For 10-plus years, I coordinated the bulk of the pre-eminent annual research project for Home Channel News. The "Industry Scoreboards" included a census of the Top 500 Retailers, Top 350 Pro Dealers, and Top 150 Distributors as ranked by sales volume. For each company -- and almost all are privately held -- we researched upwards of 80 data points, including sales, staff, number of units, contact info, products carried, sales breakdown by customer type, and similar figures. We based three of HCN's major issues each year on this information and mined it for background data and story leads throughout the year.
The Industry Scoreboards' core is tables of company data, ranked by sales. The image above is the first page of 2009's Top 500 Retailers data as printed in the pages of HCN and released as a PDF (click the image above to enlarge). A portion of
the 2007 report is still online.
I was the point person for analyzing, editing and proofing the data. I also formatted and designed the tables, created the page layout in QuarkXPress, and created the PDF for e-distribution.
