The records request that bought us a year of coverage

The records request that bought us a year of coverage

A workplace-safety software company had no budget for a survey, so we went to the public record instead. The setup: every OSHA citation in the US is downloadable, and almost nobody in our space had bothered to clean and rank it. The angle was to turn a boring government dump into a 'most dangerous employers' leaderboard by industry.

The pitch leaned on exclusivity in waves. We gave the national overview to one major outlet under embargo, then released state breakdowns to regional reporters the following week, so the story had two lives instead of one.

The result: an exclusive in The Guardian's US edition drove the launch, followed by 29 regional placements and 24 followed links over the next two months. The leaderboard page became the company's top organic entry point, pulling 11,000 monthly visits. A labor reporter wrote back, 'This is the dataset I always assumed someone had already built.'

Maintenance mattered more than launch. We refreshed it quarterly, and each refresh earned a fresh wave of 8 to 12 links.

Lesson: The best linkable asset is often a public dataset nobody had the patience to clean.