Dear Media Friends,
Please stop scaring the heck out of people by withholding information that might prevent them from freaking out.
For example, when you report that there are a “record-smashing” 300,000 new cases of COVID-19 in India, could you please add some context?
Like maybe mention to Canadians that India has roughly 102 times the population of Ontario, so the last daily report of 3,871 news cases in Ontario is higher per capita than India’s reported new-case numbers.
Oh, and don’t forget to remind your readers/viewers that the majority of people who die with COVID-19 in Canada are past the average life expectancy of a human and have more than one other disease/condition.
Telling people the facts does not mean that you are cruel and heartless; it means that you have integrity.
Here are a few examples of stories produced with education and reader empowerment in mind as opposed to fear mongering.
https://big-media.ca/assessing-the-relative-lethality-of-covid-19-a-canadian-case-study/
https://big-media.ca/face-the-facts-diving-into-the-science-of-masks/
https://big-media.ca/covid-context-how-concerned-should-we-be-about-dying-from-this-virus/
Your advertisers will not approve of this style at first, but your readers will appreciate understanding what is actually going on. We would lend you some of our advertisers to help with the short-term pain, but we don’t accept advertising on our platform. That helps us avoid falling into the click-bait cycle of doing whatever it takes to bring readers and therefore business to advertisers.
If you find any mistakes in our articles, please let me know so we can update the copy. We believe that practising intellectual humility is critical in our path to providing exceptional value to readers.
That is all for now. Thanks so much!
Sincerely,
Rob
