Gautam Mishra – The Future of the News: Truth, trust and how to turn this ship around

We are drowning in news, fake and otherwise. And our time, energy, and mental health is suffering as a result. During the initial lockdowns last year, I found myself ‘opting out’. I was overwhelmed.

But as influencers, we need to stay engaged and focused. And we need to be deliberate about the news we watch and listen to. We need to make it a habit. Avoiding the news is not the answer.

Where do you go to get your news? What news should you pay attention to?

On today’s Inside Influence Podcast episode, we talk to Gautam Mishra the founder of Inkl.

Gautam talks about why he founded Inkl, the importance of getting the right news, and the future of the industry. He also advises on how to stay informed and balanced while avoiding the traps of social media.

Inkl is a premium news service that uses an algorithm to recommend stories from over 100+ trusted global sources like The Economist and The Guardian. It recommends stories based on news value (as determined by the publishers themselves) rather than what is trending. It also presents alternative voices to its stories, “Good News”, and original journalism. It has been called the “Spotify for news”.

During the pandemic, Inkl has seen its revenues double as people have turned to quality news sources. Publishers like Inkl because it pays a higher rate than normal online advertising.

Today’s Guest Gautam Mishra

Schooled in Kolkata, Gautam went to university in the US and graduated with an MBA from the Wharton Business School.

Even as a boy, Gautam was a news tragic. He wrote stories for his local newspaper and was editor of his school newspaper. While at Wharton he helped edit the Wharton Journal.

Moving to Australia he became General Manager for Strategy, Data, and Research for Fairfax Media, owner of the leading national newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

While at Fairfax he became an expert in paywalls and who and why people were paying for news.

In 2013, he left Fairfax to co-found AirShr (an interactive radio app) and Inkl. Today, he is the CEO of Inkl. 

Website: https://www.inkl.com/

Facebook: @inklcom

Twitter: jeamish

Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/jeamish

“There are not many parallels for this in history where the value of a customer has collapsed by 99 percent and the business has survived it.” Gautam Mishra.

You’ll learn

• As readers there has been an explosion in the number of topics and sources we follow.
• Social media algorithms give us information we already know and love. News platform algorithms are designed to give us information we don’t already know but need to know.
• Social media is great for sharing news articles but as an open platform it is not good at checking their veracity.  
• A lot of news we now read or even pictures we see come from unknown sources with undeclared biases. This makes it harder for us to process the information.This is why providence is important.
• Since the introduction of the internet, the revenues of newspapers have collapsed by something like 99 percent.
• Online advertising is not working. People are not logging on to news websites. Google and Facebook attract the lion’s share of online advertising, and the small size of mobile phone screens make online advertising difficult.
• News platforms are moving to subscription models, which provide revenues per user a hundred times greater than online advertising. 
• The importance of providing people with sufficient information on their path to conviction over an issue.

References and links mentioned

• BBC Article mentioned in the intro – How the news changes the way we think and behave
• Substack – newsletter service
• Future Crunch –  new learning experiences for key new knowledge (my podcast episode with Future Crunch)
• For anyone who wants to explore Inkl further after listening to this conversation, Gautam has offered a 14 day free trial to all Influence Insiders. You can access it via this URL: http://www.inkl.com/julie-masters.

Also, don’t forget to hop on and download my new ebook The Influencer Code which is available on my website juliemasters.com. 

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