End-to-end outreach workflow
Table of Contents
- A case study is a human story used to prove a specific angle.
- Expert commentary and case studies solve different problems — an expert has studied an issue; a case study has lived it.
- Journalists now video-call unfamiliar interviewees before running their quotes.
- Finding sources is a numbers game — Edd estimates only 5-10% of people contacted cold on social media respond.
Experts are great, but a real person who’s actually lived through something is what makes a story land with a journalist and readers.
On this episode, I chat with Edd Dracott, whose agency, Folc, helps PR and marketing teams find the people and stories that can breathe life into a campaign.
Edd spent nine years as a journalist at The Press Association (now PA Media), which is the UK equivalent of Associated Press.
We get into what actually separates a human story from a case study or expert commentary, how Edd uses OSINT and social media to track people down, why a single great quote can make or break a pitch, and how journalists are protecting themselves from AI-generated fake sources.
Enjoy!
Below is a slightly edited transcript:
What Are “Human Stories” in Journalism — and How Do They Differ From Case Studies and Expert Commentary?
Edd Dracott: A human story is just a story about a real person — it could be someone who’s won the lottery, or someone who was a witness to a traumatic event, or someone who’s got some sort of extreme health condition they’re talking about.
The key thing is it’s someone who’s real, someone who has actually had a lived experience, and they talk about that experience.
A case study is a human story, but what we’re doing with a case study is exemplify the angle of a story, or a specific subject.
Let’s say your angle is new government legislation and its impact, and you’ve got stats showing 50% of people are now struggling with their monthly bills.
What would be so much stronger is having a real person who can say, “My bills have been so bad, I’ve been defaulting on payments, I’ve been struggling to pay my mortgage.”
Suddenly it’s a whole different story.
Those become the headline, the top line — they give you the pull quotes you otherwise wouldn’t have.
They’re fundamental to telling those stories.
For PRs, if you’re able to offer that case study — rather than just sending a pitch that says “a survey we found showed X% of people do Y” — and you can also offer the people who do Y, who have a really great example of it, then all the better.
Expert commentary is from someone who has thoroughly studied an issue, whereas a case study is from someone who has experienced it.
With the mortgage example, that’s a mortgage expert versus someone who’s had difficulty with their mortgage.
Or you could have an interview with a doctor talking about a specific condition, and then the patient talking about their experience with that condition — that’s the differentiation between the two.
What Inspired You to Start Folc?
Edd Dracott: My time as a journalist — nine years of it — was spent at PA, the Press Association, which is the UK’s national news agency.
For American listeners, it’s very similar to Reuters or AP — hugely respected, and when you put content on the PA wire it goes all over the place.
A brilliant place to cut your teeth in journalism, with some fantastic reporters there.
My specialism was finding people online — online news gathering, from pretty early on.
Over time I became head of social media, which involved being head of online news gathering and also verification.
Through that I covered everything from conflicts like Afghanistan and Ukraine — speaking to people from the front line who were impacted — to the COVID pandemic, where we found people who had sadly lost loved ones.
But also much lighter stories — we’d find someone doing a remarkable fundraising campaign on TikTok, for example, and that would become a great lighter piece for the papers.
After about a year as head of social media, I also became head of “real life,” which is honestly the best beat in journalism.
If you’re not aware of what real life is, it’s human interest exclusives — we’ve got a great interviewee, we’re going to tell their amazing experience, and put it into an article or feature about them.
It’s so much fun. Everything from remarkable health stories — a guy we chatted to who lengthened his legs, decided to grow from six foot to six foot seven — to a woman who had a stroke and woke up with an Italian accent.
That one got tens of millions of views because it was on ITV’s This Morning, the Daily Mail, TikTok, all that sort of stuff.
But one of the key frustrations when I was working as an editor was getting hundreds and hundreds of emails from PRs pitching something, saying “could we work on this story together,” and they wouldn’t offer a case study — or even worse, they would offer one, I’d get my reporter to chat to them, and the case study didn’t deliver on what they said it would.
That wastes everybody’s time.
So I was thinking, why isn’t there a service out there helping PRs get these case studies?
Because we do this every day — this is what I trained my journalists and my team to do. I taught them how to use social media, how to use open-source intelligence, which I’m sure we’ll talk more about, to find their own stories.
That was fundamental to everything we did on that desk.
It was always in my mind, and then I left PA partway through last year and went for it — decided to make that exact service.
That’s where we’re at now. We work with PRs and brand marketing teams and we source those stories.
