How to pitch a stats story

With some real life examples I've used successfully

I love a good stats story. And here’s a stat: 61 per cent of the articles I had published last year were wholly or largely based on data. (Yes, I’m a nerd and I went through my archive to count them.) There’s clearly a lot of appetite for this sort of story - so they’re a great thing to pitch.

Numbers are brilliant because they help demonstrate why a story matters to readers - something that’s also vital to get across to editors when you’re pitching.

The figures in a story help readers to answer questions like: How many people are affected by this issue? What’s the likelihood this could happen to me? How much of taxpayers’ (i.e. readers’) money has been spent on this? Is the trend getting better or worse? Am I getting value for money?

These are all things which make a story interesting, relevant and more likely to get readers to engage - exactly the elements you need if you want an editor to say yes to your pitch.

But numbers can undoubtably also be dull to read and complicated to understand.

So how can you pitch a stats-based story in a punchy way which grabs the attention editors?

Here are 5 tips for pitching stats based on my experiences of what works, and what doesn’t: