Data-Led Digital PR for Health and Food Newsrooms

A data story that lands in the Irish nationals returns, in my experience, 15 to 40 linking domains, and half of those are usually the same wire copy republished. I report the two numbers separately, because the second is an echo rather than a link profile, and a team that cannot tell them apart will keep paying for echoes. What the story is built from: Records, not panels. Freedom of Information requests to the HSE and to state agencies, which carry a statutory response window under the FOI Act 2014 and therefore have to go out in the first week of a campaign rather than the fourth. HIQA inspection reports. CSO and Eurostat series. The EU RASFF portal for food and feed alerts, which is public, structured, and almost never mined by anyone in the category. HPRA and EMA safety communications. Your own data where a DPIA supports it and aggregation is coarse enough that nobody is re-identifiable, with your data protection officer in the room before the analysis, not after. What I will not build: A thousand-respondent panel survey dressed as research. Health correspondents in Ireland and the UK have been burned enough that a survey pitch now reads as an advertisement, and the outlets still taking them are the ones whose links you did not need. I will also not put up a spokesperson to answer a clinical question they are not qualified to answer, however fast the cycle is moving. That is one follow-up call away from being the story. The pitch: The strongest angle goes to one correspondent as an exclusive, with the full dataset, the method written out, and an open offer to be argued with. National first, then trade, then the specialist and regional titles that will use the county or category breakdown. I keep my own lists and check every name against what they actually filed in the last month, because health desks in this market are small and the person who covered the beat last year has usually moved. Reactive: Where a client has a genuinely qualified voice I run a standing reactive line: EMA and HPRA notices, EFSA opinions, budget and HSE announcements, recall notices, and the annual reporting cycles that are known months ahead. Reactive works only when the comment exists before the news breaks, which means writing positions in advance for events we can see coming. Reporting: Unique linking root domains, separated from syndication. Coverage without a link, how many I chased, and what happened. Whether the campaign's own pages still rank for the query set 90 days later, which is the number that distinguishes a story with legs from a launch spike. No advertising value equivalent, and I will argue with anyone who asks for it. Not included: Crisis and issues management. Event and trade show PR. Broadcast bookings. Social amplification. Influencer work of any kind. Running your corporate newsroom. If you need a press office, hire one; this is campaign work that sits alongside a press office rather than replacing it. Who this is not for: Companies who need coverage to say something the evidence does not support. Teams who cannot get a 90-word comment approved inside a working day, because reactive dies at 48 hours. Brands who would rather have thirty links from anywhere than six from titles a clinician reads. And anyone expecting the same campaign on a schedule: a second story off the same dataset lands at a fraction of the first, and you will hear that from me in month one rather than month seven.