Stacker
Stacker is a data-driven newsroom and newswire headquartered in New York City, in the state of New York, that produces explanatory journalism and distributes ready-to-publish stories, rankings and data features to hundreds — by its own later counts, thousands — of partner news outlets across the United States. Founded in 2017, the company occupies a distinctive place in the American media supply chain: it is not a traditional breaking-news wire in the mould of the Associated Press or Reuters, and it is not a single consumer destination trying to build its own audience alone. Instead, Stacker researches public data, turns that data into accessible feature journalism, and syndicates the finished work to local newspapers, television and radio groups, and digital publishers that can run it under their own brands. Its official website is stacker.com.
Founding and the Graphiq Connection
Stacker was co-founded in 2017 by chief executive Noah Greenberg together with Sam Gross, Melanie Holohan and Tommy Gamba. The four had previously worked together at Graphiq, a Santa Barbara data aggregation and visualisation company that built tools connecting large numbers of data points into charts and graphics, and that had developed relationships with newsrooms through partnerships involving major wire services. When Amazon acquired Graphiq in 2017, the founders used the experience — and the newsroom contacts they had built — to start a new venture aimed directly at publishers. Contemporary accounts describe the early operation as deliberately lean: a small core team working with freelance writers, producing an initial flow of stories for aggregators and reinvesting revenue-share income into building a permanent newsroom. That origin explains much of Stacker's later identity: part technology-informed data operation, part editorial newsroom, built from the start for distribution rather than for a single front page.
A Different Kind of Wire Service
The central idea behind Stacker is that data journalism had become popular inside large national newsrooms but remained expensive and time-consuming for smaller outlets. Local newspapers and broadcasters, facing years of advertising decline and staff reductions, often lacked a data reporter who could spend days cleaning a federal dataset, checking it, and shaping it into a readable feature. Stacker set out to supply that missing national desk. Its stories are offered to publishing partners free of charge, a model that differs sharply from subscription wires that charge outlets fees they increasingly struggle to afford. The company instead supports its newsroom in part through Stacker Studio, its branded-content operation, in which commercial partners underwrite selected content. For publishers, the appeal is practical: professionally produced, ready-to-publish material that fills coverage gaps, complements original local reporting, and keeps audiences engaged between cycles of hard local news.
How Stacker Stories Are Made
Stacker's editorial method begins with public and licensed data. In its first years the newsroom drew heavily on sources such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, transforming national statistics into feature stories that could run anywhere in the country. Reporters and editors look for stories hidden inside datasets — patterns in employment, health, housing, migration, weather, education and consumer life that readers might not encounter in a raw government release. The output favours explanatory and service formats: ranked lists, state-by-state breakdowns, historical comparisons and explainers that answer everyday questions with evidence. Publishing partners receive stories through feeds and through Story Hub, the company's publisher portal, which allows editors to browse, select and download material suited to their market. At its early growth stage the company was publishing more than twenty articles a day, and later accounts describe a flow of more than four hundred new articles a month.
Stacker Local and Geographic Reach
A defining step in Stacker's development was the move from purely national storytelling to systematic localisation. With the launch of Stacker Local, a single data framework could generate distinct versions of a story for all fifty states, for hundreds of metropolitan areas — the company cited 384 metropolitan statistical areas — and for still more granular geographic cuts. A study of national parks, hospital access, real-estate conditions or immigrant history could therefore appear as a Boston version, a Boise version and a New Orleans version, each grounded in the same verified methodology but written for a specific place. Topics developed under this approach have included rural hospital access, poverty, employment, elections and public health. For local editors, the localised model matters because readers respond to data about their own community far more readily than to national averages, while the underlying reporting cost is shared across the entire network rather than borne by one small newsroom.
Publisher Network and Partners
Stacker's distribution network grew quickly. By 2021 the company reported that its stories reached some 40 million readers in a year and that its publisher network had grown by more than 300 percent in a single year, passing one thousand local newsrooms and then, by early 2022, more than two thousand publishers. Named partners in company announcements and trade coverage have included major newspaper and broadcast groups such as Hearst, Tribune Publishing, McClatchy, Nexstar and Advance Local, alongside independently owned outlets ranging from the Las Vegas Review-Journal to small digital newsrooms such as Clarksville Now in Tennessee. In February 2022 Stacker announced five further partners — Adams Publishing Group, Advance Local, Beasley Media Group, Narcity and WEHCO — spanning newspaper chains, a top radio group and digital platforms. The breadth of the network, from metropolitan dailies to community sites, is central to the company's claim to function as shared infrastructure for local news.
