The Hottest New Job in Marketing Is Editor in Chief

LangChain has been hiring for a role it calls Head of Narratives, and the posting says the company wants a media company operator to define what LangChain should be known for.

One of the most closely watched companies in AI infrastructure looked at its growth problem and concluded the answer wasn't a demand-gen lead or a growth marketer. It was someone who has run a publication.

LangChain is not doing this alone, and once you start reading these postings side by side, the language starts to rhyme. Vanta has been hiring a VP of Brand and describes it flatly as a brand creation role rather than a brand stewardship one. Cohere framed its Head of Brand Marketing search around brand as a compounding advantage, the thing that makes a journalist pick up the story. Mercury put $335K behind a role whose requirements, with the corporate vocabulary stripped off, read like an editor in chief's rather than a marketer's. We wrote about that one in June, and the pattern has only gotten louder since.

Then there's the version of this that shows up outside software, which is how you know it isn't a SaaS fashion cycle.

Ford had to invent the job

Sometime in 2024, Ford hired an editor in chief.

Nancy Trott spent her career at the Associated Press and finished there as a bureau chief. Ford brought her in to run editorial for internal communications, and this year her remit widened to cover external comms too. Cory Schouten reported the hire for Quill, the Society of Professional Journalists' magazine, in a piece worth your time, and the detail that lands came from Gabrielle Poshadlo, who runs employee experience communications there. As far as anyone at Ford could remember, the company had never had anyone with that title.

A 122-year-old automaker decided it needed a person whose whole job was deciding what got published and how it read, and there was no slot for that person anywhere in the building. They had to make one.

If you run marketing at a B2B company right now, you are either having this conversation internally or you're about to.

The numbers are better than the anecdotes

Most of what gets written about brand-side editorial hiring runs on LinkedIn announcements and vibes. There's harder evidence now, which matters a great deal the moment you have to make this case to a CFO.

Live Data Technologies, a workforce intelligence firm, tracked people moving out of publications and into brand journalism, content and communications between January 2015 and May 2026. Analyst Alex Hamilton counted more than 2,800 of those moves over the decade, running at somewhere between 230 and 340 a year. Stacker wrote up the findings and syndicated them widely; this version ran in late July.

Chandra Turner has spent years placing editors into corporate jobs through her recruiting firm, The Talent Fairy. She surveyed 367 editors and found two-thirds had already left traditional media for content, communications or marketing. She's run a version of this survey annually since at least 2020, and the 2024 results show how she gets there.

The postings themselves are where this stops being abstract, and the B2B concentration is hard to miss. Schouten catalogued a run of them from a single stretch of months. Anthropic listed for a managing editor. Autodesk and the recruiting firm LHH each advertised for an editor in chief. Vonage wanted an editorial director. Chime went looking for a director of corporate editorial and storytelling. Around the same time, Shara Tibken left the Wall Street Journal, where she'd been a personal tech editor after years as a managing editor at CNET, to run a technical blog at NVIDIA, a company she used to cover.

Noah Greenberg, who runs the content distribution platform Stacker, has been tracking where these people land, and he convened a town hall of former newsroom leaders now working at Salesforce, Mastercard and Redfin. His read on the shift is blunt. Ten years ago a company building this kind of team hired someone out of content marketing. "The new paradigm is a person who ran a newsroom."

The salaries should reframe how you're budgeting. Autodesk's editor in chief posting topped out at $279,000. Mercury's role sat at $335K. A storytelling lead at OpenAI advertised $275,000, and Anthropic is paying $300K for a standards editor whose job is essentially house style. These are leadership numbers, and they frequently beat what the same person could earn running an actual newsroom.

Nobody can agree on what to call it

The complication, and the reason this trend keeps getting covered badly, is that the title itself barely exists. Go looking for a wave of B2B "editor in chief" listings and you won't quite find one. You'll find heads of narratives, VPs of brand, editorial directors, heads of editorial, directors of corporate storytelling, managing editors, and a long tail of things like content experience manager and digital storytelling lead.