We’ve essentially gone upstream in the news cycle, giving the case studies to the PRs, who then give them to the journalists.
It’s gone really well so far.
How Does Your Social Media Background Connect to Finding These Stories?
Edd Dracott: Social media on one hand is fantastic for online news gathering, but it’s also such a great way of accessing an audience — it’s growing more and more.
Some of the PRs we’ve worked with have been amazing, and I’ve got to say, learning the other side — understanding the PR process, creating a campaign, making a pitch — has been really eye-opening.
A lot of what they do isn’t just sourcing a case study or an interviewee for a news story — it’s not just going for journalists.
It’s also thinking about social media — maybe this one isn’t going to go to a journalist, but we’re going to put it on the client’s Instagram or TikTok.
Or it might go directly on their website, because maybe we’ve just found a great customer who’s used the client’s service and made great use of it — has all the merch you could possibly get from them — so we go out, find them, and put them on the website.
Or it could be they’re not a customer, but someone who has the exact pain point that business fixes — we’ve found someone who goes through that experience, and the business could actually fix that problem for them.
That’s the absolute dream scenario.
Social media is fundamental to it, and it’s not easy.
It gets more and more difficult, and I think it’s becoming more specialized how hard it is to actually do the news gathering and use social media to source these stories, because AI has made it harder — there’s more fake content out there. It requires a careful, fine-tooth comb.
What Are Some Examples of Campaigns You’ve Worked On?
Edd Dracott: Probably our biggest success so far — we launched this year — was Care Home Open Week in the UK. We did that as a partner of Big Bang PR, a small and mighty team up in Manchester.
The brief was: can we find World Cup–themed stories to mark the launch of Care Home Open Week, since it was happening at the same time?
Care Home Open Week is for a charity — it’s for championing social care and showing off the amazing work care workers do every day.
So that’s a big jumping-off point — lots of different ways in. How do you get a World Cup–themed story into a care home story?
What we found were 1966 World Cup final attendees.
We chatted to an amazing guy called Jeff Goldstone, who sat right behind the goal where Geoff Hurst scored his famous third — the “they think it’s all over, it is now” goal.
He said the ball was coming right towards his face before it hit the net — really great quotes.
We also found a ball boy from the final, Neil, a really amazing guy — he was the first Englishman to touch the ball in the final. If you watch it back, there’s a clip where the Germans kick the ball straight out of play, it falls right at Neil’s feet, he picks it up and passes it to one of the players. His line was, “If I hadn’t passed to that player, maybe we wouldn’t have won” — he takes credit for it.
Tying it into that brief, we had an event where we brought these people to a care home in London called Hendon Hall, which is also where the 1966 England team stayed during the tournament — so it adds to that history.
We managed to get BBC Breakfast to come along, which is the most-watched breakfast show in the UK, with over a million viewers each day — a really huge thing.
I found out afterward it was the client’s dream placement, which was great to hear.
We also got them into the Daily Mail and a few other outlets, plus BBC Online with a written piece.
Beyond that, we’ve had a lot of great stories.
One was Stephen Holt, a lovely guy who was born just after the 1966 final.
I found him through some searches on Twitter and tracked him down — he’s spent his entire life collecting memorabilia about the 1966 final because he’s obsessed with it; his family always told him it was the best thing that ever happened to England.
We got him to present his memorabilia to care home residents at another care home.
It was a really emotional thing — some of the residents are living with dementia, but they were able to recognize Bobby Moore and Bobby Charlton in the pictures.
We had the BBC there, ITV there, and PA, my old news agency, there, and his story ended up all over the place — the Daily Telegraph, the Mail again, Jeremy Vine on TV. A lot of great usage.
The last one from that campaign — we also wanted a Scottish story, since it was their first time going to the tournament in 30 years. We chatted to the son of a former Scottish footballer, Hugh Macklemoile, who sadly now has dementia and lives in a care home himself.
He was famous for his headers, so there’s a connection there — as you may know, there was an investigation from the Football Association in the UK into the impact of headers on dementia in later life, and part of his care is now paid for by the Professional Footballers’ Association.
That’s an interesting news line, and it went into the Daily Record in Scotland — the most-read newspaper there, online and in print.
To give you an idea of the range of what we work on — we’ve also worked with a holiday cashback service, talking about how you can make money from it, but they didn’t have an example of someone who’d actually done it.
We found a lady who’d saved a thousand pounds over two years and was able to buy her son an Xbox for Christmas — good fun, but it immediately humanizes the content of the release and the service they were trying to get across.
