<b>The spreadsheet nobody wanted became a Reuters chart</b>

<b>The spreadsheet nobody wanted became a Reuters chart</b>
A logistics startup had one asset their PR firm called "unsexy": eighteen months of port-congestion timestamps. No story, just rows. We didn't write a press release. We rebuilt the data into a single index — average days a container sat idle, by harbor — and named it. Suddenly it wasn't a spreadsheet, it was the Dwell Index.
The angle was patience. We sat on it until a shipping strike hit the news cycle, then offered three trade reporters an exclusive look (one outlet gets first crack — that's the trade) at how dwell times had been climbing for a year before the strike.
The pitch was 90 words and one chart. A Reuters logistics correspondent replied within the hour: "This is the context piece I needed and couldn't find anywhere."
Result: 11 placements over three weeks, including two Tier 1 outlets, 34 referring domains, and a 22% lift in organic sessions to the methodology page that quarter. The chart got syndicated — republished by partner sites — across four regional trade papers.
<b>Lesson:</b> Boring data isn't the problem. An unnamed, unframed, badly-timed dataset is the problem. Give the numbers an identity and a moment, and journalists do the storytelling for you.