When crafting a newsworthy story, you can’t just let the data speak for itself.
Data presented on its own will rarely get you media coverage because it fails to tell the story behind the numbers.
Journalists want to know why the data is important, what new information it is telling or highlighting and how it relates or impacts their audience.
To transform your data into a newsworthy story, you need to put it into context and offer a case study.
Explain why your data is a newsworthy story
The first step in turning data into a newsworthy story, is to undertake some proper analysis. After all, data without context is meaningless.
What is the data saying about societal trends? What new or interesting behaviours does it track or predict? How does it compare historically?
From there, you can begin to tell a newsworthy story with commentary that explains why the data is significant.
For example, interest rates changing is a newsworthy story, but the RBA is going to have that covered.
If you can provide some data-led insights – like the suburbs most affected by interest rate changes – you’re on your way to telling a newsworthy story.
Once you’ve done your analysis and you know what the data is saying, you can start to think about who it applies to.
Humanise your data with a case study
Exclusive access to fresh data can certainly make a journalist interested, but what they really want to know is how they can make it relatable for their audience.
Localism is important, as is finding a hook that someone hasn’t thought of – and agencies are experts at this – but often the best way to pitch a newsworthy story is with a real-life case study.
For a story on interest rates, finding a family on the median Australian income with both parents working two jobs to pay the bills in a cost-of-living crisis will bring home the impact of a small change in interest rates.
But you could go even further by taking your suburb-by-suburb data breakdown, comparing the most and least-affected suburbs, and providing a case study from each.
That will give you gold-plated newsworthy story – provided you’re not pitching it a week after the RBA’s announcement, of course.
Help finding case studies
These days, case studies are so crucial, pitching a story without one is like having a guest over for dinner and serving them steak without the chips and salad, or dry pasta without the sauce.
As they say in the PR business: you need to serve it all to them on a plate.
Bespoken’s team of highly experienced former journalists are masters at sourcing case studies finding the hooks to create newsworthy stories.
Get in touch with us today to discover how we can help.
