Tag Archives: conflicts of interest

Here’s how the ‘8 data story angles’ can help you get stories from company accounts

8 common angles for accounts stories
Scale: of profit/loss, of bonuses, payoffs, cuts
Change/stasis: profit/loss/bonuses going up/down
Outliers/ranking: based on any metric
Variation: within a sector
Exploration: a company structure; a director; payments
Relationships: mapping a corporate network or director’s interests
Bad data: Undeclared interests
Leads: Background, conflicts of interest, factchecks

A couple of years ago I mapped out eight common angles for identifying stories in data. It turns out that the same framework is useful for finding stories in company accounts, too — but not only that: the angles also map neatly onto three broad techniques.

In this post I’ll go through each of the three techniques — looking at cash flow statements; compiling data from multiple accounts; and tracing people and connections — and explain how they can be used to get stories, with examples of articles that have used those techniques successfully.

We start, naturally, with the money…

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