How to pitch data stories to the Financial Times: storytelling tips from Sam Joiner

Alessia Horwich (00:07):

Welcome to On the Rox, a podcast from Roxhill Media that asks some of the best journalists in the UK for their solutions to the kind of dilemmas that PRs confront daily. At Roxhill, we know there’s not a one size fits all solution to communicating with journalists, so instead of trying to tell you how to do your jobs, we are going straight to the writers in the newsroom to get their advice on the most effective ways of communicating your stories to them. My name is Alessia Horwich. I am the Director of creative content and brand at Roxhill and a former Sunday Times journalist. Today we’re going to be talking about how to pitch data stories to The Financial Times with the paper’s visual stories editor, Sam Joiner. Hi Sam. How’s it going?

Sam Joiner (00:50):

I’m good, thank you.

Alessia Horwich (00:51):

Sam, can you tell me a little bit about your career and how you’ve come to be where you are at the FT?

Sam Joiner (00:55):

I would say in the cliche way that I have always wanted to be a journalist and I probably do the job that I’ve always wanted to do from the age of 12/13, I went to a state school in North London and I wanted to play for Arsenal. That was the only thing I wanted to do. I was captain of my school team in year seven, so it felt feasible. By year eight, everybody grew and I didn’t and I thought, this is getting increasingly unlikely and I thought, well, I quite like English and history. I quite like writing. Why don’t I be a sports journalist then I can just write about football and that gives me the perfect way in. So that’s what happened and then I was very lucky to do work experience with Dan Walker, who now presents a Channel Five News, but previously was at the BBC when he was quite, I mean he was clearly on a trajectory to be a kind of star, but I kind of shadowed him for a few weeks, 2008 maybe before I went to university and we were meeting boxers who were then trying to go to the Olympics and I remember watching them in 2012 and them being successful, but it was just so much fun.

Sam Joiner (01:57):

I mean I’ve been doing this now for, God, 13 years I think I’ve been a journalist now, which actually feels like quite a long time. I started freelancing at The Guardian just doing shifts and writing what I could and just trying to get as much work as I could, and that was very much shift work. I moved from there to work for Microsoft for a few years working in their apps team, so I was quite technical at that point, but also lots of news editing around MSN and other apps there, which taught me quick headlines, things like that to get people interested. Then I moved to The Times and The Sunday Times and The Sunday Times and Times had kind of discovered that the internet was important but not as important as print. And my job was to try to translate stories that were going in the paper and make them more interesting online.

Sam Joiner (02:43):

Generally that’s not dissimilar to what I do now in that I would go through the news list, think about what the best stories were, work with the reporters and think, okay, how can we take your story, which is getting print and make it more interesting? What data have you got? Why don’t we do, let’s chart all of this. So then I was building bespoke charts and within a year I was like, there’s way too much stuff for me to do in terms of how many people wanted their stories enhanced online. I think I was just very lucky that the visual and data journalism world just came towards me. Everything is read online and everything’s actually just read on the phone. That was already underway then, but I joined The Sunday Times and The Times at a point where that transition hadn’t quite happened and then I became part of that huge push and my team went from just me, to three to six to nine, and then I moved to the Financial Times about four years ago to start from scratch, a visual storytelling team, which felt like an amazing opportunity that you don’t get very often to build something new in a newsroom.

Sam Joiner (03:35):

About two and a half years into that role, the editor said to me, I love the stories you’re producing. I just wish they would reveal something new, something I didn’t know as well. I went away and I thought about it and I think often with senior people like that, you have to read between the lines and then try and go back to them with a plan before they make one for you. And I thought what you’re talking about is visual investigations where the visuals are still a key part of how we tell the story in the format, but the techniques we use uncover something new, sorry, and I think we see visual stories in visual investigations as two sides of the same coin in terms of the formats, but what we’re trying to do is slightly different in terms of break news. And she said, great, that sounds fantastic. I’m off to Tokyo tomorrow to speak to Nickkei who own the ft. Have you got a full pitch? And I was like, no, I’ve got the one page doc I gave you. Of course I don’t. So we quickly turned that round and we put that forward to Nickkei something that we wanted to try and do and luckily they supported us in that as well. And we’ve had a visual stories and a visual investigations team ever since, which is a nice long snappy title.

Alessia Horwich (04:33):

So we interviewed somebody at Roxhill last week from the FT and they used the term scrolly telling all the time. I read the notes, didn’t know what it was. Googled it. Can you tell me about it? Is that something you guys banged around as a term favourite?

