- How does we ensure there is enough diversity in the writing room?
- There's a lack of mentorship for first generation journalists.
- Should the journalist decide what readers should know and consequently pick topics, or should they treat the audience as a customer and understand what they want and need?
- Better India started as a blog. They published about a story about a school for girls who were hard of hearing. People read this, showed up, and helped drive change.
- Two models of driving change. Top down asks for resignations at the top, bottom up is about informing citizens to drive change.
- Change is caused because of communities.
- Content engine started by growing a community of contributors who had great stories to share. Stories of problems and interventions.
- They also used WhatsApp as a distribution channel.
- 1 lakh subscribers through broadcast
- They're working with Bloomberg on the tech.
- Janaspandana is an effort to bring citizens together at events to solve hyperlocal problems
- This way people got to interact with corporators and MLAs.
- 500 people show up with angry questions. So issues are collated together and presented.
- Moderating the questions is tricky.
- This was done on a pro-bono basis, in that it was done with civic cause and brand engagement in mind.
- Started with email
- 20000 people shared their email addresses
- Rhythm of an email every week day at 8:05 A.M
- They make sure a different person to sell the story. So that there's a different viewpoint.
- Invest in great tech for email delivery.
- Started with emails sent in plain text.
- People look at their emails as coming from a person. Which makes it more friendly and personal.
- They encourage people to reply. And this does encourage people to give them feedback.
- They track analytics but are aware of not letting that guide editorial preferences.
- Email is under-aporeciated and makes for a great channel for one to one communication a day feedback. 80-90% of best feedback came via email.
- Imperative to think of communities as champions of content.
- Not just good for distribution, but great for sourcing ideas and getting a sense of the pulse of the audience.
- They created a chat room on the Reuters messaging system. Required a lot of offline work to prod people to contribute.
- Every Friday had a Bollywood conversation.
- Eventually people started talking to each other.
- Their playbook essentially was: Identify, Instigate and Incentivize
- Important to recognize champions. Every community has people everyone else follows. You have to engage with them, and then the rest follows. This is what worked for LinkedIn with their Influencer program.
- Good examples include Zomato and OnePlus
- FactorDaily is at the intersection of tech and culture.
- They found offline meetups really help source feedback for their product, sourcing ideas for stories
- They charged for the meetups to prevent the non-serious people from coming.
- They use WhatsApp extensively
- They're willing to pay for useful content.
- They create a WhatsApp group after a meetup, and engage with them every week. Over time, people start contributing too.
- Recommends to people to start their own communities.
- How do newsrooms perpetuate biases like brahminism and how can they be kept in check?
- Communities are a great feedback mechanism.
- People check with them about potential fake news.
- How do you judge the audience's skill level so you can write at the appropriate level of abstraction?
- They speak about issues that their audience want so the audience resonates.
- They have found Facebook Live, Twitter and WhatsApp to be useful for engagement.
- They've also faced abuse and backlash when they took an editorial stand on certain issues.
- Should such abuse be engaged with? Says in case of mistakes they have made, they fix it and apologise. If it's not no fault of their's they don't engage.
- CitizenMatters, Media Lab and OpenCity
- Started as a local news magazine
- They started by speaking with RWAs
- Government officials are far more responsive these days.
- They did long pieces on very niche topics, like why the JP nagar underpass took 4 years
- They began engaging with citizens for feedback and first person experiences of events.
- Difference between audience and community. Community is where there's a shared narrative.