‘Storytelling’ Around the Corporate Campfire

In “Companies Are Desperately Seeking ‘Storytellers’,” Katie Deighton reports for The Wall Street Journal that brands across industries are increasingly recruiting “storytellers” — a role once reserved for, say, novelists and filmmakers—to shape company narratives and drive engagement through posts, podcasts, videos and blah, blah, blah.

This trend reflects how traditional media’s influence has declined while companies now own their publishing channels and need authentic voices to cut through a flood of generic content, especially in a landscape crowded by AI-generated material.

Yay for humans. What differentiates this new wave of storytelling from the previous aughts-era manifestation is its relative transparency and emphasis on authenticity. And yet, I still bristle a bit at the term, which—I get it—is pretty rich coming from a guy who recently wrote the brand story for a beloved beverage company for an overseas ad firm. I admit my relationship with this kind of, erm, storytelling has…