Sam Joiner (04:48):

I guess it is kind of newsroom jargon to an extent. I don’t think readers know what scrolly telling is, so we keep it from them. It’s a key part of the way we tell stories. It’s kind of taking control of the reader’s screen and introducing things incrementally as they scroll.

Sam Joiner (05:02):

So, Typically a text box will scroll from the bottom of a screen to the top, and as that scroll card goes up, the background will change. So you introduce information, it can be used badly. I think one of the big things is people get their hands on toys like this and then think, oh, let’s do a scrolly setting of this. But the key thing is that it should build up layers so the next bit of information that comes in should be relevant to the previous one and the one after should build on that. So we did a big story where we took readers into a proper explanation of how generative AI works and we started with a word to keep it simple. Each letter becomes a token, so the next scroll says that here’s a word next scroll, let’s put that word into tokens. Next scroll, let’s take those tokens and you kind of build it up we’re publishing a story tomorrow on how you get the UK driving EVs and we’ve built a EV utopia called Greenwell, and in that EV utopia we have all the key things you’d need to get people either switching to electric cars or out of cars completely.

Sam Joiner (05:58):

So the scroll cards move you around the town, so each new scroll card positions you somewhere else. What you don’t want to do with scrolly telling is have, here’s a map of the world, then here’s a chart, then here’s something entirely different because you’re not stepping readers through stuff in a way that feels natural and feels continued. Each scroll should also change something in the background. Otherwise readers are working really hard for texts to go from the bottom to the top of their device and then they’re seeing the same thing behind it. So it has to change what you see.

Alessia Horwich (06:28):

It’s so interesting that we’ve got this whole new term for a way to present an article. I mean I guess it shows why well that data articles are increasingly important in the newsroom, especially at The FT. Can you talk a bit about that and say why do you guys like data stories?

Sam Joiner (06:46):

Yeah, I mean I think the visual and data vocabulary is just the whole language around how we tell stories now from new formats to the way we combine data to do that, and it’s just really exciting to have the opportunity to do that on websites now where previously we really struggled in terms of why data stories matter. I think that the combination of visual stories driven by data or great charts, it just allows you to cut through the kind of news. I think that’s a really good way of thinking about it.

Sam Joiner (07:14):

That’s we often do. So what are the big stories happening this week? And then you can kind of think what underpins them and what can the data tell you about what’s going on. There’s been lots of stories about mass deportations in the US. What are the actual numbers? Who would be deported? Where would they go? What are we looking at? How many people were deported last year? You can kind of cut through with facts in a way that I think can be really powerful.

Alessia Horwich (07:36):

So it’s not the top news line then it’s behind those top news lines.

Sam Joiner (07:40):

Yeah, it can be. I think that’s a great question. It’s both. I think it should be both. Sometimes the data can be used in a way to provide context and inform and context is a key thing at the FT or you might find some killer data that becomes your top line,

Sam Joiner (07:55):

Whether that’s through an FOI or through increasingly using clever computational techniques like satellite analysis where you can find things out. There was a great story recently where it’s a dark story, but it’s an important story where mass graves were discovered using hyperspectral imagery because you could pick out different heat pans and things like that. So there are ways that you can find information out through tools and techniques that you couldn’t before and then that can become your top line and that can become, you’re either writing around the data that this is your kind of key thing or using your contextual, I’d say.

Alessia Horwich (08:29):

Yeah, when you guys are thinking about data stories, where is the data coming from?

Sam Joiner (08:33):

I think increasingly the data is coming from things that we generate ourselves, so there’s lots of tools that we have access to where we can pull large amounts of information like ship tracking data. It might be cargo vessel data, so where are things moving, transport data, all that kind of stuff. We’ll then look at and try to find stories within it. I would say we are usually coming up with a good headline or hypothesis and then we’ll try to work out what the data tells us about that theory.

Alessia Horwich (08:59):

How do you get that headline or hypothesis? Who’s coming to you with that?

Sam Joiner (09:02):

I think that the news agenda comes to us with that and I would say that we respond to the news agenda. I tell everybody in my team to read the paper front to back. It’s really easy when you work at a news organisation to stop reading your own paper, almost like you’re kind of too busy knowing what you’re going to do, but taking the time to read your own paper properly, see what’s being covered and what’s important, and then thinking about from there. Okay, so what are the big storylines here? Investigations are slightly different. You need to be speaking to people, you need to be checking in with sources. You need to think about what areas you’re interested in, what affects consumers and people every day. How can we get into those topics and look at that?

