Case study
Gammill Law
Covered in CW33, Miami New Times, Phoenix New Times, Florida Daily, 2UrbanGirls and South Bay Examiner.
Fatal pedestrian crashes in US tourist destinations, 2018 to 2023
Violent crime rates in US cities over 100,000 people
One national dataset, then a separate story for each city in it. That is how a single study earns coverage in ten different newsrooms in the same week, each of them somewhere the firm actually wants to be read.
Where the data came from
| Source | What we took from it |
|---|---|
| FBI Crime Data Explorer | Recorded violent crime for every city that actively reports to the CDE, covering 25 offence types including assault, homicide, trafficking and kidnapping |
How we built it
- Take every US city above 100,000 people that actively reports to the FBI's Crime Data Explorer, which comes to 286 areas.
- Count all 25 categories of violent offence for each one, so the ranking holds up when a reporter checks it.
- Convert to crimes per 100,000 residents so a big city is not top simply for being big.
- Rank all 286, then write the top ten as ten separate local stories, each led by that city's own number.
What it found
Ranked by violent crimes per 100,000 residents per year. For scale, the lowest city in the country, Cape Coral, FL, records 453.
Memphis, TN
18,818
St. Louis, MO
15,261
Cleveland, OH
14,941
Salt Lake City, UT
14,482
Little Rock, AR
14,232
Cape Coral, FL
453
| # | City | Rate | What made it a story |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Memphis, TN | 18,818 | Larceny and theft alone made up 31,174 of its 115,928 recorded violent crimes |
| 2 | St. Louis, MO | 15,261 | 10,517 of its 42,748 violent crimes were larceny and theft |
| 3 | Cleveland, OH | 14,941 | Third highest rate in the country |
| 4 | Salt Lake City, UT | 14,482 | Highest of any city in the Mountain West |
| 5 | Little Rock, AR | 14,232 | Fifth nationally, and the highest in Arkansas |
The angles we pitched
- Data shows Memphis crime rate nearly 20,000 incidents per 100k residents
- Families in St. Louis face 15,261 crimes per 100k
- Families in Cleveland, Ohio face almost 15,000 crimes per 100k each year
Ten city-specific subject lines in all, one for each city in the top ten, so every newsroom opened an email about itself.
The send
33,569journalists pitched
12,871opened it
38.3%open rate
Study, angles and send figures come from the press releases and outreach records for this campaign. The articles shown below are the ones checked by hand for this site.
Where it ran
Deaths following police encounters, by department, since 2013
