How to get data-backed trends content for your newsroom without PRs

If you’re in journalism, you’ll know the feeling. You log in to see 100 new emails, and 99 of them are PR lines destined for the trash.

Occasionally, you’ll be sent a story that genuinely has legs. But it’s a hopelessly inefficient process: even the most diligent PRs don’t know your publication as well as you do, and half of the content you receive has clearly been auto-sent to hundreds of newsrooms, with no thought at all for your specific audience and niche.

Even so, you can find yourself having to rely on these cold emails. The reality of the modern newsroom, especially in trends-focused roles, is that there is rarely time to carry out extensive original research.

I’ve certainly experienced that during my time in the industry. I had a spell as a dedicated trends writer, and I constantly wished for a better solution than sifting through PR emails and manually combing social media and other news outlets.

That’s where Exploding Topics comes in. It’s a huge database full of things your audience is genuinely searching for and talking about, across all major platforms.

A 10-second search in the Exploding Topics database reveals AI relationship simulator “Lovescape,” a topic that could easily support an interesting story for a technology or lifestyle trends writer.

With different topic categories, and tools for tracking the trends you’re most interested in, you can filter out the noise in a way that’s just not possible in your inbox. Early trend detection technology means you can beat your competitors to the punch instead of playing catch-up, and ready-to-use visuals make your stories stand out.

I’m going to talk you through how to use Exploding Topics to write excellent data-backed trends content for your newsroom.

How to find trending content ideas

Some trends content is too reactive. Once something is blowing up all over social media, it’s often already too late.

When you spot the trend early, you reap compounding benefits. You can sweep up early traffic because you’re the only one serving the interest; the target audience will then grow as the trend gains momentum, and even when others jump on the bandwagon, your content has already had time to establish itself as an authoritative source.

Exploding Topics is designed specifically to surface these early-stage, high-potential trends. A two-layer process of algorithmic detection and human curation ensures a high-quality database of topics across 11 categories and 65 sub-categories.

Let’s say you’re a trends writer with a focus on beauty. You can just navigate to the relevant part of the database, and you instantly have a whole host of viable topic ideas, backed up by genuine audience data instead of PRs with an agenda.

Search filters make it easy to further refine the results, too. You can modify the trends timeframe, sort by high or low volume, and toggle between brands and non-brands.

When you find a promising-looking trend, Exploding Topics allows you to dig deeper. A 12-month search forecast gives you a good indication of how interest is likely to evolve, which will help you to decide whether it’s worth green-lighting content.

For instance, based on millions of past data points, search interest in “glass skin cream” is predicted to increase 5X in the next year:

This predictive function gives your trends content an almost evergreen (or at least more medium-term) dimension. Trend writing doesn’t have to mean fighting tooth and nail with other outlets for a week’s worth of attention on an already-viral topic.

Unlike other trend platforms, Exploding Topics gathers data from multiple sources, analyzing activity on social media as well as search. So it picks up trends that tools like Google Trends might miss.

You can even view the channel breakdown, so you know exactly where people are talking about a topic. This will help you look into the trend further and might influence how and where you promote the finished article.

Armed with this data, you have a near-limitless supply of topic ideas for trends content, that you can browse in the time it takes to scan and delete a handful of PR emails.

Turning trends into content

Once you’ve found the right trends, it’s easy to start creating content around them. A single trend can lead to multiple articles:

• A simple trend explainer
• A product review/comparison
• A big-picture piece on how the trend fits into the wider industry landscape

You’ll still need to add value on top of the trend, avoiding what Google calls “commodity content,” but that’s where your journalistic skills come into play. For instance, a quick comment from an industry expert in your contacts book will instantly elevate your work, with minimal added effort.

And Exploding Topics is still really helpful beyond the trend discovery phase. You can use the suite of tools to help craft the unique insight that readers, search engines, and AI chatbots are all looking for.

For one thing, you’ll have full use of our simple, clear charts.

Good visuals instantly enhance an article, but all too often there is not enough time to make them from scratch, and pre-existing graphics are subject to usage restrictions. Exploding Topics fixes that problem at a stroke.

Most of the time, if you’re writing about a trend, a striking upward-trending search chart will be relevant to the story. Here’s an example from our own blog, in a piece about Polymarket and Kalshi:

If you’re planning to write a broader piece, the Meta Trends feature shows you how trends fit into a bigger picture.

Let’s say you come across THC seltzer in the database. Without needing any extra external research, you can also discover more trending topics and brands within the “functional beverages” sphere.

Straight away, you’ve upgraded from the basic “what is THC seltzer” format to a richer, more intriguing angle, without having to spend time that you simply don’t have.

Meanwhile, the Trend Tracking feature will help you to manage content scheduling.

If you spot a topic that’s trending upward, but raw volume remains a little too low to justify an article, you can easily keep an eye on it.

You can group your tracked trends into different projects: for instance, you may choose to make a project for each beat (health, technology, business, etc.). That way, all areas of the newsroom can keep smart “ideas lists”, which automatically detect when a topic has become viable.

The effortless data journalism hack

One genuinely helpful thing that PRs can often supply is data. An eye-catching figure for a headline is gold dust.

With Exploding Topics, you have data built into every trend you find. A 1,050% search spike in 2 years is compelling in itself: the search data becomes the story.

(And remember, you’ll have full use of our charts, so you’ll have ready-made data viz to back it up.)

It’s not a playbook you’ll want to run on every single trend you find. But for particularly eye-catching search data, and/or topics where some quick manual research doesn’t reveal a more compelling alternative angle, the whole crux of your data-driven article is right there in the chart.

And Exploding Topics supplies other data on top of raw search numbers. If you’re writing about a trending product, the platform is a treasure trove of headline-grabbing figures.

There is a whole separate database for trending products. As well as search data, every trend lists the average monthly revenue of the top Amazon sellers, average monthly sales count, average review scores, and the number of TikTok views on related videos.

Any of these figures could form the basis of a simple piece of data journalism. For example, just looking at the small selection below: The new luxury pet tech making $167,000 every month.

If the TikTok data is of particular interest, then you can dive even further with the TikTok Insights add-on. This shows you the top trends on the platform, sorted by views growth, posts growth, total views, or total posts.

The Insights tool also surfaces the most-viewed TikToks related to each trend, giving you popular and relevant material to embed into your stories.

Whatever you’re writing about, Exploding Topics can supply the data to make your journalism richer and more clickable.

Make your trends journalism 10X easier

Trends journalism doesn’t have to be a pain point in your newsroom. Exploding Topics equips you with everything you need to reliably produce the content your readers are actually interested in, before your competitors are already there.

If your desk is getting stuck in a loop of banal PR write-ups and copycat articles, the suite of tools will freshen up your content overnight. A quick browse of the database at the start of the day could fill your content list with data-backed ideas designed to deliver more than just a quick hit.

And Exploding Topics’ rich search and sales data will provide your content with new insight, authority, and striking visuals, delivering for your readers and for the AI and search algorithms.

Sign up to Exploding Topics today (there’s a 7-day free trial) and start serving your readers with better trends content.