Subhashini Ramasamy learned her first rule of interviewing early: dial down the fandom, dial up the curiosity. Since then, the Happiest Health writer has turned quiet, patient conversations into features that put people at the centre of the story. With that early lesson from her first high-profile interview with Harun Robert, Subhashini set the tone for how she reports: people first, then come the headlines. A magazine writer at Happiest Health, Subhashini covers health and wellness. During her internship, she also covered art and social issues. Her through-line is simple: observe, listen, and translate everyday lives into features that resonate. She moved from short-form corporate content into long-form journalism to spend more time with subjects and their worlds. Her reporting starts with preparation and curiosity. She said “didn’t know what journalism meant back then,” but the pull toward storytelling “felt natural.” She prepares by researching her subjects thorou

Anil Kumar Singh—independent journalist, journalism teacher, author—has spent four decades in mainstream English media, including years at The Times of India, Mumbai, where he headed Reporting. His new book, The Fault With Reality, gathers his long-running columns on farmers’ agitations, hospital fires, Mumbai’s annual flooding, Indian love poems on Valentine’s Day, and the decline of the city’s civic systems—showcasing a blend of wit, facts, and critique. In an exclusive conversation with Influencing India, Singh opened up about the idea behind the book: “The answer lies in the title,” Singh explains. “In Doordarshan’s infancy, when images went wavy, a message would flash: ‘There’s a fault with transmission, don’t adjust your TV set’. Today, when information is indistinguishable from disinformation, and fact from fiction, there’s no one to warn us: ‘There’s a fault with reality, don’t adjust your mind’.” Writing a 1,300-word column every w

Image source: India Today, Republic World and India Sentinels; Edited by Dinesh Raj M   Defence minister Rajnath Singh on Thursday warned Pakistan about its recent military infrastructure build-up near the sensitive Sir Creek region, adding that this shows its “true intentions”. The marshlands of Sir Creek, a 96-km-long tidal estuary between Rann of Kutch and Pakistan’s Sindh, have been a bone of contention between the neighbours due to differing interpretations of the maritime boundary in the region. The long-standing dispute has implications for access to fishing rights and potential natural resources like oil and gas in the region and affects drawing of maritime boundaries and EEZs in Arabian Sea.  Hot off the Press Talks on the Sir Creek issue were last held in June 2012 when the two sides discussed the land boundary in the area and delimitation of the International Maritime Boundary between India and Pakistan, reported Rahul Singh and Maulik Pathak for Hindustan T

Renowned technology journalist Chris Griffith has launched the Griffbot - an AI chatbot to answer questions about his writing or the topics he’s reporting on.   It’s something Griffith said he’d been wanting to create for a while, offering another method for his audience to consume his writing.  “The audience may not want to just read the story, but also ask questions about it,” Griffith told Influencing. “The questions can be on the article, but the chatbot can also give an understanding of my reasoning. In my opinion, chatbots are quite good at looking at those nuances and providing an explanation on particular points of a story.”  As AI has rapidly grown, Griffith has seen the upward trend of the new tech, even referencing Gartner's research that highlighted people would be using smaller, dedicated AI implementations come 2027.  “We’ll see not just companies having their own AI implementations. But people like us who have stories or small historical so

Welcome to Friday, and there's no single story capturing the front page headlines today, but there is one which runs through all publications and that's the passing, at the age of 91, of naturalist and world-renowned primate expert Jane Goodall.  The Sydney Morning Herald does it best with a picture grab on the front page and inside a full-page obituary, written by Amy Ripley, which includes the quote, "Chimps, like us, are aggressive, but quick to make peace." Of course there are parts of the world at the moment where that isn't always the case but it's good to be reminded peace is something we should, could, and can all aspire to. If the apes - our nearest relatives in the natural world - can do it, why not us? There's also a lovely opinion piece by Kay McKay, director and CEO at the Australian Museum and ex-National Geographic, who writes on her personal friendship with Goodall over many decades, while the SMH's front page headline proclaims, 'World mourns wildlif

The podcast boom has transformed the way Australians consume audio — but according to Fiona Ellis-Jones, Head of News at ARN, it has also created a dangerously crowded and confusing media landscape. “The podcasting space in Australia and around the world is very, very crowded. It’s difficult to have visibility,” Ellis-Jones told Influencing Insider. “I feel sorry for a lot of podcasters that are going it alone, given the amount of resource, energy, and effort it takes to put out a really great podcast. The visibility is really difficult.” Even with the “might of iHeartRadio - the biggest podcasting platform in Australia,” she said, ARN struggles to cut through the noise. That makes it “very difficult for those podcasters who might be broadcasting, you know, from a garage or something.” Still, Ellis-Jones argued, success ultimately comes down to quality: “If something is well produced, if it’s well mixed and the storytelling principles are great, then that�

Business is firmly in the spotlight in today's news - both legal and illegal - so for a change let's start with Melbourne's Herald Sun and the so-called tobacco wars, which takes up almost all its front page and more inside, with a dramatic all caps headline and a picture of staff at a Country store who have, as journalist Regan Hodge put it, "lifted the lid on how an underworld cartel is terrorising small businesses". The store suffered a ram raid after ignoring "a chilling order" from crime kingpin Kaz Hamad's goons, claims Hodge. What chilled me the most, purely as a journalist you understand, is that the goons can't spell. Indeed, the shop owners believed the note to be the work of a child, given the scrappy writing and the fact they couldn't even correctly spell the name of their gang group - The Commission. But then came the ram raid. All of this against the background of an extortion tactic revolving around illegal tobacco and trying to get shops like the one hit - w