How to Work Smarter, Not Harder
If you want to grow as a sports creator today—whether you cover F1, hockey, soccer, or basketball—your real advantage isn’t just about the content you publish. It’s the system you use to turn numbers into stories that travel across every platform you publish on.
At Data Punk Media, we use what we call the Storytelling Framework: a repeatable process for transforming insights into engaging social posts, videos, and articles. Whether you’re breaking down NHL shot maps or analyzing F1 driver performance, this framework helps you scale your storytelling without burning out.
Here’s a quick overview of how it works.
What Is the Storytelling Framework?
After months (or years) of creating content, creators naturally build a repeatable process. The Storytelling Framework is the end-to-end process we developed (and it supports all of our projects – sports, business and other). You can see this framework below, along with examples of tools we use within each of the steps along the way.
The framework is built around four connected dimensions.
Insight — What the data reveals?
The compelling pattern, imbalance, or outlier that makes you pause. This is the narrative spark that can light up your story.
Design — How the insight is visualized?
Color, contrast, layout, and proportion shape how the audience feels. Good design brings your audience into the story.
Modality — How the story adapts across platforms?
The same insight can (and should) land in a Carousel, Reel/Short, long-form article, newsletter and video. The format will change, but the essence of the story should remain.
Monetization — How stories support your business model?
If you design your system with intention, every story should tie to an offering, product or service, a newsletter, a community, or a paid tier.
This framework is how modern creators can scale their output and build a business from it.
Example: Turning One F1 Stat Into a Story
You don’t need a massive dataset to tell a compelling sports story. Sometimes one number creates the entire narrative structure. For example, you can find the latest F1 driver points for 2025 (PTS), ranked from highest to lowest here.
Using driver points, you can find that Max Verstappen's points account for 92% of Red Bull Racing’s Driver Point Share. Yuki Tsunoda contributes just 8%.
This is a calculated statistic, but this imbalance is the story.
From there, you can shape the narrative in multiple directions by mapping out 'beats' or segments. Below are two storylines that extend from the single stat.
Behind this storyline, you might focus on:
- Team structure and strategy
- Driver dependency and performance risk
- Comparison with McLaren, Mercedes, and Ferrari
- The implications for the Constructors’ standings (i.e., 2nd place)
Now you have a core storyline that can be adapted into different modalities, such as an Instagram Carousel, Instagram Reel or YouTube Short, or a long-form article published to Ghost, Medium or Substack. The Carousel might be a four-slide breakdown of the imbalance with a punchy headline (e.g., “Maxed Out”). The Reel/Short might be a dynamic, animated 15-second sequence that dramatizes the 92% vs 8% split. And the article might be a deeper dive into how Driver Point Share affects team outcomes.
In short: one stat → one narrative arc → multiple formats.
This is the key to scaling your content while maintaining quality and consistency.
Why This Matters for Creators
It took us two years to get our strategy, business model, process and system all aligned. This has helped us:
- Create new content (and refresh older content with new contexts)
- Create a baseline story structure that can be reused
- Bring our brand into alignment across our work product
- Produce faster without sacrificing depth
- Manage the assembly line across the team
This is how we moved away from improvising into more of a planful and integrated model—and helped us start operating like an actual media company.
Want to learn more about monetizing your content business, then check out our latest newsletter on 5 Ways to Monetize Your Content Business.
Want the Full Breakdown, Templates & Demos?
This free version is just the high-level overview. Members get the full 3,000 word walkthrough, including:
- How we sourced and cleaned the F1 data
- R code used to scrape the data
- The story-flow diagram used for planning
- The Canva carousel example
- The Reel/Short storyboard
- The DataWrapper visualization
- A detailed breakdown of three modalities
- Video tutorials and behind-the-scenes workflow
👉 Become a Data Punk Media member to access the full newsletter, templates, tutorials, and workflow videos.
Ready to level up your sports storytelling? Join us.
