Truth, Brought to You by Marketing

How corporate content has replaced journalism — and why we barely noticed.

When OpenAI’s Sam Altman was fired and then swiftly rehired in a five-day corporate spectacle last November, it wasn’t The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times that broke the story first. It was X. Or more precisely: Altman’s own X feed, the posts of board members, Microsoft executives, and a flurry of screenshot statements delivered straight to the public.

The incident didn’t just mark a leadership crisis at one of the most consequential tech firms in the world. It marked something else, too: the quiet death of the press release. Or perhaps, more radically, the quiet death of the idea that companies need the press at all.

Today, every corporation is a media company — an engine of narrative, producing podcasts, newsletters, documentaries, and daily dispatches across platforms. Founders moonlight as influencers. CMOs act like editors-in-chief. Corporate blogs have become front pages, and brand studios pump out mini-films with the tone and texture of HBO trailers. Somewhere along the way, selling products wasn’t enough. Now, companies must synthesize meaning.

But in the rush to become content creators, something essential is being lost. When brands become broadcasters, truth becomes optional. And in a world where the loudest story wins, we should all be asking: what happens when no one is left to question the script?

Over the past decade, corporate storytelling has evolved from a marketing tactic into a full-scale industrial operation. Content production has become a core business function, not a side project, complete with editorial teams, distribution strategies, and brand-safe philosophies. These aren’t campaigns aimed at fleeting engagement; they’re long-term efforts to engineer trust, influence public discourse, and establish cultural legitimacy alongside market share.

Goldman Sachs, for instance, operates Exchanges and The Markets, a series of podcasts featuring macroeconomic forecasts, conversations with business luminaries, and commentary on everything from the Fed’s interest rate policy to remote work culture. The tone is deliberate, measured, even journalistic; the aesthetic is clean, modern, and free of jargon that once cloaked the firm in elitism. Today, Goldman is not just a bank. It’s a think tank.

Stripe, a payments company, takes a different but equally ambitious approach. Through its imprint, Stripe Press, it publishes beautifully designed hardcover books on disruptive innovation, engineering management, and global prosperity. These are not how-to guides or corporate brochures; they’re longform intellectual artifacts meant to elevate Stripe’s brand into the realm of ideas. You don’t read Stripe Press to learn about APIs; you read it to understand Stripe as a steward of modern economic infrastructure.

Then there’s Red Bull, perhaps the most extreme and successful example. Long before “content marketing” entered the corporate lexicon, Red Bull quietly transformed itself from an energy drink company into a global media empire. It funds extreme sports documentaries, stages death-defying stunts, and produces entire feature-length films that rarely mention the product at all. Red Bull doesn’t just sell a beverage. It sells a lifestyle — one so immersive that the brand disappears into the narrative.

And finally, there’s HubSpot, which took the content play a step further by buying a media company. In 2021, the SaaS firm acquired The Hustle, a fast-growing business newsletter with over 1.5 million subscribers. The move was strategic: rather than pay to place ads, HubSpot bought the audience outright. Now, every reader of The Hustle is part of HubSpot’s content funnel, even if they don’t realize it. The walls between journalism, marketing, and lead generation no longer exist; they’ve been flattened into a single branded stream.

What these companies understand is that the audience’s attention is no longer captured by authority; it’s captured by narrative. When a brand can produce media that feels trustworthy, smart, or entertaining, it can bypass the scrutiny once imposed by the press. It doesn’t need to court journalists or pitch stories. It simply publishes its own and assumes the reader won’t question the source.

The result of this narrative control is a slow erosion of boundaries between truth and messaging, objectivity and agenda. As corporations refine their storytelling, the distinction between journalism and brand content becomes increasingly difficult to discern. The visuals mimic news outlets. The headlines are written in journalistic cadence. The platforms — social media, newsletters, podcasts — are the same. It’s the intent that shifts.

What’s at stake isn’t just media independence. It’s also the information diet of the public, investors, and policymakers. When corporate storytelling is indistinguishable from news, persuasion masquerades as truth. A company’s content isn’t necessarily false. It’s just uninterrupted. And when that becomes the norm, the role of the press shifts from watchdog to amplifier, not by choice, but by structural disadvantage. In a world where brands break their own news, fund their own documentaries, and publish their own reports, journalists are increasingly reacting to narratives already in circulation — ones they had no hand in shaping.

