Turning a spreadsheet into a story journalists chase.
Most brands sit on data they never think to pitch. Here's the research on what actually makes a number newsworthy — and the translation step most people skip.
Almost every business has a spreadsheet somewhere with a genuinely interesting number buried in it — usage data, transaction patterns, survey responses, something regulators or industry bodies already publish that nobody's bothered to properly read. Most of that data never becomes a story, not because it isn't interesting, but because turning a number into something a journalist wants to run is a specific, learnable translation — and most people skip straight from "we have data" to "we wrote a press release," missing the step in between.
The short version: 78% of journalists say they're more likely to cover a story that includes proprietary data, according to a Muck Rack survey, and 68% specifically want original research or trend data in the pitches they receive. A separate Columbia Journalism Review study found 82% of journalists believe data-backed stories improve their reporting's credibility. But Muck Rack's 2026 State of Journalism report is a useful reality check too: only 3% of journalists say the pitches they receive are always relevant to their beat, and 43% say relevant pitches are rare. Good data doesn't fix a pitch sent to the wrong person. It's the raw material — the translation still has to happen.
Data is a fingerprint, not an opinion
Two companies can hold the same opinion about where an industry is heading, and neither one is more citable than the other for it. But only one of them can credibly say "we analyzed 2.3 million transactions over the past 18 months and found X" — and that difference is exactly why data performs better than commentary. An opinion is infinitely repeatable by anyone with a keyboard. A genuine dataset, properly sourced, is not. That scarcity is what makes it worth a journalist's time to build a story around, and it's also — not coincidentally — the same property that makes original research the single highest-performing category of content for earning both classic backlinks and AI-search citations, since neither system can find the same analysis published anywhere else.
What actually makes a number newsworthy
Not every statistic clears the bar. Per Muck Rack's 2026 survey of over 1,000 journalists, 78% say a pitch feels genuinely relevant when it directly affects the community their audience belongs to, and 45% specifically want clear local or cultural context — a national number means less to a regional trade outlet than the specific slice of it that touches their readers. On top of relevance, the number itself needs a reason to surprise: a figure that confirms what everyone already assumed is much harder to place than one that complicates it. The best data stories tend to answer a question nobody had quite asked yet, using a source solid enough that an editor can stand behind it.
Show your work, or nobody will repeat it
A number a journalist can't verify is a number they won't put their byline next to. That means methodology isn't a footnote — it's part of the pitch. Where did the data come from: your own product analytics, a public regulator dataset, a survey you ran, and how big was the sample? A journalist needs to trust the number enough to explain it to their readers in their own words, which means the analysis has to be transparent enough for someone outside the company to follow the logic from raw numbers to conclusion. We walked through exactly this in the story behind our own Aerospace Global News placement — the entire pitch stood on one publicly checkable regulator figure, which is precisely why an editor felt comfortable running it.
"What matters is that it introduces information that is measurable, relevant, and presented with enough transparency that a reporter can trust it."
The translation step most people skip
The mistake we see most often isn't a lack of data — it's sending the whole spreadsheet and calling it a pitch. A dataset isn't a story until someone finds the one number inside it that changes how a reader sees something, states it plainly, and puts a named person behind the interpretation. That's the difference between "here is our Q3 usage report" and "one number in our Q3 usage data means X, and here's why that matters to your readers right now." Journalists aren't short on numbers. They're short on someone who's already done the work of explaining why a specific number is worth their time.
One dataset, more than one story
The most efficient version of this isn't a single press release — it's treating one solid dataset as raw material for several angles, aimed at different beats and outlets over time, rather than one generic send to everyone at once. That approach compounds: campaigns built around genuinely original data account for roughly 42.3% of the successful digital PR campaigns tracked in recent industry analysis, and brands that keep this up consistently, rather than running it as a single push, earn several times more high-authority coverage than the ones who try it once and stop.
The spreadsheet was never the hard part. Finding the one number worth a stranger's attention, sourcing it so it holds up, and framing it so a journalist doesn't have to do the translation themselves — that's the actual craft, and it's exactly what separates a data study nobody reads from one that ends up as someone else's headline.