Your Digital PR Team Lacks Editorial Judgment

Today’s Digital PR teams have access to more information than at any other point in the industry’s history.

With the right tools, we can find datasets, scrape websites, analyze thousands of results, identify trends and interrogate survey data in a fraction of the time it would have taken five years ago.

That should make it easier to find stories.

Often, it simply gives us more things that could technically become stories.

A team can feed a large dataset into an AI tool and receive dozens of possible findings, headlines and regional angles within minutes. But the ability to produce more options does not tell us which one a journalist will care about.

That takes a human touch.

What does editorial judgment mean in Digital PR?

Editorial judgment is the ability to tell the difference between data we can find and a story that deserves to be published.

A person with strong editorial judgment can look at a spreadsheet full of findings and decide:

• Which result is genuinely interesting

• Who it matters to

• Why it matters now

• What tension or consequence it reveals

• How the story should be framed

Digital PR teams often spend weeks collecting and analyzing data. Once that work has been completed, it’s natural to want to show as much of it as possible.

But journalists are not rewarding the amount of work that went into the campaign. They are deciding whether the final story is useful to their audience.

Sometimes, the best editorial decision is to ignore 90% of the analysis and lead with the one finding that creates a clear story.

Sometimes, it is to decide that there is no strong enough story at all.

The six qualities of a strong data story

There is no formula that guarantees media coverage. News is affected by timing, competition, editorial priorities and events far outside a PR team’s control.

What you can control is producing information that is not just accurate and neatly presented, but actually interesting.

The data stories most likely to cut through the noise tend to share six qualities. They are specific, surprising, human, timely, credible and easy to retell.

1. It is specific

Broad subjects may be commercially relevant, but they do not automatically create headlines.

“The cost of living is increasing” is an important topic. It is not, by itself, a news story. A more specific piece of research might reveal where commuting places the greatest financial burden on workers.

A useful test is to complete this sentence:

This is a story about how ______ is affecting ______ right now.

When the answer is vague or dull, the story probably is too.

2. It is surprising

Surprising data can take many forms. It may challenge a common assumption, reveal the true scale of a familiar problem, or show that an issue affects a different group or location than expected. The important question is whether the research changes the reader’s understanding in some way.

For example, a city ranking where every expensive city appears at the top and every affordable city appears at the bottom may be accurate, but it largely confirms what people already believe.

There may still be a story in the exceptions. Perhaps one location performs much better than its peers. Perhaps the factor driving the result is not the one people would expect. Perhaps the pattern has changed significantly over time. Start there. 

3. It is human

In-depth indexes and complicated formulas may be necessary to complete an analysis, but they alienate the average reader. A strong story connects its data to a human experience.

What does your finding make more possible, or more inaccessible? How might it validate someone’s everyday experiences? How might it affect their work, finances, home or relationships? 

For example, childcare costs are not simply numbers in a table. They may affect whether a parent can continue working, whether a family needs to use savings or credit, or whether a child can attend activities while school is closed.

4. It is timely

A topic can be relevant without being timely. Housing, careers, relationships and money are relevant to all of us, all the time. 

But general relevance is typically not enough. Strong campaigns connect the research to a moment when interest is likely to increase in the topic at hand.

That may be a seasonal occurrence, a policy change, a major news event, a new workplace trend or an emerging cultural conversation.

5. It is credible

AI tools can make weak research look extremely polished. A methodology may sound convincing even when the source is outdated, the sample is unrepresentative, or the calculation does not fully support the headline.

Strong editorial thinkers ask whether the source measures what they claim it measures, whether any proxies are reasonable, and whether the language used in the headline reflects the limitations of the research.

6. It is easy to retell

One of the clearest signs of a strong story is that somebody else can explain it accurately in one or two sentences.

Digital PR stories move through several layers of interpretation. A PR professional explains the finding in a pitch. A journalist explains it to an editor. The publication explains it to readers. Readers may then repeat or share it themselves.

If the central finding requires several paragraphs of caveats before it makes sense, it may not be ready. If five different statistics are leading the pitch, the team has not yet decided what the campaign is really about.

How to build editorial judgment into the campaign process

Editorial judgment can feel like a gut instinct, but it can be practiced and improved. It should also be built into the development process rather than applied only once a campaign is ready to launch.

Start with a question, not a dataset

Start with the question the research needs to answer. Who is affected? What pressure, behavior or change are you trying to understand? Why will people care about the answer?

Write the potential headline early

Writing a provisional headline before completing the analysis forces the team to articulate what the campaign is actually trying to discover.

Compare:

New study analyzes the best cities for families

with:

Parents in these cities could spend the largest share of their income on childcare

Separate the lead story from the supporting material

Choose the one story that leads the campaign and use the remaining data to support it.

Additional findings can still be valuable for regional outreach, follow-up pitches, onsite content and journalist questions.

Read the news like an editor

Don’t forget the sheer volume of news stories we have access to are all examples of editorial judgment. Read a handful of articles every day. Consider why they were published.

What made the headline work? Why was the story useful at that moment? Which part of the research became the lead? What did the journalist leave out? How was the story adapted for a particular readership?

Over time, these questions help teams understand not only what coverage they’re after, but how editorial decisions create the stories all of us are trying to tell.

Give teams permission to kill weak ideas

Junior team members may feel their job is to execute the campaign they have been given. Senior team members may be reluctant to abandon an idea after presenting it internally or to a client.

But continuing to invest in a weak story does not make it stronger. It only makes it more expensive.

Teams need space to say that a finding is not interesting enough, a methodology is not defensible or a campaign needs to move in a different direction. A team with that culture is set up for the strongest editorial success. 

AI makes human judgment more valuable

AI can make Digital PR work faster and more ambitious. 

It can help teams gather information, interrogate large datasets, identify patterns and explore more possible angles. Used well, it can give us more time to think about the story rather than spending that time on repetitive tasks.

But it cannot remove the need to decide whether the output is worth anyone’s attention.

As the cost of generating research, ideas and headlines continues to fall, selectivity will become increasingly important.

The strongest Digital PR teams will not be the ones producing the most findings or launching the most campaigns.

They will be the ones that consistently recognize what is specific, surprising, human, timely, credible and easy to retell—and have the confidence to discard everything that is not.

This post was written by Erica Prush, US Head of PR at Rise at Seven.

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