FactorDaily’s Pankaj Mishra on breaking free from the news cycle and the tyranny of key performance indicators
Splice sat down with the co-founder of FactorDaily, a media startup based in Bangalore, India whose mission is to make sense of technology's impact on society. FactorDaily recently pivoted into a non-profit model. What hasn’t changed, however, is their focus on public-spirited journalism.
We asked Pankaj the question many of you are probably itching to ask: no ads, no paywalls, no venture capital funding—what’s up with that?
This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Hosted and produced by Alan Soon and Rishad Patel, co-founders of Splice.
When you started the company about five years ago, what was your intent?
Science and technology's impact on society was very under-reported in this part of the world. I'm sure it is the case everywhere else. That was 2015 when we registered the company, and we realised that things were getting lost in the news cycle. Either they were about consumer technology gadgets, or they were about social media, or they were about politics.
But the intersection of technology and society is something that fascinated us, and it also made us very restless because we saw what was happening and what it was doing.
And there were two aspects of the intersection that I'm talking about. One is the dark side of technology, where it weakens the weak and creates all kinds of troubles, and then there is this illuminating side of technology where it empowers, where it shines light, where it democratises information.
So this is broadly why we got into this.
What struck us the most was the idea of no more publishing cycles, that you would publish when you had something to say. What has this saved you in terms of cost and benefits and just that pressure of no deadline?
When we decided that we don't want any new cycles or publishing cycles, the idea was not to cut costs or bring any kind of operational efficiency or anything like that.
The core idea was that we wanted to apply a project approach to journalism, and on topics that matter. We did not want to be a slave of news cycles or a publishing cycle wherein, if it is a daily, I'm getting up and saying, hey, what am I going to be putting out today? Or, if there is any development, I have to make sense of it almost like a fast food joint.
We didn't want to do that. I have had two decades in journalism across all the newsrooms and this is very liberating. It is liberating not because of efficiencies and cost but because it allows you to focus deeply on things that matter and in a timeless way.
Maybe one of the biggest challenges in this is trying to engage your audience. How do you keep in touch with your audience if you're not there in their faces and they don't know when your next story's coming?
So first of all, we are a few months all into this approach. We are, again, a startup. It is a journey that never ends. Every time you try something new, you become a startup, right? And that is what is happening.
First of all, I think it's also about habit formation and setting the expectations. We did this because we wanted to tell our audience, or at least people who care for what we do, that hey, don't expect us to come to you every day. We will come to you when we have something to tell you, and that happens through newsletters, through continuous dialogues we have. We have an engagement journalist on our team, she worked with The Marshall Project and ProPublica.
I would say I don't have a perfect answer so far because we are still listening and learning. But I think it is about having a community approach to journalism, especially if you're tracking some deep topics. You kind of listen to them. And it's not just your readers.
As part of this approach, for every topic, we also collaborate with the social sector — organisations that are working in the grassroots in different areas. Because, to be honest, as journalists, we don't have that depth of domain expertise. So we are tapping into audience communities that we never had access to.
No ads, no paywalls — what's going on there?
One way to describe it is that it's very liberating.
No ads because we all know the trouble with ads. You are actually looking at the advertisers and you kind of start shaping a product to suit them. And by that, I don't necessarily mean anything unethical. You may be following journalism, but as a product builder, subconsciously your mind starts thinking about advertisers and you try and bring features, you try and get into activities that are going to be relevant for your advertisers. That is one.
Subscription — I have a very different thought about that. I believe subscription is a new [form of] advertising. And the reason I say that is because if you are a subscription product, you are chasing big brands. Whether it’s a university or a large company, you are looking at bulk subscription sales. The same thing plays [out]. And I have seen that in many subscription products. You start thinking about subscribers. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that.
But, for me, every time you let the mission go out and get dictated by people who pay for it, it is distracting.
So if, let's say, there is a big technology company and it has 10,000 subscriptions, my ability to either question them or if I'm adding a new feature, I would think can I increase the coverage in this direction?
Because you're looking at data just like you would look at a dashboard in the advertising world, right? And for me—and I don't have anything, I have not been to a journalism school, I haven't studied data — but for me, that dashboarding is where the problem lies because I start building a product according to that data.
And that is why we don't have subscriptions. In fact, FactorDaily 1.2 [prior to our pivot], we didn't have subscriptions. We had people writing to us and saying, “I feel guilty reading this for free, why don't you ask for money?” I said if you want to give us money, here is a link to donation. You do that, but that's about it. We won't put it behind a paywall.
