How to Build a B2B Newsroom That Outranks Actual Media

When Melissa joined ClickUp, she faced an impossible math problem. The addressable market was massive, but no marketing budget could reach every potential customer at scale, and paid channels were burning cash faster than they generated pipeline.

Her solution wasn't another content strategy. It was borrowed infrastructure from her media days: build a newsroom inside the company. Not a blog, not thought leadership, but a legitimate trade publication that happened to be owned by a SaaS company. The kind that could outrank big legacy media companies when prospects searched for industry news.

Two years later at Outlever, she's turned that experiment into a repeatable system. In this article, we'll try to uncover Melissa's secrets behind the closed doors as much as we can.

TL;DR

• B2B companies can outrank media outlets by establishing newsrooms that cover their industry in a manner similar to how journalists do
• Trade publications are dying, creating an opportunity for companies to become the industry's publication of choice.
• This requires media listening algorithms, journalist teams, and custom tools to produce news at scale.
• Best for Series A-C SaaS companies with $500K+ budgets and leadership that understands multi-touch attribution.
• Publishing third-person news on your domain allows you to own the narrative when people search for industry topics.

Melissa is very direct about this:

Can every company afford to do it? No. Should every company do this? No. Should most companies not exist? Probably.

Building a B2B newsroom isn't a universal playbook. It requires real resources, actual differentiation, and leadership that understands marketing isn't a vending machine where you insert budget and get an immediate pipeline.

The Media Company Blueprint Applied to B2B

Before Melissa joined the B2B world, she spent years building newsrooms at Buzzfeed and Cheddar. The model was straightforward: create authority and credibility, then sell advertising against it. Media companies built audience trust as a business strategy, using editorial authority as the conduit to revenue.

When she moved to ClickUp (as Chief Creative Officer), she brought that same publisher mindset with her. But instead of building authority to sell ads, she realized SaaS companies could build authority to sell software. The infrastructure was the same, it's just the business model that's different.

Why Traditional Media Models Are Collapsing

Traditional media companies are dying because their overhead is massive. They're trying to maintain expensive journalist teams while their ad revenue is diminishing.

This is also why these media companies are dying, because their overhead is tremendous. It's really hard for them to publish great journalistic content, and we can do that at a fraction of the cost on an extreme scale.

The Triangulation Network Effect

Melissa's approach creates what she calls a triangulation network. Instead of targeting one ICP directly, Outlever helps companies publish content at the intersection of what matters to them, their customers, and industry influencers. The company amplifies its voice through subject matter experts and potential customers, creating a network effect that reaches far beyond what traditional targeting could achieve.

Inside the Outlever Tech Stack and Process

The Media Listening Algorithm

Outlever spent two years building a media listening algorithm that processes hundreds of millions of signals daily. This isn't social listening or brand monitoring. The system identifies who's talking about what across channels, surfaces stories that should be news but aren't getting coverage, and finds signals outside mainstream media that matter to specific industries.

Melissa describes it as their secret sauce. The algorithm doesn't just track mentions, but it also identifies moments worth covering before most publications notice them, giving Outlever's clients a first-mover advantage on industry narratives.

But, how do you build one for yourself? While we don't know exactly what Melissa's system looks like, we can try reverse-engineering what she's doing.

Besides some obvious social listening tools (such as Brand24), I would first start with deciding what sources you want to monitor.

The obvious ones that come to my mind are:

• LinkedIn and key players in your industry
• Legacy media and publications
• Reddit and its' conversations

Then I would start by building different n8n flows that monitor these sources, filter garbage from interesting signals, and notify you right away.

And, of course, a good knowledge base for AI content software is essential.

Note: A similar feature, which addresses this issue, is on the roadmap for ContentMonk in the near future.

The Journalist Team and Production Tools

The algorithm feeds into a proprietary production tool that enables Outlever's journalist team to work dramatically faster than they did at their previous publications. The reporters and journalists would take the topics and write news for their clients.

The tool handles the mechanics that slow down traditional newsrooms. Journalists can focus on reporting and writing while the system manages workflow, optimization, and distribution at scale. Traditional media companies are dying partly because their overhead makes speed impossible. Outlever operates at a fraction of that cost.

Note: As a part of that new ContentMonk feature that monitors social signals, you would get new content ideas automatically inside your content editorial. If you like the topic, simply clicking a button allows ContentMonk to create the entire article in under a minute.

What Gets Published

The output isn't corporate blog posts dressed up as news. Outlever is publishing actual journalistic content written in third person, covering news that matters to their clients' audiences. They write about industry developments, data trends, and stories that create triangulation between what matters to the company and what matters to their prospects.

For example, when Rippling had their espionage story, they proved this model works.

Outlever runs that playbook across multiple clients simultaneously.

The Rippling Case Study: How to Outrank TechCrunch

Rippling faced an espionage case involving Deel. Instead of publishing a defensive blog post or a sanitized company statement, they wrote it as a third-person news article.

Melissa describes it as reading like a spy novel, the kind of story that would feel at home in any tech publication. The writing was journalistic, the tone was objective, and the format matched what readers expect from professional news coverage.

It outranked every publication that covered the story. Not just small blogs. Everything.

The $450M Fundraise Announcement

A few months later, Rippling raised $450 million. They used the same approach, writing the announcement as if TechCrunch was covering Rippling's funding round. Third-person perspective, journalistic structure, newsroom-quality writing. The article ranked at the top for searches about their fundraising.

What Makes This Replicable

Here's how to replicate this:

• Write your company's news the way a reporter would cover it.
• Use third person.
• Follow news article structure.
• Focus on the story, not the pitch.

Companies can achieve this at scale by treating newsworthy moments as genuine news, rather than promotional opportunities.

Who This Works For (And Who Should Ignore It)

This isn't a playbook for every company. Melissa's clear about that. If you're running a company that's barely differentiated from your competitors, building a newsroom won't save you. The same goes if you don't have a budget or resources to invest in something that builds over time rather than delivering leads next quarter.

The companies that make this work share a few key characteristics:

• They're doing something genuinely differentiated.
• They have executive leadership that understands brand-building doesn't map to last-touch attribution.
• They're willing to invest in relationships and authority that compound over years.
• And most importantly, they have a perspective and POV worth fighting for.

As Melissa puts it:

If you have a great product and you are differentiated, your moat can definitely be figuring out the next wave of traffic.

That's who this is for.

The Bottom Line

Traditional B2B content channels are delivering diminishing returns, while trade publications are collapsing, creating an opening for well-funded SaaS companies to become the authoritative news source in their industries.

This requires real infrastructure - media listening algorithms, journalist teams, custom tooling, and a publishing operation that functions like a newsroom, not a content marketing department.

Companies like Rippling are already doing this, outranking established media outlets for stories about their own news and industry developments.

Here's what you should do next:

• Audit whether you have the prerequisites: marketing budget for this, executive buy-in for multi-touch attribution, and genuine product differentiation worth covering
• Identify the news vacuum in your industry by mapping which trade publications have died, been acquired, or stopped covering your niche comprehensively
• Start small by writing one piece of company news in third-person journalistic style and measuring whether it outranks traditional media coverage
• If early tests work, explore partnerships with agencies like Outlever or hire journalists directly to build internal newsroom capacity

In any case, keep investing in AI content software that can help you optimize your entire content operations, such as ContentMonk. You can use it to effectively plan your entire content strategy, get briefs & content, repurpose, and distribute. This way, your team can focus on more high-value tasks, such as collecting new insights, sourcing stories, and more.

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