DIGITAL MEDIA/ ARIJIT SEN and RASMUS KLEIS NIELSEN
Six Indian case studies are selected in
this Reuters Institute study to illustrate the strategic choices digital
journalism start‑ups have to make.
Extracted from a report by the Reuters Institute For
The Study Of Journalism.
Introduction
India today combines the fastest
growth in the number of internet
users in the world, a vibrant and
diverse legacy news media sector in
both print and broadcast, and widespread
concerns that some news media are compromised
by their pursuit of short-term profit, by weak
professional ethics, outside pressures on
journalists, and by conflicts of interest related to their owners’ other business and political activities. In this report, we review
a range of digital journalism start-‐‑ups in India that all aim to build on the opportunity afforded by rapid growth in internet use while navigating between on the one hand legacy news media competitors and international technology
companies who increasingly expand their
online activities and on the other
hand the economic, professional, political, and
proprietor-‐related pressures many journalists in India have to confront.1
The cases we
look at in some detail – the
Quint, Scroll, Inshorts, DailyHunt, The
Wire, and Khabar Lahairya – all
represent different approaches to digital
journalism in India, in terms of
their content strategies, their distribution
strategies, and their strategies for
funding journalism on a for-profit or
non-profit basis. At this stage, none
of them compare with the reach and
editorial muscle of leading legacy news
media like the Times of India, NDTV,
or Dainik Bhaskar. In India, as
elsewhere, established media dominate digital
news provision and employ the vast
majority of journalists.2
But all of
the cases we discuss here represent
important examples of how digital
journalism might be done in new ways
and by new players in India. By
extension, they also shed light on
how digital journalism might evolve in
other growing low-income democracies with a
rapidly developing digital media market,
like Ban gladesh or even Indonesia.
In this opening
section, we will briefly outline the
rapidly growing digital media market these
start-ups are navigating and summarise some
key features of how digital journalism
start-ups have developed in other countries
that help us understand the situation
in India. In the second section, we
discuss two cases that are both
for-profit content-based start-ups with a
clear editorial focus, namely the Quint and
Scroll. In the third section, we
examine two cases that are for-‐‑profit aggregators with a greater emphasis on technology, namely Inshorts (formerly NewsInShort) and DailyHunt (formerly NewsHunt). In
the fourth section, we look at two
examples of non-profit content-based start-ups
with very different editorial ambitions, namely
The Wire and Khabar Lahairya.
The three sections
and six case studies are selected to
illustrate a range of different ways
of thinking about the strategic choices
digital journalism start-ups have to make
around content (what kind of journalism
are we doing and how?), distribution
(what is our target audience and how
will we reach it?), and funding (what
are our sources of income and how
will they fund our journalism?). We write
on the basis of interviews done
between October 2015 and February 2016
with 20 people involved in a wide
range of start-ups, as well as
background conversations with outside analysts
and with legacy media players.
The start-ups we
examine have very different origins. Some
were launched by well-‐‑known journalists like Raghav Bahl and
Ritu Kapur of the Quint or Siddharth
Vardarajan and Sidharth Bhatia of The
Wire. Inshorts and DailyHunt, in contrast,
were launched by people with a
technology background. Others, like Khabar
Lahairya, are growing out of legacy
media. At each of them, we have
interviewed key individuals involved in
launching and running each enterprise.
We have singled
out these six start-ups for special
attention because they together represent
some of the variety in the Indian
digital journalism start-up scene. (At the
end of the report, we provide an
overview of a range of other
start-ups.) They also indicate where there
is less variety, in that many of
them are fully or mostly English-language
oriented in a country where most of
the population does not speak, let alone
read, English. At this stage, Hindi
and other local-language digital journalism
start-ups are few and far between,
especially when it comes to original,
on-the-ground reporting.
This report
investigates what digital journalism is and
how it is developing in India. It
is a portrait of a rapidly evolving
situation that aims to help us learn
from early experiences and understand
where things are heading in the
future. We examine individual start-ups not
to predict their eventual success or
failure, but as examples of how
digital journalism is being pursued in
a context that is very different from
that of high-income democracies. We
look at how technology, the media
market, and audience demand is changing
in India. But also at how Indian
journalists are trying to seize the
new opportunities. As Sidharth Bhatia,
co-founder of The Wire, said in our
interview with him: ‘Digital is not
going to be the revolution. The
revolution is going to be the people
behind it.’3
We have talked
to some of those who want to
lead the digital revolution in Indian
journalism. Our aim is to understand the
journalism they do, how they use
digital media to distribute it, how
they plan to finance it, and where
their ventures fit in to the wider
and rapidly evolving Indian media market.