Turner's explanation is that companies genuinely want this person and are bad at describing them. They know the right candidate when one walks in, but they write the title in language no editor would ever type into a search bar. The pipeline jams at both ends. Editors can't find the roles, and the companies posting them can't work out why nobody good applied.

The tempting move is to flatten all of it and call this an editor in chief boom. I'd rather not, because the inconsistency tells you more than the volume does.

A job with a settled title is a job the market has already absorbed. Nobody needs the CFO role explained. When a dozen companies hire what is recognizably the same function under a dozen different names, without coordinating, you're watching a role get invented several times in parallel. That's earlier and more interesting than a hiring trend, and it means the titles currently tell you close to nothing about the work.

The real question is whether they get to say no

The difference between an editor in chief and an editorial director was never about scope. It was about authority. An editor in chief has final say over what publishes. An editorial director inside a marketing org usually runs a calendar and reports to someone whose number is pipeline.

Right now both jobs are being filled out of the same pool, often by the same résumés from the same layoffs. They are not the same job, and if you're writing the req, this is the part to settle before you post it. It's also happening while the org chart above the role is in motion: the Fortune 500 has been quietly deleting the CMO title, which makes the question of who this person answers to less theoretical than it sounds.

Aaron Foley was chief storyteller for the city of Detroit from 2017 to 2019, the first person to hold that title at a city. He told Quill these roles shouldn't sit under a PR function that also handles crisis communications. His reasoning is that the work means mining your own people and data for stories that hold up outside your walls, and that doesn't survive a reporting line whose job is making problems disappear. Foley is looking for one of these jobs himself now and says the competition has gotten fierce.

The question that settles it is whether this person can kill a piece. If they can't, the title on the offer letter is decoration, and the veteran you just paid a third of a million dollars will be gone inside two years, probably with a fairly specific story about why.

What's driving it, and what could stop it

Two things are pushing this, and they don't have the same shelf life.

The first is structural, and we've come at it from several angles. B2B buyers build their shortlist before they ever talk to you, trust in traditional media has thinned, and AI flattened whole categories into a single comparison table, which made competent generic content free and therefore worthless. Differentiating now takes something a model can't cheaply reproduce: original reporting, proprietary data, a voice, an actual position. That argument for keeping editorial capability in-house isn't going anywhere, and it's why the B2B blog keeps giving way to something that behaves like a publication.

The second is opportunistic. A lot of this hiring aims at getting brands into AI-generated search summaries, where you have an edge over publishers because you can count the outcome a win even with no click. The edge is real, but it's pegged to one configuration of the search market, and search markets move.

Underneath both sits something worth saying plainly rather than dressing up. Journalists are cheap at the moment, not because their skills got less valuable but because the industry that employed them keeps shrinking. A meaningful share of this hiring wave is a buyer's market being worked, and any version of this story that reads purely as companies discovering the power of storytelling is telling you half of it.

The risks will be familiar if you've been in marketing more than a cycle. Content budgets get cut early in a downturn, and inside marketing, content and creative go first. HubSpot paid $27 million for The Hustle in 2021 and the strategic logic looked airtight at the time; the harder question of what that kind of media asset is actually worth is one we've spent a fair amount of time on. Several people who made this jump early have already lived the full arc of a content strategy funded enthusiastically, then quietly abandoned, then eliminated along with the team.

There's a credibility ceiling too. A newsroom owned by the company it covers can only get so far, audiences are getting quicker at spotting where that line sits, and the companies doing this well have made peace with a return that's slow and reputational rather than attributable to a quarter. The ones treating it as a faster route to search visibility will produce exactly the slop they were trying to escape and then decide the model doesn't work.

For now, the number I'd watch isn't postings. It's reporting lines. When these roles start reporting to the CEO instead of the CMO, and the person holding the title has publishing authority and a budget that survives a bad quarter, the function will have arrived. That's the difference between owned media as a channel and owned media as an operating strategy. Until then, B2B companies are hiring editors in chief in everything except name and mandate.