Editorial Subjects and Formats
The subjects Stacker covers are intentionally broad, reflecting the general-interest needs of its partners. Business and personal-finance explainers sit alongside food and travel features, entertainment rankings, sports data stories, weather and climate reporting, and public-policy analysis. Examples cited in trade coverage include breakdowns of food-stamp usage and of cost of living by state — practical, data-rich topics that help readers understand their own circumstances. Evergreen subjects such as pets, seasonal wellness and personal finance are particularly valued by partner editors because they remain useful long after publication and can be scheduled during holidays or thin staffing periods when audiences still expect fresh material. The ranked-list format, for which Stacker is especially well known, packages verified data into a scannable structure, while longer explanatory pieces provide context on issues such as voter demographics by state or the geography of rural hospital closures.
Role in the Local News Ecosystem
Stacker's rise coincides with a structural crisis in American local journalism, in which shrinking newsrooms must cover city hall, schools and public safety with fewer reporters while still serving readers online around the clock. Partner editors quoted in industry coverage describe syndicated data features as a way to protect scarce reporting time: a Stacker item can hold a regular evening slot on a local site while staff reporters concentrate on municipal government, education and community news that only they can produce. Stacker itself frames its work the same way — as material that supplements original reporting or gives local journalists a verified starting point for their own stories, rather than as a replacement for local journalism. Critics of syndication in general sometimes worry about homogenised content across outlets, but the company's localised editions and its partners' ability to select and frame stories are designed to keep the output relevant to each market it reaches.
Business Model and Stacker Studio
Stacker's economics rest on giving the journalism away and earning revenue elsewhere in the system. Distribution through aggregators such as MSN and Yahoo historically returned a share of advertising revenue to content producers, and the company built on that foundation with Stacker Studio, through which brands underwrite select editorial-style content. That branded work subsidises the newsroom whose stories publishers receive without charge — an inversion of the traditional wire model, in which the outlets themselves paid subscription fees. For brands, the studio offers data-led storytelling distributed through trusted local publications; for publishers, it removes a cost barrier at a moment when wire subscriptions are often among the first expenses cut. The model depends on maintaining a clear separation that keeps the core news product credible, since the entire distribution network is built on partner trust in the accuracy and neutrality of the data journalism carrying their names.
Headquarters and Organisation
Stacker is headquartered in New York City, New York, and operates as a modern distributed newsroom built around data journalists, reporters, editors and distribution staff. Noah Greenberg has served as chief executive since the founding, and Nicole Caldwell, who previously helped launch the environmental news organisation Green Matters and worked as an editor at Thrillist, has been cited as managing editor during the company's growth years. The organisation's workflow — centralised research and writing, digital delivery through feeds and the Story Hub portal, and publication under thousands of partner brands — reflects its identity as a born-digital wire rather than a legacy agency adapting print-era systems. Its New York base places it within the country's largest media market, while its product is aimed primarily outward, at regional and community outlets in every state whose readers encounter Stacker journalism on their local newspaper, television or radio websites, often without ever visiting stacker.com directly.
Significance and Continuing Development
Within a few years of its 2017 founding, Stacker had established itself as one of the most visible examples of a new generation of news agencies built for the economics of digital local media. Its significance lies less in any single story than in the system it operates: verified public data, processed once by a specialist newsroom, localised at scale, and distributed free to a network that grew from hundreds of outlets to more than two thousand publishers reaching tens of millions of readers. Industry coverage in outlets such as Digiday and Editor & Publisher has treated the company as a case study in how syndication is being reinvented — less as a commodity feed of breaking news, and more as shared explanatory capacity for newsrooms that can no longer each employ their own data team. As local outlets continue to seek sustainable ways to serve their communities, Stacker's model of centralised data journalism with local delivery remains a closely watched experiment in the future of the American newswire.
