From “What’s a Storyteller?” to a Million Search Results

In 2009, I did something that felt a little audacious at the time. I went into my LinkedIn profile and typed the word “Storyteller” into my headline.

I remember hesitating over it. Storytelling wasn’t a job title back then. It was a thing your grandfather did around a campfire, or something ad agencies name-dropped in pitch decks without really meaning it. When I searched LinkedIn to see who else was using the word, I got a few hundred results. I could have scrolled through every single one of them in an afternoon and probably recognized a good chunk of the names.

Do that same search today, and you’ll get millions.

Millions. Not thousands. Not “it’s grown a lot.” Millions of people, across every industry, are calling themselves storytellers. And it’s not just LinkedIn vanity titles, but it has climbed all the way up the org chart.

So, the question I keep turning over, and the one I want to dig into with you today, is simple: what actually happened here? Did organizations wake up and genuinely understand something important about storytelling? Or did everyone just pile onto a word because it sounds better than “content person”?

I think the honest answer is that it is both. And figuring out which one you’re looking at, in any given company, is the actually useful skill.

The numbers are not subtle.

Let’s start with what’s real and measurable, because this isn’t just a vibe.

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a piece, “Companies Are Desperately Seeking Storytellers,” that quantified exactly what you and I have both felt anecdotally. Job postings on LinkedIn that include the word “storyteller” doubled in a single year. We’re talking roughly 50,000 listings in marketing alone, and more than 20,000 in media and communications. Roles like “Head of Storytelling” and “Customer Storytelling Manager” are showing up at companies that, a decade ago, would have called that job “PR Manager” and left it at that.

And it’s not confined to job boards. Executives are saying the word “storyteller” or “storytelling” out loud, on earnings calls, in front of investors. Look at these numbers: 469 times in 2025, compared to 359 in 2024, compared to a mere 147 back in 2015. That’s not marketing copy inflating a resume. That’s leadership deciding this word belongs in the boardroom.

Companies like Google, Microsoft, and Notion aren’t quietly experimenting either. Notion merged its internal comms, external comms, social, and influencer functions into a single ten-person team and just started calling it “the storytelling team.” Google Cloud has storytellers building customer narratives designed explicitly to drive acquisition and retention. Microsoft is hiring a senior director for narrative and storytelling inside its security org, of all places. Even a fintech company, Chime, received 500 applications for one storytelling role, and the majority were from current or former journalists.

That last detail is the one that made me sit up and take notice. Journalists. The people whose entire profession was built on finding and telling true stories for a living are now applying to do it inside companies. That tells you something about where the talent is flowing and why.

So why now? Why this decade?

Here’s the part that convinced me this isn’t purely a fad: there’s a structural reason it’s happening right now, and it has almost nothing to do with storytelling itself. It has to do with the collapse of the old media system.

There are roughly 17,000 fewer journalists working today than there were in 2000. Print newspaper circulation has dropped about 70% since 2005. For decades, the corporate playbook was simple: do something newsworthy, pitch a reporter, let them tell your story to their audience. That pipeline is drying up. Meanwhile, every company now has its own direct channels, like social accounts, YouTube, Substack, and podcasts that didn’t exist in anything like their current form even fifteen years ago.

Put those two forces together, and you get an obvious gap: companies suddenly have the distribution to reach people directly, but they’ve lost the professional storytellers who used to do that work on their behalf, from the outside. So, they’re hiring them in-house instead. That’s not a fad. That’s a labor market responding to a structural shift in media. The title “storyteller” is really just the corporate world catching up to the fact that it is now, functionally, a media company, whether it wants to be one or not.

But, and this matters, plenty of it really is a fad.

I don’t want to oversell this because there’s a very real counterargument, and it comes from someone with far more credibility on the subject than most executives currently using the word. Designer Stefan Sagmeister said something years ago that’s aged uncomfortably well: people who actually tell stories, like novelists and filmmakers, don’t call themselves storytellers. It’s the people who aren’t storytellers who suddenly want to be.

That line stings a little because it’s often true. For every Notion building a genuine ten-person storytelling function, there’s a company that changed a job title without changing anything about how it operates. They hire someone with “storyteller” on their new business card, but keep thinking in quarterly campaigns instead of an ongoing editorial rhythm. They want the credibility of a media brand without being willing to publish anything that doesn’t directly sell something. They’ll happily put “storytelling” in the job description and then judge that same hire purely on lead-gen numbers three months later.

That’s not storytelling. That’s rebranding a marketing job and hoping the new label does some of the work the strategy should be doing.

How to actually tell the difference

If you’re trying to figure out whether an organization or a person is doing real storytelling work or just riding the wave, here’s what I’ve come to look for:

Editorial calendar vs. campaign calendar. A campaign resets every quarter and chases a launch. An editorial approach builds momentum over time, has recurring beats, and exists independent of whatever’s being sold that month. Real storytelling orgs behave like the second one.

Willingness to educate before selling. Media brands earn trust by being useful even when there’s nothing to promote. If a company’s “storytelling” only ever appears wrapped around a pitch, it’s still advertising with better vocabulary.

Access, not just title. The pattern that shows up again and again in the genuinely effective cases: storytellers are involved early, upstream, where the actual decisions and trade-offs happen, not brought in afterward to make something sound better. Involvement beats polish, every time.

What they’re measured on. If someone’s title says storyteller but their KPI is purely conversion rate, the organization hasn’t actually changed its operating model. It’s just changed a word on an org chart.

Where I think this is actually going

My honest prediction, and I say this as someone who staked a claim on this word fifteen years before it was fashionable, is that we’re heading toward a split, not a plateau.

One group of organizations will continue to treat storytelling as cosmetic. They’ll keep hiring for the title, keep measuring it like a marketing function, and within a couple of years, the term will start to feel as hollow to hiring managers as “ninja” or “rockstar” already does. That erosion is already visible if you read between the lines of some of these job posts.

But another group, and I think it’s a growing one, has understood something enduring: as the old system for having someone else tell your story disappears, the ability to tell your own story, credibly and consistently, becomes a genuine operating capability. Not a department. Not a campaign. But a core function, the way finance or product is. Those companies aren’t chasing a trend. They’re building infrastructure for a media landscape that isn’t going back to the way it was.

As for the raw numbers, the millions of “storytellers” on LinkedIn don’t prove the discipline has arrived. I think they prove the word has arrived, which is a different thing. The real signal isn’t in how many people use the title.

I got there in 2009 for reasons that had nothing to do with a trend. I’m genuinely curious to see how many of the people using the word right now will still be using it, and still mean it, over the next few years.