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Hi readers,
You can’t fit everything into an article.
To me, knowing what to focus on and what to exclude is just as important as writing with coherence and balance.
That was my experience with this premium article, which highlights key takeaways from Grab’s Investor Day 2022. The three-hour event – the super app’s first – featured sessions on six topics plus a Q&A at the end.
The article did not touch on topics like GrabUnlimited, the company’s new subscription program, and GrabForBusiness, which targets businesses whose employees use Grab’s services.
Each session tackled Grab’s strategic initiatives to drive growth. GrabUnlimited, in particular, seems promising – the company said it drove 19% of gross merchandise value in its deliveries segment in the most recent quarter. It can also drive up user engagement with the app and encourage them to use multiple services.
However, I had already written about GrabUnlimited as part of my coverage of Grab’s second quarter results in August. It’s also a very new service, so we’ll need more time to properly assess how it’s doing. That’s why I decided to leave it out.
Covering a company like Grab has its pros and cons. People want to read about the company, so your article should be decently written at the very least. But many other people are writing about the same thing, so it takes some effort to find a unique angle. I hope we manage to do that more often than not.
As I was writing this piece, I was recounting this dilemma to a friend, who asked what stood out to me from the presentation. I said I found it interesting to see which executives were chosen to speak, the topics they discussed, and how long they talked because one might get a sense of who else could be in Grab’s leadership bench apart from the co-founders.
“That’s what you should be writing about!” my friend exclaimed.
I toyed with the idea, but decided against it. Pursuing this angle wouldn’t fit with the rest of the article, and I would need much more time to do research – these event-linked pieces have an expiry date.
But maybe that’s something I can revisit and chase in the future.
— Simon Huang, journalist at Tech in Asia
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