The Wall Street Journal reports that companies are “desperately seeking storytellers.”
That’s not hyperbole.
LinkedIn job postings mentioning “storyteller” doubled in a single year—to some 50,000 marketing jobs and more than 20,000 media and communications jobs. Google has a storytelling team. Microsoft is looking for a senior director overseeing narrative and storytelling. USAA is building a staff of storytellers. Notion has combined communications, social media, and influencer marketing into a single “storytelling team.”
Companies Are Desperately Seeking ‘Storytellers’ — The Wall Street Journal
This is more than giving an old job new spin.
It reflects a major shift in the job of communications itself.
For decades, much of corporate and institutional communications was built around getting other people to tell your story.
You developed relationships with reporters. Pitched stories. Issued press releases. Worked to generate coverage. The organization had a message; the media provided much of the means of getting it in front of an audience.
That world isn’t gone. But it doesn’t have the influence and power it once did.
Companies are becoming their own publishers.
Websites. LinkedIn. Instagram. YouTube. Podcasts. Newsletters. Substack. Video. Events. Executive communications. Customer stories. Donor communications. Thought leadership.
The number of ways an organization can communicate directly with the people it needs to reach has exploded.
And then there’s AI.
There is virtually no limit to the amount of content an organization can produce. Give AI a few prompts, and it can generate an article, a LinkedIn post, a newsletter, a case study, an email campaign, and six variations of each.
You might think all this technology would reduce the need for comms pros. But something much more interesting is happening: as AI makes content easier and cheaper to produce, the demand for skilled storytellers is rising.
Because the communications challenge is no longer simply producing enough content. It’s producing something worth reading, watching, hearing—and remembering.
What is the story?
What does this particular story tell people about the organization? Why is it important? Why should someone care? How does it connect to the larger narrative the organization is building about who it is, what it believes, what it does particularly well, and why someone should choose it, support it, join it, fund it, or pay attention to it?
That’s strategic storytelling.
And it has always been the foundation of great brands.
The strongest brands don’t simply repeat a collection of messages. They accumulate meaning. The stories they tell — about their beginnings, their customers, their people, their ideas, their successes and sometimes their failures — reinforce what we understand and believe about them.
That’s as true for a small nonprofit or school as it is for Nike or Apple.
Strategic storytelling requires choices.
A university has thousands of student stories. A hospital has thousands of patient stories. A nonprofit has stories about the people it serves, the people who support it, and the people doing the work. A company has customer stories, employee stories, founder stories, product stories, and stories about problems solved.
But having stories doesn’t make you a storyteller.
A skilled storyteller knows how to take the raw material — the people, events, details, contradictions, stakes — and shape it into a narrative someone actually wants to read, watch, or hear.
That takes more than good grammar and polished prose. It takes an ear for voice, an instinct for structure, an understanding of character and tension, knowing what to leave in and what to leave out, where the story really begins, and how to make the reader want to know what happens next.
In other words, it takes craft.
And that may be one of the great ironies of the AI era. We have never had more tools capable of producing perfectly competent words. But competent words aren’t the same thing as a story worth reading, worth telling — or worth remembering.
The craft is in listening carefully enough to recognize the detail everyone else has overlooked. Asking the question that changes the direction of an interview. Seeing the larger idea inside one person’s experience. Knowing that the story everyone in the room loves isn’t actually the one that will do the job.
As a television producer, I could come back with hours of terrific footage and still not have a story. The job was to find the narrative buried in all that material — and then know how to tell it so that someone would want to keep watching.
AI can give us more words, more images, and more content than we could ever use.
But finding the story is Job One. Knowing how to tell it is Job Two.
No wonder storytellers are having a moment.
