Planning a survey? Read this first

What to include - and what to avoid - in surveys for media stories

Journalists love a strong data story - and surveys can be a great way to generate your own data on a subject you want to get covered in the media.

I have covered literally hundreds of survey stories over the years (I once counted I’d written 52 in one year). But I’ve found it increasingly difficult to place this type of story in the past five years.

Does that mean the survey story is dead?

No - there is still potential to get survey-based stories in major publication. (I wrote this one for The Times just last week, for example.) But it does mean you might have to change your approach to surveys to maximise your chances of success.

Nothing like a good graph… Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash

Personally, I think the main reason it’s so much harder to place survey stories today is that competition for space is higher than ever: The cost of living crisis has seen a drop in advertising budgets, and fewer adverts mean fewer physical pages in print publications, while staffing cuts are limiting publications’ capacity to upload as much content online.

And when space is limited, the bar for entry is higher.

Survey-based stories are essentially stories about numbers. To keep things interesting for readers, publications have to run a mix of dry, numbers-based stories and the more meaty stories about people and real-life events. And that means space for “numbers” stories is limited.

Pre-pandemic, publications had no problem with running a PR survey story alongside everything else going on in the news. But when space is limited, if an editor has only one slot for a “numbers” health story, for example, and they have to choose between some new NHS statistics, a report on the results of a randomised controlled trial or a PR survey, they are going to choose the most newsworthy one, with the most credible, robust data - and 99% of the time, that’s not the PR survey.

So what can you do? I’d recommend ensuring your survey story is so strong, editors won’t be able to resist using it. Here are 3 things I look for when choosing whether to cover a survey-based story: