Introduction

B2B brands can now outrank actual media outlets by building internal newsrooms that report like journalists, not marketers.

What’s the problem it solves?

Traditional content marketing is noisy, slow, and self-centered. Trade media is collapsing, leaving gaps in industry coverage. Melissa Rosenthal’s newsroom model solves this by helping SaaS companies own their narrative, publish real news, and dominate search results with authority-level content.

Quick Summary

Melissa Rosenthal, former Buzzfeed and Cheddar exec, faced a challenge at ClickUp: a massive market and limited budget. Instead of pumping more into ads, she built a newsroom inside the company. Her goal wasn’t to sell directly but to report industry news with the quality and credibility of a media outlet. This approach created long-term authority, trust, and organic visibility that even top tech media couldn’t beat.

At her new agency, Outlever, Melissa turned that playbook into a system. They use a custom media-listening algorithm to scan millions of online signals daily, spotting news before mainstream media does. Their journalists then write third-person, newsroom-grade stories about clients’ industries. This gives clients a “first-mover” edge and lets them own search rankings around trending topics.

Examples like Rippling show how powerful this can be. During an espionage scandal with Deel, Rippling published its own story in third-person format - and it outranked every major outlet. They repeated it with their $450M fundraise announcement. These weren’t puff pieces; they read like real news, earning trust and traffic.

Melissa is blunt: this model isn’t for everyone. It’s for differentiated companies with real products, strong leadership buy-in, and long-term vision. You can’t fake journalism or shortcut authority with AI tools alone. But for brands that can commit, it’s a modern replacement for paid distribution and dying trade media.

Key Takeaways

• Trade media’s decline is an opening for SaaS brands to become their industry’s top publication.
• Treat company updates as real news written by journalists, not marketing copy.
• Use media-listening tools to track signals and publish before competitors or press do.
• Third-person, objective reporting builds credibility and boosts rankings.
• Works best for Series A-C SaaS companies with real differentiation and marketing budgets above $500K.

What to Do

• Check if your company has the resources and differentiation to act like a media outlet.
• Map the media vacuum in your niche and identify undercovered topics.
• Test one newsroom-style article written in third person - not branded content.
• Measure how it performs against existing industry media.
• If it works, hire journalists or work with agencies like Outlever to scale newsroom operations.
• Use AI tools like ContentMonk to automate briefs, repurposing, and operations while your team focuses on sourcing real stories.

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