Data-driven journalism and data-driven PR are in their infancy, but they are gaining steam with each passing day.

Data-driven journalists look for interesting data that they can transform into a good story. If you want to be featured in a story written by these journalists, you’ll need to take inventory of what data you have that might be interesting to readers, listeners and viewers.

For the purposes of data-driven PR, you can mine data or you can make data. Let’s take a look at these two ways to get story placements.

First off, do you have interesting data that you can mine that can tell a good story? For example, long ago Walker Sands approached our client SurePayroll with the concept of mining their payroll data to come up with some interesting economic statistics.

Simply by running their online payroll service business, SurePayroll had accumulated payroll data for tens of thousands of U.S. small businesses. Our recommendation was to mine that data and come up with statistics on small business hiring trends, salary trends, a