#26 - Melissa Rosenthal

Hey all,

This week, I sat down with Melissa Rosenthal, co-founder of Outlever. She is building a genuinely novel motion for her clients by helping B2B companies create their own full-blown media brands.

It is no shock to say the traditional media model is shrinking.

For years, companies bought credibility through ads, sponsorships, or paid placements. Today, that authority boost lasts minutes, not months.

At the same time, audiences are losing trust in generic media coverage. As AI content floods every channel, people are craving credible, human perspectives—and they can only find it in their personal networks.

Melissa’s thesis is simple: this media shift is an opportunity. Outlever’s bet is that companies can build their own “owned media machines” and step into the role trade publications used to play. 

As Melissa put it:

If you cannot rely on the media to help you tell your story, you have to become the place the story gets told.

Since founding Outlever, Melissa and her team have built entire editorial ecosystems for B2B brands, with CIOnews.com as one of the strongest examples.

Every day, her team interviews executives at Fortune 500s, global banks, and large enterprises to publish news, roundups, reports, and analysis. And each month, they’re publishing 40-80 pieces of high-quality content.

It’s not a blog.
It’s not a newsletter.
It’s literally a newsroom built specifically for CIOs.

Once the content is written, the distribution is organic. The executives who were interviewed and featured share articles that spotlight their perspectives, which expands the reach directly into their networks. 

“We are empowering executives and making them look like rock stars. And because of that, they’re sharing the content to their own audience.” 

People click on content from people they trust and, as a result, it has a greater impact than traditional content types because they don’t need to build credibility from nothing.

Melissa described it as “ABM disguised as a trade publication.” It’s hyper-targeted, relationship-driven, and built to feature the exact people her clients want more of. And, of course, it meets the need for information that used to be served by traditional media. 

I think it’s insanely brilliant.

How it works

Running a newsroom isn’t something a lot of internal teams are equipped to handle, but there are pieces of the framework that every marketing team can use. 

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Outlever’s approach is essentially a repeatable, scaled version of what good media brands have always done: define the beat, source credible voices, and earn attention through relevance.

Here’s the simplest version of how it works:

1. Start with a specific audience

Your editorial site should be built around a very tight ICP. These are the people who will:
a) be highlighted in your content, and
b) be the primary readership for it.

Melissa said the success of their clients comes down to precision: 

“All the viewership, all the readership is CIOs and VP of IT. It could not get more aligned.” 

When the entire editorial strategy is designed around exactly who you want in the room, alignment is unavoidable. The more specific the audience, the easier sourcing, writing, and distribution becomes. 

This is the opposite of trying to maximize blog traffic from anyone who will click. It is a media brand designed for the 1,000 people who matter most.

2. Make your audience the star

Here is one of the biggest differences between traditional thought leadership and editorial content: you become the editor, and your ICP becomes the hero.

This serves a twofold purpose:

1. Distribution

Your customers and prospects are your most valuable distribution channels. When you feature someone as an expert in a respected editorial, they share it. Not because you asked, but because it elevates them.

Melissa put it plainly:

“For CIOnews.com, we talk to CIOs every day. We build relationships for them. And the growth is coming from the network of these executives.”

Every story expands the distribution graph. Each interview invites a new executive (and their network) into the ecosystem.

2. Credibility

Traditional thought leadership puts the company or founder at the center. This editorial approach builds on that. The audience should see themselves—their peers, their challenges, their expertise—before they ever see you.

That shift does several things at once:

• It anchors your company next to credible operators, not above them.
• It makes the content feel like “industry truth,” not marketing.
• It builds trust faster than brand-led narratives.

Your editors still shape the perspective and the coverage. But the actual voice of the ecosystem comes from the people doing the work, and that’s what keeps practitioners reading, sharing, and paying attention.

3. Create news, not marketing collateral

Editorial content is built to spark discourse. It exists to cover what is happening in the industry, not what is happening inside your company. Melissa is blunt about the bar the content should meet:

“If the content you are creating is not going to create a conversation, then why publish it?”

Instead of pushing product narratives, your editorial content should focus on:

• Industry analysis and implications
• Emerging trends and shifting behavior
• Practitioner perspectives and disagreements
• Insights surfaced from interviews
• Context your audience cannot get anywhere else

None of this needs to tie back into your product directly. In fact, it works better when it doesn’t. The credibility of the editorial is what gets people reading, and the quiet brand association  builds its own authority.

There is also a case to be made to not associate the media brands with your brand at all—as is with the case of CIOnews.com (brand behind this was not disclosed). In this strategy, the value comes from the interview slate—leveraged to nurture prospect, customer, and partner relationships—and the equity of the new editorial brand, which can be built into a bigger community or event platform.

As traditional media shrinks and lazy content takes over social media and SERPs, B2B buyers crave credibility and authenticity even more. And notably, this media brand approach only works if it’s built on human perspectives. You can’t swap the high-quality primary sources for ideas hallucinated and compiled by AI. 

So if the publication your buyers wish existed doesn’t exist, the opportunity is simple: you should be the one to build it.

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