What stories proved most popular with media outlets on PA Explore in July 2022

There was a time when staff in newsrooms would describe July as “silly season” due to the lack of serious stories around. Not so in 2022.

Over the past month, PA’s team of journalists, photographers, video reporters and editors have been as busy as ever, thanks to a series of major events including Boris Johnson’s resignation, the impending race for our next Prime Minister and a sweltering few days that led to the highest temperature ever recorded in the UK.

Our words, photos and videos have been a critical component of the media’s coverage of those events, and we have seen a big surge in journalists turning to our Explore platform to find them all in one place.

There have been 34,000 searches from journalists in July so far – here’s a little look at what they’ve been looking for. As you can see, two stories very clearly stand out.

The PM’s resignation was our most read story of the year so far on Explore – and in fact six of the top ten came in the space of two weeks.

So where does all of that end up?

As well as analysing usage of the platform, we also monitor the web and a selection of newspapers to detect where our content appears, using a text-matching algorithm. That found that, in the week surrounding Boris Johnson’s resignation alone, there were more than 240,000 articles online and in print featuring PA’s reporting – the highest total we’ve ever seen. From broadcasters like the BBC and ITV, to newspapers such as the Times and the Mirror as well as digital publishers like HuffPost UK and LADBible, journalists around the country are using Explore to help them cover the news in multiple formats.

To find out why journalists from the UK and Ireland’s biggest media outlets rely on Explore to help them cover breaking news, request a demo today here.