Alessia Horwich (09:38):

What’s the balance for you between those two different types of data stories?

Sam Joiner (09:41):

Investigations are harder because they sometimes don’t happen. I’m often if we have a spark of an idea for a visual story, if we say we petrol cars are over or we need to get people out of cars, how do you get the UK to drive electric vehicles? How do you get the UK to go electric if that’s something you want to do, I’m pretty confident we can do it. There’s nothing stopping us coming up with that idea apart from being overtaken by the news agenda. If you take too long on some stories like well, the goalposts have moved and actually, and I mean we had that idea to do the EV story last summer and then loads of stuff came out about EVs towards Christmas where suddenly big companies are saying this transition isn’t going to be possible. Keir Starmer had to come out of different kind of, I mean have to discuss it and talk about what he was going to do next.

Sam Joiner (10:30):

And there’s been more about electric vehicles in terms of charging this year in the news, so it’s become very topical and it looks like we’ve timed this really well, but if they changed the mandate and it wasn’t 80% sales by 2030, which is what they’re saying that companies need to do, we’d have to kind of rethink the story. So that’s challenging. With investigations, it’s much more challenging because you’re trying to reveal something that people don’t want you to know. Ultimately, the key of an investigation is that you’re breaking news and you’re saying something new that’s just difficult. People don’t like it when you say things about them that they don’t want publicised. You’ve got to find things out that are hidden and computational techniques have become a key way of us doing that through the kind of satellite analysis or in-depth data driven reporting that we can now do in the newsroom.

Alessia Horwich (11:15):

I’m guessing out of the two of them, PRs have little to do with investigative. So how much do you interact with PRs then? On the first type,

Sam Joiner (11:24):

It’s often the fact that we’ll have an idea and then the data might land at a point when we’re discussing it, which is by chance really. But that’s the way our way into it. I mean we are very lucky at the FT in that we do pay for data, which is something they increasingly have to do, and I think one of the things that PRs actually should maybe focus more on is that they have access to data which is exclusive in terms of volumes of data because they represent clients who have that data and that can be very valuable to newsrooms understanding that not all good data is, we’re very lucky in the UK there’s lots of good public data available, but in Russia, if you want to do stories on Russia, there’s lots of data that isn’t available.

Alessia Horwich (12:01):

The FT is extremely global, obviously.

Sam Joiner (12:03):

Yes. Yeah, we have a massively global audience, so we speak to PRs if they get in touch specifically about a data set that might fit or it might be that we are kind of thinking, okay, this topic could be really good. I wonder who’s got data out there and that might be a way around that you end up speaking to PRs about things.

Alessia Horwich (12:20):

If a PR is bringing data to you, what kind of data are you after?

Sam Joiner (12:23):

I think we’re after large, not necessarily large volumes of data, but we’re looking for data that we can explore.

Sam Joiner (12:30):

I think that there’s a difference between a visual and data team and the skillset there and what they want to be able to do and maybe some other reporters who would like the data to be handed to them in a way that they could then say, okay, well the top line might be this, but I mean at the FT we are very lucky. I think the newsroom is increasingly data literate. There’s lots of people who are good with numbers. It’s the financial times and actually there’s a kind of quite a high level of data literacy maybe compared to other newsrooms, and I think that means that being aware of the data that’s available is useful. I treat the newsroom as a source. That’s how we work as a team. We’re the specialists and how you tell the stories rather than the subject matter. We move from the biggest stories of the moment around.

Sam Joiner (13:09):

That means you have a coffee with the reporters when you can or you give them a call and you say, what’s the biggest thing on your patch at the moment? What would you love to do that you haven’t got time to do? What’s the big themes or topics that underpin what you’re writing about every day. For a PR It should be similar right? That relationship building where you can talk to people one-on-one is a really good chance to kind of have those conversations and it’s almost like the first email or the way you get in touch is, Hey, this is the kind of stuff that I can get hold of. These are the people I work with. Let me know if this is of any interest rather than here’s article structure you could rip and put into. That’s much less likely to work with a publication like the FT where the reporters will want to be doing the work themselves and we don’t partner with even NGOs that often within specialist areas. It’s not something we might partner with amnesty on a story. We might partner with some of those global phishing watch on a story, but we wouldn’t take their data and just write it up if it was a report. We’d want that to be a kind of exclusive relationship where we worked on something together.

