Evidence

The Times of India created a property called Start Your Day With TOI+, which had one Chart of the Day.

Footnotes:

• Bringing the newspaper’s funny page to TOI Plus | by Ritvvij Parrikh | What’s next at TOI (timesofindia.com)

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail

restofworld.org is a news publication that runs a property called Stat of the Day. Below are some screenshots:

Footnotes:

• Stat of the day – Rest of World

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.

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)

Trust is the belief that you’ll act in a reliable and dependable way. It is earned over time through consistent behavior and actions.

Do you have built a reputation for being trusted, reliable, high-integrity, long-term thinkers in an otherwise trust-deficit ecosystem?

Strategic communication rules everywhere: Whether it’s marketing, PR, or ads from companies, they’re all designed to push us in directions benefiting the sender – either to build brand recall or lower their customer acquisition cost. That’s not inherently a negative thing.

• But, there’s a caveat: Brands sometimes resort to manipulation or even outright deceit to shape perceptions and behaviors for their benefit. Case in point: Bournvita’s ads in India. They claim health benefits while 50% of their product is sugar.
• The fine print: Brands often speak the truth – but usually only after the fact. If certain details conflict with their agenda, they downplay, gloss over or obscure them. The “research” or “science” they cite is more about persuasion than factual information.

On the flip side, there’s candid communication: This involves conveying your best understanding of reality backed by evidence and data. It’s about being genuine, saying what you believe and meaning it. No fluff allowed.

• Practically speaking: Candid communication means you’re not merely selling a product or service but sharing a story – your story. Websites, blogs, podcasts, videos, social media are all platforms to share this story, engaging in a dialogue with your customers rather than talking at them.

• The key elements: Respect for your audience’s intelligence and time, meaning not just honesty, but clarity and conciseness too. Ditch the business jargon. Next, it involves tackling difficult truths and sharing unpopular decisions or viewpoints, which although challenging, builds trust, eliminates confusion, and fosters a productive environment.

• The golden rule: Never exchange honesty for strategy. Regardless of your strategic goals, maintain clear, direct, and ethical communication.

Limitations of candid communication: By compounding on one set of audience and topics, you are beholden to them in the long term. But then, right at the onset we discussed that candid communication is for those who go deep instead of broad. You are unlikely to earn a full salary via the media itself. Though it may add to your passive income.