Everybody Writes, 2nd Edition

58Biased and Balanced

“There's a name for something with a single point of view: It's called a press release,” marketing veteran Joe Chernov once told me. (Joe is now the CMO of software company Pendo.io.)

Invite multiple perspectives into your content. At the very least, acknowledge that other points of view might exist; ignoring them makes your reader not trust you.

You can be biased and balanced. It sounds paradoxical, but it isn't.

Biased and balanced coexist even in traditional journalism.

“The New Republic was always a biased magazine,” author and journalist Dan Lyons said in an email interview. And so was Forbes, where Dan worked as senior editor.

“At Forbes we were not allowed to write stories that said, ‘On the one hand this, on the other hand that,'” he said.

“We were under orders to have an opinion, to take a side and defend it. But we were also expected to ‘fight fair,' meaning you should be honest, and acknowledge all the facts, and then say why you believe what you do.”

One hypothetical example might read something like this, Dan said:

Apple stock is a bargain right now, and you should buy it. Why? Apple is about to release a bunch of great new products in the second half of this year and when it does the stock will soar.

[The] counterargument is that Apple's growth has slowed, and some critics think it will never be a growth stock again. However, I think the new iWatch could sell XX number of units at XX dollars, and this would be a huge shot in the arm to Apple's ...