Not putting it behind a paywall is also because we want our journalism to reach more people. We believe that, if I want to do something in a public-spirited fashion, I need to keep it open. I can not be a subscription product and say that this is public-spirited.
How is that public spirited if people who need it can't access it? It's not just about money. It's about creating a wall. Perhaps in a few years we will reach a point where we will learn some new things and rethink this, but it won't be ads or subscriptions at all.
And no VC money, as you say in your website. As part of this pivot, you are now a non-profit newsroom, a Section 8 company incorporated in India. What benefits does that give you, and does it address a problem with the business model?
I'll give you a very honest answer. It doesn't matter whether I am for-profit or non-profit, as long as I'm in control of my mission. To be honest with you, I could have done it by staying the course that I was on, as long as I have control.
We did a non-profit just to ensure that we don't have any distractions that you face when you are for-profit. And by distractions I mean all of these things — attracting reader metrics, thinking of a bunch of revenue models and keep getting consumed in those battles. We didn't want any of that.
So we are non-profit by choice, because we believe these are the most suitable clothes to wear.
What’s your view of newsletter open rates?
Just to give an update, we are perhaps moving away from Revue as well. It's for a bunch of reasons, privacy and data included. And you will see a newsletter product from us very soon; we are just putting it together.
Also in this new approach, we are creating audience communities under different focus topics. So it is not going to be a mass email newsletter product anymore. It has to be more conversational, deep, and very focused.
Talking about open rates, my views are the same. With any dashboard — I know I sound like a lazy person when I say these things, but it isn't for laziness — it is actually not wanting to get distracted by data, not becoming a slave of data.
I have spent 21 years in the profession. I have seen things take birth and die on these dashboards. I don't want to be part of that life cycle. And you can call me lazy, you can call me trying to escape from reality or data, but I don't like that.
How do you measure impact if you're not willing to look at any number, any kind of metric, any kind of KPIs?
First of all, as of now, I can't measure the impact because our definition of impact is really long-term.
And I'll give you an example. One of the story projects we are doing is on electronic waste, and one of the pockets we kind of chronicled is a place called Seelampur, which is near Delhi. I've been traveling there for five years now, meeting people and watching firsthand the problems that their society faces.
A good impact for us is that, after three years, five years, seven years, 10 years, there are some changes on the ground in Seelampur.
For example, foreign manufacturers become more responsible because we are questioning them and they start taking more ownership of recycling in a good way, or there is a new hope in terms of livelihood for people who are involved in this profession in Seelampur.
Or there are some organisations who consume our content and they realise the societal problem and they go about finding a solution to those problems, or our deep story and continuous tracking reaches the corridors of power and policy makers and there are some tweaks in the policies.
Now, these things are not on a dashboard. These things are not going to be found in day-to-day or weekly or monthly reports. These are long journeys so far as impact goes. Now this might sound really far-fetched and all of that, but, hey if I'm doing all of this, then this is an outcome of all of that.
Having said that, one of the things we are also doing is we have distribution partnerships with different mainstream media companies across different languages. So we are not obsessed with having people on our homepage and tracking the traffic and so on.
We are distributing, for example, [through] the Times of India, which is the world's most-read English newspaper platform. They republish all our stories in English. In Malayalam, we have the biggest Malayalam language platform called Malayalam Manorama. They republish our stories in Malayalam. In a few weeks, they will have a Hindi language publisher on board.
So what is happening is, I'm taking these battles off my table—the battles of distribution, the battles of commercialisation—and I want to focus primarily on the mission. Absolutely nothing else, in a very naked way.
The last time we spoke, you were describing the atom of a story. You called it a product. You said every story is a product. Can you explain some of that?
This is one of the learnings that I had after three years of FactorDaily. When we were winding it down, I looked back at things that worked for us, and I looked back at it very carefully.
Over the past few years, I have also had the privilege to spend time with a lot of software product founders and I realised that, as media, we are creating value with our stories, our ideas. But all of that is unlocked by others — the so-called creator economy or whatever you want to call it.
There will be a movie producer who will read a newspaper, figure out an idea, go about doing research, and then turn it into a movie. Someone would write a book, someone would build a documentary, and so on.
So when I say every story is a product, I mean that it is an intellectual property. And when we look at media, mostly we are looking at business models as ad, subscription, or branded content, and so on.
In our experience, in just a few months, we have been reached out to by a bunch of people who want to turn our stories into web series documentaries and they're ready to put the money on the table upfront.
So that got me to thinking: how do I think of stories as an IP? And this meant everything from creating a contract to licensing a story as an IP and so on. So that's a massive learning because, as media, we think of every story as a product. And by product I mean something which talks to an audience, a particular community. It has the potential to become habit-forming and it can have enough value in it for someone to pay for it.