Alessia Horwich (14:09):

That’s interesting. So if somebody’s going to offer you data, it’s going to be a piece of the story rather than the whole story.

Sam Joiner (14:14):

It’s very likely to be a piece of the story unless somebody, I mean I always say to people who do work experience, if you have the best idea of the day or go on the front page

Sam Joiner (14:21):

It Doesn’t matter who you are, someone might help you write it, but it’s unlikely that that person is going to have that level of access or find in that data an angle like that, especially because the things that go on the front page would be news, and if you’re breaking news like that, then it might not be information that the person they’re representing is going to like . We had to look at this massive amount of data. We realised that our client is in big trouble, might not be something that is great for the person.

Alessia Horwich (14:46):

Yeah, for sure.

Sam Joiner (14:46):

Who’s in charge

Alessia Horwich (14:47):

I guess that’s the risk they run in a way because that’s not necessarily going to be the outcome and something else could come out of it. You guys could find something really juicy and interesting.

Sam Joiner (14:55):

I think that if you give access to large amounts of data, you would be accepting that the way it was used might not necessarily be, it would be to reveal the truth about what the subject matter was. We did another big story about how Europe gets its gas a few years ago, which again was an example of, okay, well Putin’s turning off the taps, what does that mean for Europe? And then I was like, well actually how does Europe even get its gas? Do readers understand how it gets into the country? Does it come through? We’re an island. How does it all get here? What does that look like? How much food comes in ships, how much is it through pipes? And that’s the kind of dataset where really valuable to us and somebody might have a data set that becomes part of that story. So I think that’s also an opportunity for people to speak to us about things.

Alessia Horwich (15:35):

Can you talk a little bit about the whole commissioning process for a data story? When we spoke last, you were talking about being in conference and things being demanded of you and you being like, no, but what is the ideal process for getting a really nice data story commissioned and on the road?

Sam Joiner (15:52):

You want to start with a hypothesis, I think something that you want to prove or find out or interrogate, and then you want to start with the data and see where it should send you. Where does that mean you should go and do the reporting? Which area should you send people to? I mean, I remember when we were at the Sunday Times and we did best places to live, we tried to do a data-driven approach to picking that out, and that’s what you would traditionally do. You’d want to say, okay, well which town has the most coffee shops the most this, and maybe that’s an example where you send a reporter there and they say, I’m not sure this would fit into the best places to live category even though it’s surrounded by coffee shops, but it would give you a chance to work out what to do next. What you don’t want to do is retrospectively fit data to a story that’s written.

Alessia Horwich (16:31):

And that’s the difference between a pure editorial story and then a data story that is the other way round of thinking about it.

Sam Joiner (16:37):

I think so.

Alessia Horwich (16:37):

The data comes first.

Sam Joiner (16:38):

Yeah.

Alessia Horwich (16:46):

I am obviously coming at this from the angle of a PR, so if you’re saying to me that you start with your hypothesis and you go and find the data, where are the ins for PRs in that whole process or can they initiate it with their own hypothesis?

Sam Joiner (16:59):

I think initiating with their own hypothesis is feasible. It depends, but there’s a lot of things that are going to have to go right for you.

Sam Joiner (17:07):

You’re going to have to land the email at the right time to a reporter who’s potentially thinking about this as a subject. Reporters are quite stubborn in terms of where the idea comes from. Almost like when we approach reporters with ideas, you’re working on their patch,

Alessia Horwich (17:21):

Are they territorial?

Sam Joiner (17:23):

Do you know what at the FT they’re not that territorial at all, but you do want to make sure we kind of have a rule as a team almost, which is that in fact no surprises for the reporters that you don’t want a reporter to hear about your story from somebody else if it’s on their patch,

Alessia Horwich (17:36):

Ok

Alessia Horwich (17:37):

How much ownership we have of the story kind of depends. If we’ve got a really complete idea, we might go to them for advice, but a story is always going to be stronger. If you speak to somebody who’s worked on that patch for five years, you just save so much time and ultimately we are here to work for readers. I almost think that relationship building, going back to what I was saying earlier is key. If you can pick out the transport correspondent and you can say, this is the kind of stuff that I have access to, and if this isn’t interesting, what would be interesting? You might not get a reply, but that’s a question that a new person in a beat could be good.