Right now I’ve also got a footwear company that wants women who’ve sadly hurt themselves in heels, for example.
It’s a real broad spectrum — essentially, as long as we’ve got a brief, we’ve got something to get our teeth into, and we can go out and look for it.
That’s the thing that really excites me.
My mission is to go out and find those things, and working on Folc is my excuse to keep doing everything I was doing at PA for years — just keep finding those stories.
Why Do Great Quotes Matter So Much to a Story?
Edd Dracott: It basically entirely changes the impact of a story, because then you’re able to have a great headline.
Often a headline is a quote — there’s going to be quote marks in there, some great line pulled out of it.
I remember a person I spoke to after there was a strange power outage in the middle of London one year — all the lights went out, including all the traffic lights, for like 20 minutes, which was crazy.
All the headlines came from someone who said it was “apocalyptic” — that was every headline, because that’s what it felt like.
If you hadn’t managed to chat to that person, you wouldn’t have that line. But it’s what everyone was thinking as they saw it.
The other thing, particularly from a PR perspective — what makes something interesting compared to what you’d see on PR Newswire — is the offer of an exclusive interviewee.
Being able to speak to someone, full stop, as a journalist, lets you take ownership of the story, because you can ask your own questions and get your own quotes.
That completely changes how you approach it — you want to get that to the top of your piece, use the information you managed to get, and maybe you’ve thought of a way to relate it to the audience that someone else didn’t, because you asked a niche question someone else didn’t think to ask.
I remember — and I can’t believe I’m going to tell this one — a meeting with the former head of “real life” at PA, one of the first stories she had us work on, and it was with a nudist.
How do you make a story about a nudist relatable?
How do you make readers want to understand it?
She said: chat to them about the kitchen — how do they cook food?
It’s a risky business, right?
And suddenly you can paint the picture in your head — this is a much more fun piece, because you can talk about the little things they do day to day.
How Do You Ask the Right Questions to Get Great Quotes?
Edd Dracott: I think it depends on the journalism you’re doing.
If you’re doing it for press, particularly a feature, you’ve got the luxury of maybe an hour for a long interview, getting information where you can, and maybe cutting in if they’ve given you a 30-minute answer.
But fundamentally, it’s about trying to get them to give you a one-sentence answer — if you can sum this up in one specific way, or describe this situation to someone who’s never experienced it before — then they play up to it, and they might give you something meaty.
Vince Nero: All right, let me try it. Edd, if you had to tell me the single most important reason people need human stories in their journalism, what would it be?
Edd Dracott: To give their stories impact, and to make sure the audience wants to read it.
The audience is readers — the audience is humans. If you can make it so that, from the very top line, a human reads it and thinks “that’s me, I can relate to that” — even if it might not seem relatable at first — that will give your story impact, and it’ll go really far.
That may not have been one sentence, but there you go.
How Do You Actually Find These People Online?
Edd Dracott: There are a few key parts to it.
First, it’s about having the skills — do you understand how to use open source intelligence, for example? Open source intelligence is information you can access online.
I did a course with Bellingcat, the big OSINT experts, seven years ago now, and learned a lot from them.
Essentially, you can use skills like advanced Google searches, searching through social media in smart ways, Boolean search strings — there are a lot of different methods. It’s almost like coding, really, when you’re using Google in a certain way.
Are There Any AI Tools That Can Help?
Edd Dracott: AI can be part of it, but in that fundamental first point of understanding the skills, it’s just another one of the tools you can use to access things.
You might use it to create a smart Boolean search string, which you then use in a search elsewhere.
The second part is creativity — you need to be able to get into people’s heads. That’s always the advice I used to give journalists.
For example, during COVID, when flights started taking off again after restrictions lifted, we thought: where is someone going to post about their flight taking off?
So we did a geolocated search to Heathrow Airport on Instagram, because everyone shows off that they’re going on holiday on Instagram.
You have to think in their heads — this is where they’ll post, and this is the kind of thing they’ll post.
And then it’s about tenacity — it’s ultimately a numbers game.
If you don’t have the skills and creativity to find lots of ways in — just like you said, if you got a message from some random person on the internet, would you respond?
Maybe 5%, maybe 10% of people will actually respond.
So the more ways in you have, the more likely you are to be successful.
A quick example of using those skills: when Ukraine was invaded, I got a call — at 5 a.m., not the best time to receive a call — from Richard Woodward, who said, “We need to find human stories from Ukraine, they’ve just been invaded.”
