How Daily Mail US uses Storycue to uncover stories they would have missed

Daily Mail US has a clear picture of what its audience wants. The problem was not understanding their readers. The problem was that the tools available to find those stories had a fundamental blind spot that was costing them opportunities every single day.

Google Trends only surfaces stories once they have already broken into the mainstream. By then, every competitor has the same information. The niche angles, the stories from smaller publishers and local outlets, the content sitting just below the surface that would resonate specifically with a Daily Mail US reader: none of it was visible. It was not being filtered out. It simply did not exist in any tool Katrina Schollenberger, US Head of Live News, had access to.

The missed opportunities were not obvious because they were invisible. The team had no way of knowing what they were not finding.

Katrina now estimates she uncovers at least five stories every day that would have been missed entirely without Storycue. Not obvious trending stories that every other outlet has. The specific, niche angles their audience is looking for that were simply not visible in any other tool.

Before Storycue, those opportunities were lost without anyone knowing they had gone. Now they are the first thing on screen. The tool’s value spread naturally through the team: after an executive editor began using Storycue, the rest of the team followed without any instruction, because the missed opportunities it recovered were impossible to ignore.