* *
* * *
Digital journalism
start-ups are not alone in pursuing
this opportunity. Legacy news media titles
like Times of India, NDTV, and Dainik
Bhaskar are all investing in their
digital operations and all have greater
reach than most of the start-ups we
examine here. The most important new
international players are from the
technology sector. With China largely
closed off, most major Western internet
players are looking to India for
growth. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other
technology companies have all made major
investments in India. International publishers
like the New York Times, the Wall
Street
Journal, the
Huffington Post, and BuzzFeed have also
tried to establish a presence in
India. Faced with strong domestic brands,
many international publishers have failed
to build much of an audience in
India (and several have scaled back
their investment or pulled out). But
some international technology companies are
doing well. As is the case across
the world, search engines – primarily Google
– and social media – primarily
Facebook – dominate digital advertising. In
2014, search and social media accounted
for an estimated 48% of all digital
advertising in India, leaving everybody
else to compete for the remaining
half.4
The Indian digital
media market in which the journalism
start-ups we examine here aim to
establish themselves has a number of additional
specific features that it is important
to keep in mind. The first is
the comparatively low average revenue per
user in terms of digital advertising.
With around 400 million people online
in 2015 and estimated total digital
advertising revenues of $975m, the total
advertising revenues were only about $2.5
per internet user. The same figure
for China is over $5 per user.
The second is
that the reference price for news and
media content in India is very low.
Print newspapers are sold for INR
5–10 ($0.07-‐‑$0.15) or less,
little more than their recycling value
and heavily subsidised by advertising, and
basic pay television packages cost as
little as INR 100 a month ($1.5).
This means that getting Indians to
pay for digital news may be even
harder than in high-income democracies
where the reference price established by
print newspapers and pay television is
much higher, even in relative terms.
The third is
that – like most of Europe but
unlike for example the United States
– India does not have much of a
tradition of domestic philanthropic support
for news and media. International donors
have supported various news and media
related initiatives in India, but individual
donations are uncommon and larger
foundations like the new ‘Independent and
Public Spirited Media Trust’ (launched in
October 2015) are rare.
Lessons Learned from Start-Ups Elsewhere
No other country
in the world offers the huge
opportunities afforded digital journalism
start-ups in India, but it is still
worth examining lessons learned from start-ups
elsewhere. The first, sobering thing to
note is that most digital journalism
start-ups – like most start-ups –
fail. A frequently repeated estimate is
that 75% of all start-ups across all
sectors fail, and only 5–0% meet
their own stated goals in terms of
growth.5 ‘Failure is the norm’ says
Shikar Ghosh, from Harvard Business School
(while underlining that entrepreneurs should
still be valued for their initiative
and experience even when some of
their ventures do not succeed).6
Looking specifically
at some of the most highly visible
digital journalism start-ups launched in
the United States, it is clear that,
even when launched in a favourable
environment characterised by rapid growth
in both internet use and digital
advertising, start-ups need both money and
time before they break even, let
alone begin to make a profit.
Take-off, to use
the Silicon Valley jargon, often requires
a long and potentially expensive runway.
The Huffington Post was launched in 2005
and reported its first profit in
2010. After it was bought by AOL
in 2011, millions more was invested
in expanding the site’s global reach,
and the site only reported a profit
again in 2015. BuzzFeed, launched in
2006, reported its first annual profit
in 2013.
Politico, launched
in 2007, announced its first profit
in 2011. All of these sites have
pursued a path of ‘users first, profits
later’ that requires significant investment and
patience from their backers. All have
first carved out a distinct niche in
the United States and then turned to
the pursuit of a global audience to
reach the scale necessary to break
even. All of them have been launched
by people with strong networks in
other media companies, leveraged for
visibility and investment, confirming the
wider point that innovators are rarely
young, new entrants and more often
are people who bring confidence, business
knowledge, and social connections accumulated
from prior experience at existing
organisations to a new venture.7 Not
all of them survived. Some otherwise
very impressive start-ups, much lauded at
the time, have not made it –
like the mobile-first news service Circa
and the technology news site GigaOm.
