Data Journalism: Putting Your Law Firm on the News Circuit
Whether you’re a small law firm or a huge dream team powerhouse, adopting a Data Journalistic style of marketing is a great idea for growing your reach and developing your place as a leader in your area of practice. What’s the win-win? Your content will serve to educate society while growing your audience and expertise in your field, win-win.
What is your law firm’s current marketing strategy? What are you currently doing to contribute to your field of practice? Yes, it’s important to get your basics down i.e. online searchability, developing your niche, maintaining a presence on your top performing social media platforms. However, once you’ve nailed down the basics, conduct an inventory of your efforts, goals, time, and staff to consider what high-quality deliverables you can add to your marketing strategy. Delivering great blogs and interacting on social media is important, but when you’re ready to jump beyond that, high-quality data journalist articles are some of the MOST highly shareable content your law firm can be creating. Sharing your articles with the Huffington Post, New York Times, and other major or local news outlets can get you on the path to Law Niche Stardom, or at the very least make your name and law firm a recognizable leader in your area of practice.
But who will do the work?
There are many ways to plan out writing substantive, data-centric articles. But who will do all of this work? Depending on your caseload, staffing, and general workload, you can develop an editorial calendar that addresses some major topics in your field of expertise.
You can decide that you want to take charge of this exciting endeavor all on your own or you can enlist the help of a ghostwriter, an assistant, or data journalist. With the emerging freelance economy, there are no limits to the types of content creation arrangements you can set-up.
If you need help to figure out your management of this project, contact us.
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Learn from the Leaders in Data Journalism
Getting inspired yet? The skills required for great data journalism are luckily the same skills that led you to law. In fact, many law graduates turn to Investigative Journalism when faced with the realities of an over-saturated legal field. So use your innate investigative attorney skills to unleash a data journalism approach to marketing your firm.
Here are some of the big time Data Journalism Newsrooms to Learn from:
The Guardian’s Data Journalism iDept.
Take a Lesson from Award Winning Data Journalism Projects
Measuring Justice Scalia’s Tenure
The Panama Papers – The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
Pollution Continues to Batter City’s Lungs, Ears
Discover more award-winning projects here.
The Data
I don’t have to tell you that data accessibility is ever-increasing which serves as a scary, yet useful tool for investigative works. With that said, tap into your magic lawyer bag of data sets that you likely have access to. If you still need to locate some specialized data consider where you might find the best and most reliable data sets: local law enforcement, state boards, CDC, EPA, USGS, etc. If you need help finding a data set, just contact us. Here’s a short list of some open data sources you can use for your data article endeavors:
Everlaw – For investigative Data Journalism
Springboard – Data Sets to begin your Articles
Federal Aviation Administration Data
So what’s next?
Remember to take an investigative or substantive angle, not procedural. Get niche in your journalistic efforts – educate on your niche. Think of interesting angles to perceive your chosen data and use this to develop a piece of work that could go viral in your area of practice. Get some help modeling your data with great visuals. Decide to write your article like a Sunday New York Times Featured Article. Move out of the blocks and docs and into the realm of live streaming data that tells a story about the type of law that you experience daily. People want to be educated on things they didn’t even know they wanted to be educated on, make it easy for them and draw attention and leads to your law firm.
Inspiration & Ways to Spot Bad Statistics
To get you moving on your data journalistic plan, watch this TedTalk by Mona Chalabi to start thinking of simple ways to spot bad statistics and also to inspire you to delve into the confidence of presenting your findings to your audience.
And of course, if you need help with any of your Data Journalistic efforts, contact the A.R. Team, we’re always ready to turn your brilliant ideas into headliner content.
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