Within an hour I’d spoken to someone and we had quotes running on the wire.
It was a British-Ukrainian 19-year-old who had woken up to the sound of explosions — a really shocking story to cover.
How I did it was actually quite straightforward: rather than any fancy searches, I just thought, I need to speak to people who are speaking English and are in the right location.
So I did a long search of every different way you could say “I am in Kyiv” — spelled different ways, “here in Kyiv” — and went through all those people and chased them.
Eventually I found Valentina, an amazing person I’m still in contact with today, and her quotes ran on the wire.
It’s a specialist skill, and the thing I’d want to get across to anyone going into this is: it’s like learning the piano.
You can be told where the notes are, but you have to play it for a long time to actually get good at it.
If you’re a PR or a journalist looking to get into this, it will take a long time to get good and be able to access it enough to get really good results.
What Do People Struggle With Most When Sourcing Stories Like This?
Edd Dracott: Disinformation is one thing they struggle with, because you have to be able to verify it, and that’s a lot to expect.
Journalists tend to be pretty good at verifying stuff.
But most of the journalists I’ve trained, if I’m honest, have never gotten brilliant at the actual searching, the news gathering part, because that’s not what they do every single day — if they’re on a beat where they’re mostly out on the ground reporting, they don’t have time to be constantly searching Twitter or Instagram.
So beyond battling disinformation, it’s also struggling with, “what’s my next search, how else can I find a way in” — because I’ve managed to find two people who’d fit the bill, but someone who’s been doing this for years might have found 20.
So it’s about how you find as many ways in as possible.
Another thing is properly looking at someone’s profile and assessing it.
What we learned through Bellingcat — the really high-end approach to verification — is that it’s not a binary process.
It’s about building a picture: if everything went wrong and my editor told me that was nonsense, we’re going to have to pull that story, what’s your argument going to be?
If you can give a really great argument, because you’ve shown this is everything on their profile — it locates them in this area, it all ties in well, they’ve got lots of posts that relate to it, we spoke to them, we got pictures of them in the situation, we got screenshots of them receiving cashback, for example, one of the examples we did recently — then you build that picture to make a good case that this is legit.
I was listening to your podcast with Rob Waugh recently — he did some amazing stuff on AI experts, and uncovered so many that were appearing in places like the Telegraph and the Times.
I’ve got a friend who works at the Times, and she was telling me all their interviewees now — if they don’t know the PR, they’ll always video call them to confirm they’re a real person before speaking with them.
Even if they know the PR and trust them, they’ll call the source themselves and get their quotes themselves — they won’t accept quotes just coming through secondhand, because of the way people have been burned on this.
So it is a process that diligent journalists follow — and there are so many brilliant journalists out there who really have to verify carefully.
My recommendation to PRs — from all the PRs I’ve spoken to, this has been a big headache for them.
They’ve thought, “how do I find someone who’s been impacted by this?”
Maybe they send a WhatsApp out to their friends, ask if anyone knows anyone who’s gone through X or Y.
Or they try some social media searches, which is great — anyone can technically do it.
But if you want to be confident in the results, and confident you’ll be able to verify them, I’d really recommend having a journalist involved in that process somewhere.
When You’ve Found Multiple People, How Do You Decide Who to Use?
Edd Dracott: I think you’re adapting as you go.
Most of the time, because you found the person, you know why you’re chasing them — their post said something, it might be a comment they left on a Facebook group three years ago, but they revealed they had this incredible experience — and you already know, okay, this is a really good one, we should focus on this.
If we can verify that and we’re happy with it, great — this is legit, this is a real story, and we’ll go with it.
Is This a UK-Specific Problem, or a Global One?
Edd Dracott: No, I think it’s absolutely international, not just focused on the UK.
If you went on the New York Times or the Washington Post today, you’ll find quotes from real people who’ve had real experiences.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a massive story about the impact of something Donald Trump has decided to do, or a smaller, more quiet, uplifting story — those stories will be there.
I think it applies everywhere, in every language — we’ve sourced a lot of stories in foreign languages too, at PA, with a translator involved.
That’s the beauty of online news gathering.
When I give talks to journalism students, I describe it like a library notice board — when you start in journalism, maybe at a local paper, where do you search for stories?
You might go to the local library and look at the notice board to see what’s happening in the local area. Social media is the world’s library notice board — it’s just a way to access billions of people.
Vince Nero: I love that — that’s a good quote potentially. “The world’s notice board.” I like that.
Edd Dracott: I should add it to the website for sure.
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