Case study: The Better India- Positive Journalism

India Social Case Challenge – Edition 1

Category- Long-term Initiatives

Title- Positive Journalism – The Better India

Share a little about your organisation

The Better India is a news organization with a difference – it reports only positive stories, showcases unsung heroes – people who are making a positive impact and leading developmental solutions.

Executive Summary

Founded by a Bangalore based couple, The Better India aims to use the concept of positive journalism and bring about a mindset change amongst its readers.

We hope that by showcasing stories of social and economic development by ordinary citizens, we might be able to inspire at least one amongst our readers to do something that leaves an impact. Small or big. But, an impact.

Background

Most sources of news provide a larger coverage to sensationalism, negative news, stories of despair and tragedy. Everyday newspapers were becoming difficult for us to consume. Surely, there had to be a lot more to India than just the deaths, scandals and corruption.

This led us to start The Better India – an initiative to showcase Positive news, Happy Stories and Unsung Heroes.

Approach/ Strategy

The web has a low (or nil) barrier of entry. We set up a portal, started searching for positive news via friends, colleagues and other organizations. Slowly, we also started amassing a steadily growing readership. Now we have reached a stage where readers point us to various events of positive development in and around their communities.

Readers are on the lookout for such news, and in turn are inspired to do more for their surroundings.

Stakeholders

We’ve engaged many NGOs who desperately needed a platform to showcase what they were doing. However, from an effort perspective, it was just a team of 2 who started this and ran it for more than a year. In the recent past, we’ve managed to get 2 more people on board our team.

About the initiative

Initially, we started searching for positive news via various other media and put them up on our site. As we grew, we diversified into original coverage of our own and since then we’ve grown from strength to strength. An able use of all social media channels (twitter, facebook etc) has seen our popularity rise quickly. We were recently invited at the IIM-A’s Entrepreneurship summit too to give a talk about The Better India.

Impact – Outcome

Impact, for us as of now, is to reach out to as many readers as possible. We started with zero readership less than 2 years ago and now our site is read by close to 15000 visitors every month. Additionally, around a 1000 people subscribe to our newsletters.

Learnings

One learning – if you have an idea, go out there and execute it. Don’t spend too much time on planning. Your idea will evolve on its own, you just need to listen to it regularly and adapt everything around it.

What Next

As of now it is a 4 member team reporting positive news 1-2 times every week. In the near future, we plan to start an internship program for all students (including journalism students) who can get an exposure in the field of positive journalism by working with us.

Reasoning

There is no single other site that has achieved what we have done so far. We’ve been around for 2 years now (and that in itself speaks of our dedication to this initiative).

Credits Strategy

Self

Credits Execution

Self

Testimonials

Recently, we had published an article about an organization called Blind with Camera – visually impaired pursuing photography. To this article, we received the following comment:

This information was really thought provoking. I have no words to express the joy that I had while reading through this article. While I share similar kind of visual problem and always had a great passion towards photography, this probably got me the wings for that passion. Thanks a million for this article. – Sowmya.

It is testimonials of this kind that makes our effort worthwhile. Also, our site has hundreds of comments from various people appreciating our work.

Factsheet

Name of the company: The Better India
Number of Employees: 1-10
Category: Other
Case submitted by: Dhimant Parekh, Co-Founder
Website: http://www.thebetterindia.com