Index of terms

A clear Work Products that you can provide to your audience is a collection of clean, standardized, and up-to-date database of datasets that is relevant for your Niche.

Why it matters: This is an unsolved problem.

• It is a hard problem. It is likely to be outsourced because building and maintaining datasets is a full-time activity that requires domain knowledge and dedicated bandwidth.
• Most suppliers provide this data as Charts-as-a-Service or dashboards instead of programmatic access.
• There is a market for this within each Niche industry.

Example:

• CMI, Dataful.in, and How India Lives provides socio-economic government data.
• Sports Interactive provides granular cricket match data.
• Neilson provides live election counting day data.
• The Bloomberg Terminal also provides financial data.

Insights are similar to Charts-as-a-Service but requires much more research, analysis, and possibly even data science.

Examples:

• Your next business idea, delivered weekly | Trends by the Hustle is a Subscription content product that provides ideas with product-market fit.

A timeline is a well-established story format. It can either act as Context to a story or be the story itself. It is also a high Shelf Life content Formats that can be maintained with minimal regular updates.

Topics that are ideal for timeline

Long-arc topics:

• Topics that have a long history of being in the news, for example, war (Russia’s invasion of Ukraine), scams, long-lasting court cases (Tarun Tejpal rape case), geopolitical conflicts, socio-political movements that organically gain relevance (Farmers Protests), roll out of major policy or legislation (GST)
• Events where the past directly impacts the present and future, for example, Sri Lanka’s economic situation, impacts of a major event e.g. 2008 recession, etc.
• Finally, events that happen frequently but without a regular pattern, for example, gun violence in the US, forest fires, major IPOs, etc.

Defined-arc topics:

• Scheduled events like sports tournaments (Olympics), national days (independence day), major competitive exam announcements, announcements of major court cases, etc.
• Ad hoc events like Neeraj Chopra’s Olympics win, the tragic death of General Bipin Rawat, etc.

Live updating topics:

• Fast unfolding novel events like natural calamities, man-made disasters (fires, train derailments, etc.), terrorist attacks and major crimes.
• Scheduled events like sports matches, parliament sessions and stock market updates.
• Important events within a macro topic like election counting day, announcements of major court case verdicts, etc.

Yes, a topic can start off as a live timeline, then graduate into a micro timeline, and eventually into a macro timeline.

Footnotes:

• Context as news product #JournalismAI | by Ritvvij Parrikh | Times Internet Technology

A common Formats of content products is Q&A. It can take the form of:

• Quora and Stackoverflow where the community answers the questions raised from within the community
• ChatGPT and Bing’s Chat where AI answers the questions
• Or ‘Ask the Expert’ columns in newspapers where designated experts answer questions

Example: Many years ago, Google piloted a Q&A product called Neighbourly. It solved for:

• Strong value proposition: Solve problems in people’s lives with news
• Identification: Collecting user identification and First Party Data so we give them value
• Intent-based notifications instead of Spray-and-pray: Getting users to subscribe to emails and Push Notifications
• Personalization without AI: Users choose what they want

The cost of producing high-quality editorial product is high. However, the Digital Advertisements business model values page views irrespective of whether the content is cat videos or highly researched content. Hence, it is highly recommended to create to evergreen content, like Work Products, deep explainers, Timeline, and data dives can explain the Context. Such content remains usable months/years in the future.

• News is a fast-moving consumer good. Hence, most news is about reporting what is happening. However, this content tends to be fast-moving, shallow and has short shelf-life.
• To maintain high shelf life content, you need to invest in a workflow that allows for updating of previously published content.

Often there are entire chunks of information — evidence, example, explanation, description, FAQs — in long-form text that support the core argument but isn’t core by itself. We recommend putting such text in our Content Toggle Block.

Why this matters:

• It gives your audience the agency to pick-and-choose the parts that are relevant to them.
• This is backed by research. In this insightful paper, Shirish Kulkarni demonstrates that inverted pyramids are a legacy of earlier communications technologies like the telegraph. However, that isn’t the best way to write in the digital age.

