Our small newsroom needs to pivot

And as a founder am a tad lost

I have been thinking a lot about a pivot for Newsworthy in 2025. We are a small newsroom. I founded it a few years ago after spending decades in the legacy media broadcast newsrooms in India. The motto arose from the need of the hour.

News was confusing, muddled, its own echo chamber and not geared to explain.

So we decided to create a fresh model, a grammar for news on Instagram that brought clarity, trust and a sense of understanding. The Newsworthy audience of 60K+ on Instagram says as much.

But the pivot is staring at us—partly forced, partly desired. We are clearly in a de-growth phase. We having essentially been social publishers. That perhaps was the first mistake. The platform is clearly de-prioritising news.

The value we gave to our audience—news without noise, context not conflict and information worthy of their time and mental health, is turning out to be a high cost value. Our cost of acquiring one audience member is huge. We have never monetised our audience or allowed our news to be at the hands of advertisers.

We have a small number of paying subscribers. They are not enough.

While we created a new grammar of informing & simplifying news for people, some part of our work can still be considered as that of an aggregator. As someone who spent years on the field and in the studio, I have overwhelming and utmost respect for journalists on the field.

Newsworthy with Anubha Bhonsle—Un bought, Un bossed, Un biased

How have we managed so far? Newsworthy.Studio, our social impact communications and design studio is the bread, butter, jam that fuels the news engine.

There is a connective tissue between the two. Good storytelling, researched, factual, well-told stories with life and rhythm. Our work is thoughtful, clean and modern—whether we work for non-governmental organisations or our news audience. We have deep expertise in the areas of gender, public health, climate and access—something that reflects both in our news coverage and our clients.

We have been ideating, talking to veterans, newbies, news hounds, creators to design what a low-cost, efficient pivot could look like? We are thinking some of this:

• becoming YouTube first

• concentrating on value-added deep videos that stand the test of time on news and news adjacent issues

• doubling down only on areas of gender, public health, access and climate and leaving the large current affairs universe barren

• asking our very small paid group of subscribers as to what would help. [we fear we know the answer, they want us to stay on Instagram as this has become a news habit for some of them]

• successful news handles today are more news-influencer handles channels. Explain the news but with a perspective and personality

• disappear

I am putting it out here hoping the larger creator universe would chime in. And show us a path.