How to Actually Build a Storytelling Function

In the last issue, I asked whether “storyteller” is a real job or just a fashionable relabeling of marketing. I was talking about this with a bunch of people at Story It, and we were wondering how we would actually build a storytelling function.

And I want to answer it honestly, which means I’m going to say a few things that won’t be popular with whoever currently owns the marketing budget at your company.

Here’s my first provocative statement, right out of the gate: most storytelling functions are dead on arrival because of where they sit on the org chart, not because of who they hire.

You can hire the best journalist in your city, give them a great title, and still get nothing but glorified press releases out of them, because you’ve buried them three layers under a CMO who thinks in quarters, reporting into a team that’s judged on lead-gen numbers, with a legal department that flinches at anything that isn’t pre-approved. The person isn’t the problem. The plumbing is.

So, let’s talk about the plumbing.

Stop hiring a storyteller. Build a newsroom.

Here’s the second uncomfortable truth: a single “Head of Storytelling” hire, dropped into an unchanged organization, is basically decorative. It’s the corporate equivalent of buying a treadmill and putting it in the corner of the bedroom. The intention was real. The structure to actually use it wasn’t there.

What are the companies getting this right doing? Notion: merging comms, social, and influencer work into one ten-person function; Google Cloud: building an actual production team around customer narratives, not hiring one talented person. It’s building something closer to a small newsroom: an editorial operation with its own cadence, its own judgment calls, and enough independence to publish something that doesn’t directly sell anything this quarter.

That’s the part most companies quietly refuse to do. They want the output of a newsroom, like credibility, trust, and a distinct voice, without granting the independence a newsroom actually requires. You can’t have both. Editorial trust is earned specifically by publishing things that aren’t just adverts in disguise, and if every piece of content still has to loop back to “and here’s why you should buy,” you’ve built a marketing team with better vocabulary, not a storytelling function.

Hire for judgment, not for prose.

Provocative statement number three: the writing is the easy part. What you’re actually short on is judgment, and you can’t hire that from a content agency.

There’s a reason journalists are flooding into these roles: 500 applicants for one storytelling job at Chime, most of them current or former reporters. It’s not because journalists write prettier sentences than marketers. It’s because their entire professional training is about deciding what’s actually worth saying, what’s true, what’s padding, and what will embarrass you in six months if you publish it. That instinct, the ability to kill a mediocre story instead of running it because a deadline is looming, is exactly what a storytelling function needs and what most in-house teams have never had to develop, because for decades, an actual journalist stood between the company and the public, doing that filtering for them.

If your hiring plan is “find someone good at writing LinkedIn posts,” you will get LinkedIn posts. If you want a function that actually earns trust, you need someone who has said no to their own boss before, in public, and survived it.

Give it access before you give it a title.

If there’s one operational rule I’d want tattooed on the inside of every executive’s eyelids, it’s this: access matters more than title, and most companies get the order backwards.

The typical pattern is: decide on a storytelling hire, announce the title, and then later figure out what that person is actually allowed to know. That’s backwards. The storytelling function needs to be in the room when the hard trade-offs get made, like the product decision that didn’t go the customer’s way, the layoff, the pricing change nobody’s thrilled about, and not brought in afterward to make it sound better. A storyteller with no access to the real decision-making produces PR. A storyteller with real access produces something that reads like it understands how the company actually works, because it does.

This is also, frankly, why so many of these new hires quietly burn out within 18 months. They accepted a title that implied strategic proximity and got assigned to campaign support instead.

Kill the campaign calendar.

Provocative statement four, and this one tends to upset the marketing org specifically: if your storytelling function still operates on a campaign calendar, you don’t have a storytelling function. You have a marketing team with a new job title.

A campaign resets every quarter, chases a launch, and disappears the moment the budget cycle ends. An editorial operation does the opposite; it builds momentum over time, runs recurring series, and exists independently of whatever needs to be sold this month.

This is the single clearest diagnostic I’d hand anyone trying to evaluate whether their company is doing this for real: pull up the last six months of output and ask whether it reads like a publication with a discernible point of view, or like six unrelated product launches wearing a narrative costume.

Measure it like trust, not like a funnel.

Here’s where I’ll say something that will sound almost heretical to anyone who’s spent a career in performance marketing: if your storyteller’s KPI is conversion rate, you have already told them, structurally, to stop telling stories and start selling.

Real storytelling functions get judged on things that are harder to put in a dashboard, whether journalists and analysts now come to your company for context instead of chasing quotes elsewhere, whether new hires cite your public content as a reason they applied, whether customers repeat your framing back to you unprompted in sales calls. None of that shows up cleanly in a quarterly report, and that’s exactly why finance teams are suspicious of the whole function. But judging a storyteller purely on immediate conversion is like judging a novelist by how many copies sell in the first week and firing them if it’s slow; you’ll optimize for the wrong thing every single time.

Willing to publish something that doesn’t sell

Last provocation, and it’s the test I’d actually apply to any company claiming they’ve “built a storytelling function”: ask them to name the most recent piece of content they published that educated their audience and did not mention their product.

If they can’t answer quickly, they don’t have a storytelling function. They have a content team with better branding.

Real media brands earn trust by being useful before they’re commercial. That’s uncomfortable for many executives because it means funding work whose payoff isn’t a straight line to revenue this quarter. But it’s also precisely the muscle that’s disappearing from the broader media landscape: fewer journalists, shrinking newsrooms, less earned coverage, which is the entire reason companies are trying to build this capability internally in the first place. You can’t outsource the discipline of “publish it because it’s true and useful, not because it converts” and then refuse to practice that discipline yourself.

The actual build order

If I had to compress all of this into a sequence, it would look like this: decide where the function sits and whether it has real independence before you post the job. Hire for judgment, not just voice. Grant access to the decisions that matter, not just the announcements. Replace the campaign calendar with an editorial one. Measure trust, not conversion, at least for the first year. And be willing to publish things that don’t sell anything, on purpose, regularly.

Miss any one of those, and you haven’t built a storytelling function. You’ve bought a treadmill for the corner of the bedroom and given it a great title.