European markets,
some of which have as high levels
of internet use as the United States,
but where country size and language
barriers mean that the markets are
smaller, where digital advertising has
generally grown less rapidly, and where
legacy media are often stronger, have
been less fertile ground for digital
journalism start-ups. One review of nine
leading sites across France, Germany, and
Italy from 2012 found only one
breaking even and concluded that start-ups
needed to have very lean operations,
diverse business models, and carve out
a clearly distinct niche in the
market to survive.8 With limited
opportunities for international expansion in
other languages than English, the European
digital journalism start-up scene has
predominantly been made up of niche
players who have targeted relatively small,
very clearly defined, and often affluent
specific audiences and produce editorial
content that stands out from what
other media provide.
Across the United
States and Europe, even where digital journalism
start-ups succeed in developing new and
interesting forms of content, in finding
an audience, and in establishing a
sustainable business, news markets continue
to be dominated by those legacy
brands that have most successfully moved
online, and digital markets more generally
are dominated by platforms with far
wider scale than any legacy or start-up
news organisation. 9 Only in those contexts
where legacy media are very weak,
have decided not to invest in
digital, or where people have lost
confidence in them do we see digital
brands dominate online news provision.10
In those markets
where journalism start-ups have established
themselves as central players in the
digital media market, the constant
evolution of the digital media environment
– with the rise of social media,
mobile media, and now increasingly online
video – can be as challenging to
navigate for digital-born start-ups as for
older legacy media. First generation
start-ups like Salon and Slate in the
United States, or historically important
portals like AOL and Yahoo, have not
been able to capitalise on their
first-mover advantage.
(Similarly, the
first wave of Indian digital news
sites, like the website of the news
magazine Tehelka and the newspapertoday.com site
of the India Today Group, have not
been able to maintain their first-mover advantage
– though sites like Indiatimes.com and
Rediff.com still have millions of
users.) Established digital news
organisations like the Huffington Post are
finding that they, no less than older
pre-digital legacy media organisations, have
to ‘pivot’ and constantly adapt and
update their editorial, distribution, and
business strategies as the digital media
environment continues to change.
We turn now
to a series of case studies of
how six different interesting Indian
digital journalism start-ups are making
their own decisions about what kind
of journalism they want to do, how
they distribute it, and how they will
fund it. These case studies are based
on interviews with people at each start-
up supported by other data. We start
with two examples of for-profit content-
based start-ups (the Quint and Scroll),
then turn to two for-profit aggregation-
based start-ups (Inshorts and DailyHunt),
and then to two non-profit start-ups
(The Wire and Khabar Lahairya). At
the end of the report, we have
compiled a longer list of other
interesting digital journalism start-ups in
India for reference.
1 For recent research on
developments in Indian media and
journalism, see e.g. Parthasarathi and
Srinivas (2012), Kohli (2013), Mehta (2015),
and Ramaprasad et al. (2015). For a
recent journalistic treatment, see e.g. http://www.caravanmagazine.in/vantage/the-big-five-the-media-companies-thatthe-modi-government-must-scrutinise-to-fulfill-its-promise-of-ending-crony-capitalism.
The most recent review of press
freedom by Reporters without Borders
highlight increasing pressures on journalists
from religious groups, political actors,
and commercial interests: http://rsf.org/en/india.
Painter (2013) presents a range of
journalists’ perspectives on contemporary Indian
journalism.
2 See e.g. http://www.caravanmagazine.in/perspectives/minority-report and
Newman et al. (2015).
3 Sidharth Bhatia,
co-founding editor, The Wire, interviewed
by Arijit Sen.
4 FICCI-‐‑KPMG (2015).
7 Audia and
Rider (2005).
8 Bruno and
Nielsen (2012).
9 Meeker (2015).
10 Newman et al. (2015).
http://www.thehoot.org/media-watch/digital-media/digital-journalism-start-ups-in-india-9393
हिंदी अखबार के 190 साल पूरे हो गए। हर साल हम हिंदी पत्रकारिता दिवस मनाकर रस्म अदा करते हैं। हमें पता है कि कानपुर से कोलकाता गए किन्हीं पं. जुगल किशोर शुक्ल ने ‘उदंत मार्तंड’ अखबार शुरू किया था। यह अखबार बंद क्यों हुआ, उसके बाद के अखबार किस तरह निकले, इन अखबारों की और पत्रकारों की भूमिका जीवन और समाज में क्या थी, इस बातों पर अध्ययन नहीं हुए। आजादी के पहले और आजादी के बाद उनकी भूमिका में क्या बदलाव आया, इस पर भी रोशनी नहीं पड़ी। आज ऐसे शोधों की जरूरत है, क्योंकि पत्रकारिता का एक महत्वपूर्ण दौर खत्म होने के बाद एक और महत्वपूर्ण दौर शुरू हो रहा है।