And when I look at a story like Seelampur, for example, it is a product for us. It is not a narrative. It is a product and we are now licensing it out. And that is what I meant.
I think the media landscape is full of doomsday. People are dejected, especially in this part of the world. In India, there have been massive layoffs. We are not being able to attract young promising people into the profession because senior editorial leaders are looking at this as their last job and they are discouraging people. And that is bad.
And one of the reasons I quit mainstream jobs to build FactorDaily is because I'm so much in love with this craft. Now, if we put out from our experiences the things that are working, not just the stuff that is broken, hopefully, if someone wants to look at this as a serious profession, as a product builder, they will look at it as an alternate profession.
Could you tell us about the strategy behind how newsrooms should think about reinventing themselves as a non-profit entity?
There's no playbook. I'm still learning and all that, but very quickly, I think one of the things is, I think we need more sense of pride in what we do.
What has happened over the years with platforms threading the mainstream media, Google, Facebook, and so on, is that there is a lot of dejection out there.
We have kind of lost sight of why we exist as media and what is our role in the society. What is our social contract with the society and our readers? What is our social contract with each other? And this has happened because of many reasons, everything from fake news to polarisation, all of those things have got us where we are, and, last but not the least, the whole platform disruption that has happened.
The point is, first of all, we need to gather a sense of pride in what we do and why we exist. I think that would be a good starting point to think of a future where there is hope. Because now, the problem is that it is absolute dejection and hopelessness. So that is the first step, I would say. If it's a newsroom or if it's someone in the profession, be proud of why we exist and why we matter. What is our social contract with society and our leaders?
The second thing is, who reads us or who consumes us is more important than how many. And this is again, nothing new, and this is a battle which platforms have won because of the deep analytics they have and because of their algorithmic engines and so on. And conventional media cannot fight that. So, “who” is very important.
Over the years, newsrooms have not spent enough time engaging with their reader communities and audience communities, in making them feel being part of this newsroom. This is kind of an ivory tower.
This needs to change because suddenly you go out and you tell your audience, hey, you pay for my time. What is that relationship you have? One of my problems with this subscription wave is that people are leapfrogging it. People transition from print to digital to this new, new way. What if I just come to your door one day and ask for money — cold calling — I don’t know you, and you don't know me.
One of the important building blocks is to first build a relationship. If I know you, you know me, and I feel that what you do is valuable, I will pay for it.
I will perhaps pay more than what you're asking me. People are charging everything from a dollar to a thousand dollars and so on. Perhaps I can give you a couple of thousand dollars a year if I have this relationship with you.
That is missing. And that's a very important thing missing in most of the subscription products, especially in media, because they are an outcome of what we see is the disease that VCs have — FOMO. And this FOMO is now driving a lot of companies into subscription and so on.
And finally, every story is a product. And by that I don't necessarily mean every story that you do every day, depending on your news cycle. But if you are going to be looking at a funnel of ideas and stories every month, you kind of hand pick one or two who have the potential to become a product. And you disproportionately invest your time and efforts in seeing it through, taking it through the entire product life cycle — from idea to community to monetisation, and everything around it, and ringfence it so well that others cannot unlock value from it. Get more possessive about those ideas and story products. Have that sense of obsession about it. That's how I would sum it up.
What can we at Splice do to support the incredible work that you're doing and the thought process that you've put into it? And what can the community that's around us do to help you as well?
We should keep talking, first of all. And I think we need to form a collective wherein we are talking about these learnings in a more open way. One of the things that we don't do enough as media, whether it is new or old, is we don't share our playbooks. And it is a deterrent in kind of becoming better as an industry, as a collective. And I see that everywhere.
So I would definitely like us to brainstorm more, bringing field notes from the battlefield. We all have scars and we have trophies, right? But we don't exchange them. The next time we meet, we should be proud enough to put both the scars and trophies on the table and say hey, I was there and this is what I picked up.
The next time someone else is going to that battlefront, they know how to deal with it. I'm not saying there won't be scars.
You are foolish if you are still going to fight in this battle, but you will know a lot about healing, right? You will know how to come out of it.
One of the other reasons why we are a non-profit is also to open source our learning without any profit objective. Our company is called Sourcecode Media, from the time we registered in 2015. I think a good way to look at us is like a media lab. Stories are one of the outcomes. Every design tool, everything that we build, we plan to open source.
You will have all kinds of companies and media for-profit and venture-funded and so on. But I think the role for folks like us is to kind of keep bringing learnings on the table. And these are exciting times to be in this part of the world and we should, as a collective, become more proud about.