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  "description": "How BehanBox turned research rigour into a sustainability story",
  "path": "/recipe-1-let-your-journalism-live-twice/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-07-01T11:37:53.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.firstdraft.media",
  "tags": [
    "BehanBox"
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  "textContent": "_Hello friends,_\n\n_Last year, around this time, I had started writing Newsroom Nudge, a monthly newsletter where I would convert inspiring newsroom case studies and stories around audience engagement, monetisation, and similar topics into recipes. Why you ask? Because I have spent countless hours reading one case study after another without knowing exactly how to translate it into action items for myself. So was born Newsroom Nudge. But like a neglectful parent, I abandoned it soon after for new pet projects._\n\n_I am back here because I am hoping to turn this into a habit. I mean I need to learn from others anyway. Why not take the time to convert it into a recipe that others can use as well?_\n\n_So here we go again. Hopefully, this time I am here to stay._\n\n* * *\n\n### **🥘** Recipe of the month\n\n _How_ BehanBox_is building an India without margins, one partnership at a time_\n\nFounded in 2020 by journalist and public policy researcher Bhanupriya Rao, BehanBox was born in India during COVID-19, when it became impossible to ignore how much harder the pandemic was hitting marginalised communities and frontline healthcare workers and how little of that was making it into the news. Six years on, BehanBox is no longer just a newsroom. The core is still editorial, but they have build an ecosystem around it that now has its own life. There is community pillar that takes readers further down the engagement funnel and a partnerships pillar called ChangeLabs that gives their journalism a second life inside within the impact sector.\n\nAt the heart of all of this sits a strong sense of who they are, what they want to do, and a solid instinct. BehanBox realised that they were already in close contact with unions, academics, public sector actors, social enterprises, and related fields. Their reporting on gender and marginality was rigorous enough that people doing research, advocacy, and policy work wanted to build on it, unions wanted to use it. Change Labs simply gave that organic demand a name, a structure, and a price tag.\n\nThey realised early on that there are limits to journalism. You can publish the most rigorous reporting on ASHA workers or care work, and the article still ends where the article ends. So BehanBox decided to feed their data and reporting into the hands of the people who negotiate, litigate, and legislate. Today ChangeLabs is looking at several ongoing and developing partnerships and a realistic revenue potential alongside reader subscriptions. One body of journalism creating multiple revenue streams.\n\nAnd they do all of this as a six person team. For small and exiled newsrooms convinced that impact and sustainability require scale, BehanBox is proof that what you actually need is rigour, the willingness to think beyond the newsroom, and the openness to notice who is already using your work.\n\n* * *\n\n**Ingredients**\n\n  * A body of journalism with genuine research rigour above all. Institutions partner with you because your work holds up to scrutiny, not because of your reach.\n  * A clear sense of your mission beyond publishing. BehanBox wants to build an India without margins. Everything else follows from there.\n  * A list of people and institutions who are already using your work. From the researchers citing you, to the unions sharing your reporting, and the NGOs emailing for your data. Most newsrooms have these people and treat these as favours rather than clear signal of a demand.\n  * One person who can think in partnerships rather than stories.\n  * A willingness to accept that journalism has limits, and that is a design constraint you can build around.\n  * A name for the thing. BehanBox calls theirs ChangeLabs. Naming it really helps turn scattered requests into an offer. For you as well as for the world.\n\n\n\n* * *\n\n**Preparation**\n\n**Step 1: Audit who is already knocking**\n\nBefore you build anything, take a hard look at the 'requests' you may have been getting. Who has asked to use your data? Which researchers cite you? Which organisations share your work with their members? BehanBox created ChangeLabs for work they were already doing and then expanded upon it by asking themselves what do their partners or various areas of work need that they can cover. Institutions already knew them, their work. Your equivalent of that demand is probably sitting in your email right now.\n\n**Step 2: Get honest about the limits of your journalism**\n\nThis step costs nothing and changes everything. Ask yourselves: where does our reporting stop, and who picks up from there? If your investigation into a relevant beat gets read, shared, and then nothing changes, the missing link is usually an organisation that could have used your findings as ammunition. Map who those organisations are for your beats.\n\n**Step 3: Work out what they actually need from you**\n\nA union doesn't need another article. It might need your dataset, a briefing, a workshop, or your reporters in a room explaining what they found. There might also be things that you can build together. Once you have your list from Step 2 have those conversations.\n\n**Step 4: Package the demand into an offer**\n\nTurn the pattern from steps 1 to 3 into something you can say yes to repeatedly. For BehanBox that's ChangeLabs: a partnerships pillar where their body of work feeds actionable information into research, advocacy, and policy work among others. It doesn't have to be fancy. It has to be repeatable and it has to have boundaries, so it does not bleed into your editorial priorities and resources.\n\n**Step 5: Put a value on it**\n\nThis is where most mission-driven newsrooms struggle the most. Putting a price tag on their work. Don't. Organisations have budgets for research, training, and consulting in a way that individual readers never will. BehanBox now treats organisations as a paid pipeline alongside reader subscriptions. Your journalism does the expensive part of holding truth to power. Charging for its second life is only a pathway to sustain the first.\n\n**Step 6: Protect the editorial core**\n\nThe whole thing only works because the journalism stays rigorous and independent. The work is rigorous journalism, data collection, and caring about the people they write about. The partnerships emerged because of this editorial integrity, never the other way around. So build firewalls early. Who you will partner with, what you will not do, and what happens when a partner dislikes your reporting.\n\n* * *\n\n**Ready to serve!**\n\n* * *\n\nIf this nudged something loose, open your inbox and find one organisation that has asked something of your journalism in the past year. You might have your ChangeLabs waiting for you. And if you find one, I would love to hear about it, as would BehanBox. Drop pallavi@behanbox.com a line if you would like to partner with them.\n\nThanks for reading this far. It means more than you know.\n\nSudeshna :)",
  "title": "Recipe #1: Let your journalism live twice",
  "updatedAt": "2026-07-01T13:37:53.870Z"
}