Vertical Account Executive — News

$60K base + commission and equity to be negotiated

We license the IQS to newsrooms. The IQS is a standard. When a publication runs IQS- scored content, every claim shows its source on the page, and readers can see provenance the same way they see a byline. In a media environment this polarized, the newsroom that adopts the standard first owns the credibility differentiation in its market for as long as no one else has it. Three investigative desks, a national broadcast standards team, and two public-radio operations are already in conversation with us. The role is to turn that into the dozen most-read publications in the country.

The Work.

The newsroom book at GK Media Group LLC covers the Times, the Post, the wire services at Reuters and the AP, the major broadcast standards desks, public-radio operations including NPR and the regional public stations, the largest regional newspapers, and the digital-native publishers like Axios, The Information, Semafor, and Puck, where credibility differentiation is most of the business model. No single rep covers top-50 newspapers, the wire services, public radio, the networks, and the digital-natives at the same time, so we’re staffing the news vertical with several AEs and you’d trade leads with them rather than carry the whole list. Day one you’d pick up one of the three active investigative-desk conversations and the public-radio thread. Week one you’d be running standards leads at the networks with the other AEs in seat, because broadcast adopts standards faster than print and tends to define what good looks like for the rest of the building. Month one you’d be in New York, D.C., or Atlanta, sitting with editors who already know they need this.

What we need from you.

You’ve sold SaaS into newsrooms or publisher tech. That means
editorial buyers, CTO desks at CMS vendors, or distribution platforms, with a signed license
you can point to. Adjacent experience doesn’t count here. Beyond that, you should be able
to walk an investigative editor through what changes in her newsroom the day she adopts
the standard, without making her feel patronized. You should know the difference between
a Standards desk buyer and a Digital Operations buyer. One signs the contract. The other
decides whether the rollout survives its first month. If your track record includes legal
review, fact-check tooling, CMS, or rights management in newsrooms, you’ll recognize the
shape of the buying motion. Bring the names.

The truth about working here.

We’re building the category. Some of these buyers will tell
you their current vendor already does this, and your job is to know why that vendor
doesn’t. You’ll be calibrating the pitch in real time, and we’ll iterate on it together every
week. Small team, direct reporting line to me, no middle layer to slow you down. The IQS is
only the first stone within a castle, and the news vertical is where the public sees the castle
first.

Apply with a short note about which three newsrooms you’d open first and which
standards lead you’d cold-call this week.