How We Founded a Positive News Organization

Lessons from an Indian initiative trying to usher-in positive news in a market saturated with sensationalism

It was a little over 5 years ago that my wife and I decided to start an alternative news medium. We were exasperated by reading the daily news in India that was largely negative and sensational in nature.

It got us thinking:

What should news do to you?

Should it shake you up in horror? Should it leave you in disgust? Or should it also make you learn? Should it make you contribute? Should it enable you to bring about a change?

With that idea, we decided to start our own news site, but with a difference. We decided to report only positive news. And by positive, we didn’t want it to be preachy or opinion-filled, we wanted to talk about ideas that have impacted communities, we wanted to showcase people who have brought about a change in their areas, we wanted to talk about forgotten art forms of India, celebrate the successes of organizations who’ve improved the lives of many children, display the enormous achievements of groups working to eliminate poverty, showcase innovative movements like those of a photography club for the visually impaired — the list continues to grow with every passing day.

Start Small. But Start.

All that listed above didn’t really come to us on that fine day. What struck us was what we had to do — start a website of positive news. We started as a filter blog on blogspot, linking to articles from various publications as and when we found them. But this too became difficult simply because there were very few articles out there in other publications that fit our ‘positive criteria’.

Pivot. Of course.

So we pivoted to covering news ourselves. We, as a team of 2, went around Bangalore, the city we live in, to discover and know more about individuals and organizations. We covered these folks, captured photographs and put them up on our blog. We circulated the stories on Facebook and e-mail.

Get the ‘Network Effect’ going.

We pushed our content to as many people as we could — family, friends, friends of friends, colleagues, friends of colleagues and so on.The idea was appreciated by all and, more importantly, shared by many. So we continued to work on it persistently for 6 months. And then, one person mailed us volunteering to join us on this journey. And she had a journalism background too, which neither one of us did. We were thrilled!

Going from 2 to 25 in 5.

This one person joining in gave us the ability to cover a different city. It gave a different writing style to the articles. It gave us perspective. We continued to push content to our network, and then one more person joined in. This person brought in a different mindset and so our articles became more varied. Our readers started loving us more. And so more of them spread the word. And then more writers wanted to be a part of it. And thus we went to 25 writers in 5 years. 25 writers who write for the passion of spreading positive news. 25 writers who believe that we can bring about a change.

Amplify Conversations.

We identified early on that a large section of our readers liked us and wanted to share about us. So we got onto Twitter and Facebook early-on and invested a lot in having conversations with our audience all the time. This helped us get a lot of leads for both our articles and writers. And then we focused on e-mail. We hooked up MailChimp and used their fantastic drip e-mail (they call it autoresponders) facility to ensure that we run our new readers through some of our best articles before they start getting our daily alerts. We also ensured to send them a mail asking them to talk about us with their contacts — adding in a paragraph of content which they could just copy and paste in their mails. It quickly became one of the top 10 sources of reader traffic!

Be At It.

We did this, and continue to do this, for over 5 years now. The reason we remained persistent — We heard from every reader that they absolutely loved what we were doing! This was not one-off from friends and family, this was from every random person who talked to us. They all loved it. And hence we decided to Be. At. It.

We’ve covered some amazing people and ideas and we continue to be surprised everyday. Some of our best stories have been of extraordinary effort that some people have taken to bring about changes, some of them are here for you to read:

The Bird Man of Kheechan
A Wedding with a Difference that Made a Difference
‘Ahmedabad No Rickshawalo’
Making 1.5 Million Meals Daily in less than 5 hours

There are thousands of such stories covered in the past years and we hope to continue to grow this movement. We hope to show that news can do a lot more than what it does today.