Footnotes:

• Full article: Innovating Online Journalism: New Ways of Storytelling (tandfonline.com)
• Last year TOI turned up the notch on data. Here’s how | by Ritvvij Parrikh | What’s next at TOI (timesofindia.com)

Insight Density is the number of Aha moments for every 100 words. A good example is the series Two minutes with Seth Godin that Blinkist ran. Each 2-minute episode in this 50-episode series forced one to think.

One can employ Artificial Intelligence to detect which sentences are insight-dense. For example, TextRank finds how similar each sentence is to all other sentences in the text. The most important sentence is the one that is most similar to all the others, with this in mind the similarity function should be oriented to the semantic of the sentence, cosine similarity based on a bag of words approach can work well and BM25/BM25+ work really nicely for TextRank.

References:

• https://medium.com/p/b8efc7e70b4

From/To Analysis helps you visually and succinctly articulate where you are today and how the future will be different. Here are some examples:

When it launched, this is how Medium.com communicated the change it was trying to drive:

Another great inspiration is this early diagram on Intercom’s website.

When veteran journalist and founder of Storyful, Mark Little, started Kinzen.com, he articulated the transformation they were trying to drive on their whiteboard.

Editorial Products demonstrate judgment and a world view — a form of consistent sensibility and quirk that optimizes for something. It could be Insight Density, political leaning, social justice, Click-bait, etc.

This editorial judgment determines what the audiences will see, what will get omitted out, how it is presented, when it will be published, and by whom.

And this is how** **work products set the agenda for a certain aspect in the minds of a target audience. No! It isn’t always passionate activism. Work Products are often utility oriented.

Flashback: More than a decade ago, The New York Times started publishing visual, mix-media, interactive stories to explain complex issues. Since then, this style of visual storytelling has been a north star for publications and data journalists alike.

However, the ROI from these stories isn’t proven.

• These stories are extremely expensive to produce. Only a few stories can be produced per week or month. Each story requires high-skilled labour who not only knows data analysis and storytelling but also designing and coding.
• We’ve not seen these stories generate an outsized quantity of page views. In fact, adding to the challenges in discovery is the fact that there is no meaningful way to inject interactive stories in most page-based CMS.
• Hence, they are at best a branding exercise.

Workaround: Another method is to use templated solutions, like KnightLabs’ Timeline.js, Storyline.js, and Juxtapose.js and Google’s Web Stories.

Context is the background or surrounding circumstances in which something occurs. It can refer to the setting, situation, or environment in which a particular event or situation takes place.

Why it matters: As professionals or experts within a Niche field, we are attenuated to the details. However, the same might not be true for your audience.

How much background to provide in a Posts depends on whom you’re writing for. Too much and the article can get boring and redundant. Too less and you might trigger Context Collapse.

Click-baiting’ is when a publisher posts a link with a headline that encourages people to click to see more, without telling them much information about what they will see.

It is typically used in escape products because Escape products game attention minutes.

Footnotes:

• https://www.theawl.com/2014/08/um-is-your-facebook-about-to-get-less-dumb-wow/

Readers experience Context Collapse, i.e., not fully understand or misinterpret the meaning, when they read or consume information that was not written for them or for then.

The details: It is likely to happen:

• When talking about under-reported phenomena and slow-moving movements that require a longitudinal outlook to grasp
• When discussing fast-moving topics where the situation is dynamic and information can become stale fast
• When talking across cultural boundaries

What you can do about it?

• Declare your Assumed Audience.
• The Posts format was an acceptable format for the print newspaper. Every day, the reader would trash today’s newspaper and start afresh. Online, articles stay around forever. When we write stories on unfolding events, the information published in the article might not be accurate after a day or two. Yet, this is archived forever and can drive misinformation. One solution for this is to put a message at the top of a dated article.