Think like a newsroom: Tahirah Hairston on what brands can learn from journalism

Tahirah Hairston has spent her career looking at fashion and beauty through the lens of culture and politics. Previously the fashion and beauty director at Teen Vogue, she’s written deeply reported features for New York Magazine, along with contributing to Cultured and Harper’s Bazaar. She now writes the cultural newsletter Ridiculous Little Things. Here, she looks at how some of this year’s most talked-about brand work quietly borrowed its instincts straight from the newsroom.

At 12:07pm on 8 May 2025, the Vatican announced the first American Pope. At 1:23pm (a mere 76 minutes later), Popeyes posted two words on social media: “pope yes”. Without spending a dollar or booking a single media placement, the post out-engaged the Church’s own announcement by 55%. The joke itself is obvious. What’s more interesting are the conditions: someone with a keyboard who was fast enough to catch the story while it was still breaking.

Popeyes wasn’t the only recent instance of a brand moving at speed. In January 2026, as rumours of a TikTok ban in the US sent American users scrambling to a Chinese app called RedNote, Duolingo posted the same day: “Oh, so now you’re learning Mandarin.” Someone on their team got the joke out before the news cycle had even settled on what to call the moment.

A scoop is all about timing; being early matters just as much as being right. And this year, what’s making some brands stand out is acting like journalists – spotting the story, understanding why it matters and filing before the moment goes cold. Popeyes and Duolingo have shown the power of acting like a breaking news desk. But brands are borrowing from journalism in other ways too.

For years, “mustard” has meant one thing first: DJ Mustard, the music producer behind countless hit songs. Instead of fighting for ownership of the word to sell its mustard products, Heinz partnered with him directly – pairing the condiment with the producer’s own name and reach, so every mention of “mustard”, his or theirs, did double duty. Nobody asked for a mustard renaissance. Heinz just noticed the internet already had one, sitting right there in someone else’s name, and decided to use it instead of competing with it.

Reporters call this chasing the trend. A good trend story is about finding an angle only your publication could report. What’s your entry point? That’s the first thing I think of when pitching a story. Brands have started asking the same question.

Speed gets you the breaking news story. Perspective gets you the trend piece. The third kind of borrowing takes something else: nerve. When the US government changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, it was more than an insignificant map update for the Mexican people whose national identity is tied to it. Most brands stayed quiet, the way brands usually do with anything political, based on the theory that saying nothing keeps you safe. Tecate didn’t. The beer brand built a floating bar and anchored it in the middle of the Gulf itself, positioned exactly so that anytime someone’s map was tracking the bar’s GPS location, it would keep reading “Gulf of Mexico” no matter what the US government renamed it. The brand forwent the easy way of making a statement on social media and built a physical object, sitting in the water, forcing the correction to hold.

Maple Leaf Foods took the same nerve and pointed it inward. When Trump’s tariffs hit Canada directly this year, most brands did the safe thing: quietly raise prices, say nothing political. Maple Leaf ran a campaign urging Canadians to buy Canadian. Look for the leaf, the campaign said, and it meant any leaf, on any product, including a competitor’s. A normal ad campaign doesn’t usually tell you it’s fine to buy from a competitor instead, but like in journalism, the information comes first.

This is all part of what I like to call the brand journalism toolkit. Speed, for a story breaking right now. Perspective, for a story that’s been sitting there for months, waiting on someone to notice the angle. Nerve is the odd one out – it’s less about the story asking to be covered and more about it asking you to pick a side, which most brands still won’t do.

Each of these four brands picked the right tool. If they’d chosen different ones, their efforts wouldn’t have worked. Popeyes moving slow would have just been a chicken chain making a Pope joke a week late. Tecate moving fast instead of building something permanent would have been a fleeting social post, gone by morning. The real skill on display this year was knowing whether a moment called for speed, perspective or nerve, the same way a good editor knows whether a story needs a wire report, a feature or an op-ed.

I know brands aren’t journalists; they have completely different purposes and intentions. But the same tools a newsroom uses day in, day out – speed, perspective and nerve – are powerful methods for brands today, which need to master not only the story they’re telling but also how they’re telling it.

Download the D&AD Trend Report 2026 to discover six trends shaping the creative industry, including The Brand Hack, which analysis how brands are hijacking existing cultural or sporting moments for creative advantage.