Beyond corporate media arms and branded storytelling lies a more intimate form of narrative control: the executive as influencer. Satya Nadella doesn’t simply lead Microsoft; he curates its philosophy. His essays on empathy, AI ethics, and organizational resilience circulate far beyond tech circles and are often cited in academic courses, business school lectures, and even policy discussions. The authority of his voice rests not just on title, but also on tone. The corporate message is delivered but camouflaged in something that reads more like wisdom than PR.

Brian Chesky of Airbnb takes a different tack. His posts are visual, often emotional, designed to humanize the company during moments of tension or change. During the pandemic, when Airbnb laid off 25% of its staff, Chesky published a memo so personal that it was hailed as a masterclass in crisis communication. It was widely shared not as news, but as inspiration — a sign that even hard decisions could be framed with grace. The narrative landed exactly as intended.

Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder of Bumble, has turned her leadership into a lifestyle brand. Her public image — equal parts tech founder, feminist icon, and cultural commentator — extends the company’s mission into every public appearance. Her words carry strategic weight not because they’re revolutionary, but because they’re relatable. She’s not just building a dating app; she’s authoring a worldview.

This isn’t accidental. Behind every authentic-sounding post is a team of communications strategists, ghostwriters, and brand consultants. Executive communications has evolved into a full-scale editorial function with narrative arcs, tone guidelines, and platform-specific playbooks. The goal isn’t just visibility. It’s emotional trust. If the CEO feels transparent, the company seems accountable.

But something gets lost in the performance. As executives embrace the tools of influencers, they also adopt the logic of platforms built for attention, not nuance. Posts are optimized for reach, not rigor. Complexity is flattened. The substance of leadership is often reduced to a carousel of curated vulnerability and corporate values.

The danger isn’t that corporations are telling stories; it’s that they’re telling them into a vacuum, one they’ve helped create by steadily displacing the institutions meant to hold them accountable. As newsrooms shrink, the void is expanding. BuzzFeed News has shuttered. Vice stopped publishing on its flagship site. The Washington Post, once buoyed by Bezos-era investment, has endured repeated rounds of layoffs. Even when journalists remain, their role often shifts. Understaffed and under pressure, reporters increasingly find themselves recycling press releases, rewriting corporate blog posts, and referencing executive social media as primary sources. In some cases, the corporation’s version of a story circulates faster and louder than any independent reporting could. By the time a journalist has filed, fact-checked, and edited a piece, the narrative has already settled — pre-chewed and widely accepted.

This dynamic doesn’t just weaken journalism’s ability to investigate; it also weakens its ability to matter. What’s the function of a watchdog if the public sees it as redundant? Why wrestle with uncomfortable truths when a branded podcast tells a smoother story? In the race for trust, corporations have something that journalists don’t: control.

And control is seductive. It delivers clarity, polish, certainty. Journalism, by contrast, is messy. It asks follow-up questions. It tells inconvenient stories. It often ends with ambiguity instead of resolution. But that friction is essential. Because in a world where everything is crafted, friction is the only signal that something hasn’t been ironed into submission.

What we’re witnessing is not simply a shift in communication strategy; it’s a quiet restructuring of public knowledge. The infrastructure that once mediated corporate power is being replaced by a closed circuit of storytelling, delivered by the very actors it once held to account. The effect is subtle, almost invisible. Fewer press conferences. No hard questions. A world where statements feel like stories, stories feel like facts, and facts feel like consensus.

When Sam Altman was ousted from OpenAI, the story didn’t emerge from a press conference or investigative report; it unfolded in real time through curated statements and strategic leaks, released directly by the people involved. Traditional media didn’t break the news; it tried to catch up to it.

That dynamic is no longer an exception. It’s the blueprint. Corporations now release stories the way artists drop albums: on their terms to their audiences without intermediaries. The narrative is already assembled by the time anyone else arrives.

This isn’t a war on truth. It’s something quieter and harder to resist: a world where the story sounds so complete, so confident, so omnipresent, that questioning it feels unnecessary.

And that’s the most effective kind of control: the kind you no longer notice.

Michelle Yu (MBA ‘26) is passionate about all things media, with experience in business news, documentary film, broadcast journalism, and television. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Film and Media Studies and worked for CNBC, NBC News, and CNN prior to HBS, along with projects for HBO, Showtime, Oxygen, and Spectrum.