Sam Joiner (18:10):

And actually targeting new people in beats is a great idea. If you’ve got somebody who’s just moved onto a private capital desk and they’re new to that beat somebody who’s been in the job for 15 years, it’s slightly difficult, slightly harder to get hold of, right? Unless you’re, if you’re new in, you’re green in your role and then you’re getting in touch with that person, that’s hard.

Alessia Horwich (18:28):

Does that also mean that it’s better to be contacting the beat reporters rather than you and your team?

Sam Joiner (18:33):

Yeah, I was thinking about that on the way here. I think that the beat reporter covers the same thing, right? So that’s going to give you more of a chance, whereas if you get in touch with us next week with a great EV related data dataset,

Alessia Horwich (18:45):

you’re done.

Sam Joiner (18:45):

we’re done. We’re not going to return to that topic. We might pass that on if it looked really interesting to the person who is, but we would be unlikely to hit that topic again, certainly anytime soon. So I think that beat reporters probably are a better way in not least because the visual and data team is a team that is capable of sourcing and accessing and analysing really large volumes of data. It’s not all about scale, but you find stories in those big data sets and you can combine them to find interesting things out and then it’s maybe just a bit of research before you send the email, the bit of snooping to find out when they started in the role, what they’re doing. Okay, well this person’s covered this for this long. I’m not going to do that. In some companies I wonder what they even do. And if you want to find out what people do in a newsroom, just go on their stream page and you just find out everything they do that we have such a public profile of information about us.

Alessia Horwich (19:38):

So I mean this is a bit cheeky, but what gives you the most satisfaction? Is it initiating a story yourself or working with a reporter to get something done?

Sam Joiner (19:46):

It’s a good question. This may be quite a diplomatic answer, but I think it doesn’t really matter where the idea originates for us. We just want to produce the best piece of work we possibly can, and I think you often forget where an idea started by the time we’ve got to the end that the person who’s come up with it will know and they’ll be quite pleased about it. But I think because we’re an interdisciplinary team and it’s multiple bylines, it becomes a big team group thing anyway. It’s nice when we initiate the idea because we have more ownership of how we shape it, and actually that’s really valuable for us. Sometimes a reporter can have a vision of maybe not even a vision in terms of what it looks like, but a vision of what the story will become. You have to work around that a little bit.

Sam Joiner (20:26):

That’s the challenge in general. We work with reporters across the newsroom, as I said, so if you’ve worked with someone before, you’ve got an idea of what they’ll be like, but actually each one kind of needs to get indoctrinated into what we do and think differently about how a story could be structured and how actually maybe the visuals are going to open this piece. And we’re going to start with maps and we’re going to write those sentences and their lovely drop intro might be a little bit further down the page. Sometimes we say to reporters, go to this place and just write up some notes, and then we’ll work with those notes and we’ll structure it based on what we’ve got back from the images we can see. Reporters at the FT are incredibly receptive because we’re lucky that we have an editor Roula Khalaf, who really champions our work, and it goes at the top of the homepage if it’s good. And Roula talks about it being great and the comments are often very good, and then if we knock on people’s door and say, do you want to work with us on this story or what’s going on? People are kind of like, oh, great. This is a chance for me to do one of the big pieces I do this year.

Alessia Horwich (21:20):

I mean, do you think that the stuff that you guys are producing is some of the most important content that the FT is putting out?

Sam Joiner (21:25):

It should be. I hope it is. If it’s not, then the team’s set up and not set up quite right. We get the long lead times. We’ve got a group of designers, graphics journalists, and we get to work with the best reporters in the business. So our job is to try to answer those big questions and produce those big high value pieces that set the FT apart and that make readers go, wow, this is why I subscribe. Before I saw this topic, I thought I understood it, and now I actually really do.

Alessia Horwich (21:53):

I want to just hit through really quickly about actually pitching data.

Sam Joiner (21:56):

Yes.

Sam Joiner (21:56):

So what is the ideal way to pitch data? And I guess we’re going to say pitch to you because you are the person that can tell me about it, not the beat reporter, but I mean from what you’ve said, there’s value in going to you as well.

Sam Joiner (22:08):

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, there is.

Alessia Horwich (22:09):

Yes. What is the perfect data pitch?

Sam Joiner (22:12):

Keep it short, keep it chatty. You don’t necessarily need to be pitching us a fully formed story. I don’t think that’s less valuable. You want to say, this is the data I have access to. Are you interested in these topics at the moment? If not, here’s some things I’m kind of interested in or I now have access to. What would work for you? I think keeping it that simple, a sample of it so we can see whether it’s clean and by clean I mean is it well structured? What if you got in that sense is useful and it saves you kind of having to send another email, focus on what you have and try to explain it rather than sell it. I think

Alessia Horwich (22:45):

What about lead times?

Sam Joiner (22:46):

Lead times are interesting because our lead times are quite long, but if I’m talking now about being a member of the visual and data team, we turn things around in 24 hours comfortably within a day, start in the morning, finish in the evening. So you’d need to be quite responsive if somebody got in touch.

Alessia Horwich (23:00):

And what’s a big mistake that people make when pitching to you?

Sam Joiner (23:03):

I think writing half the story for the reporter from my perspective is if I receive an article that’s kind of set out, I think very obviously being blanket email to lots of people, I always think it’s quite difficult if that’s clearly what’s happened. Most news reporters are looking for an exclusive in some way, or they might be like, God, I’ve got nothing to write about this week. I’m just going to pick this up and see if no one notices that this wasn’t done by me. I don’t think that’s the kind of coverage that most PRs are looking for. They want to build for the people they’re representing really good in-depth, quality coverage of their data or company too. So I think that picking people out and feeling like you’re emailing them is a better approach. It’s more time consuming, but perhaps you get more of a reward for it.

Alessia Horwich (23:50):

What are the main things that people need to know when they’re going to pitch data to you?

Sam Joiner (23:54):

Think about the data set you’ve got in terms of structure. Is it clean? Is it accessible? How are you going to share it? I think pulling out bullet points of what it says is quite nice. Those kind of news lines definitely resonate with reporters rather than, here’s your potential headline, this is what the data shows. Explaining what the data is is quite useful. I think there’s a lot of jargon around things that are shared and actually just distilling it into things that make sense to people. Like, I have access to all of this data. It covers these key areas. This is the kind of thing you could find within it, is hugely valuable and a nice way to do it.

Alessia Horwich (24:27):

You’ve obviously worked on tonnes of stories and they go quickly through the newsroom, but is there anything that really sticks out to you? What’s one that you’re most proud of?

Sam Joiner (24:34):

From a visual story perspective, I thought explaining how Generative AI works, it was the right time and it was incredibly in depth, and I think that explained something that people just didn’t know, and that was really good. From an investigation point of view, we worked on a piece for months looking at locating Ukraine’s missing children. So that was where they’d been stolen by Russia and a reporter on my team, Alison Killing, had a great idea, which was to take a Ukrainian database of people who were missing and combine it with a Russian database of children up for adoption and see if there was any overlap. And we thought, well, that is actually a fantastic idea. Let’s see. And there were thousands, I think there were 36,000 children on the Russian database and thousands on the Ukrainian one, so it led to there being millions of potential matches between the two.

Sam Joiner (25:22):

That’s when we kind of turned to computers to see if they can help us. So we used Amazon’s recognition, which is a facial recognition software to, well, first of all, Sam Learner, who’s also my team, scraped both databases and we created a single database of all of this information, including all the photographs and all the profiles and all the names, all the information available. We then ran that through Amazon’s recognition software to look for matches, and that gave us a sort of highest match to lowest match possibility for every child in the database, which we then reviewed as a team manually to work out if we thought those matches were accurate. We did that independently. And then we combined all of that and we came together and we kind of worked through what we thought were matches, and then we worked with Chris Miller Ukraine correspondent to take this information and work with the human rights group in Ukraine to try to actually see if these were the right children.

Sam Joiner (26:16):

We were never going to use the scores from Amazon recognition as like, this is a definite match, no matter what the percentage chance it was came back or how much it looked like a match from the photographs. We managed to find that actually a lot of these children were up for adoption in Russia, had been taken from Ukraine, and some of them even had their names changed, and these were children the Ukrainian authorities did not know about before we published the story, which the White House then responded to, and kind of had a really big impact in that sense. And we’re now working with the Ukraine authority to try to return these children to Ukraine. So in terms of impacts, you want to have an impact as a journalist, and that’s, I will have forgotten stories that I’m very proud of, but that’s one that stands out.

Alessia Horwich (26:56):

Thanks so much to Sam for talking about how to pitch data stories to the FT. In the next episode, we’ll be talking to Audrey Ward, who is head of Serialisations at The Times and Sunday Times about how you can pitch books to those titles. To keep up to date with all the questions our journalists answer on On the Rox. Visit us on social media at Roxhill Media.