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Before you listen to this episode of The Scene and the Unseen, I have a recommendation for
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Do check out Pulliya Baazi hosted by Saurabh Chandra and Pranay Kutasane, two really good
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friends of mine, kick-ass podcast in Hindi.
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I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s when the state of the media looked very different from
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Everyone got the news from a handful of mainstream newspapers and magazines and TV stations.
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And while there may have been some biases here and there, there was by and large a consensus
#
All of us lived in the same world, but that world has changed.
#
The media is fragmented.
#
We all get our news and facts from different sources and there is no longer that consensus.
#
We can all choose the reality we wish to inhabit and can find supporting facts from it, whether
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those facts are true facts or alternative facts as the lingo now goes.
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We can all choose to form our own echo chambers and we can all choose to live in different
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In all of this, what does it mean to be a journalist?
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Are we all just suppliers, fulfilling the demands of a particular segment of the marketplace
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or do we have a dharma that goes beyond that?
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Bhatma.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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In today's episode, I'm going to be talking about the state of the media, a subject I
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covered in an earlier episode with my friend Prem Panekar.
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My guests today are Siddharth Bhatia, founder editor of The Wire, the outstanding independent
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online site at thewire.in and Peter Griffin, my old friend, who now works as a senior editor
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But before that, a brief commercial break.
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Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen.
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Siddharth and Peter, welcome to the show.
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Hi Amit, lovely to be here.
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It's been a while coming but I'm happy I'm here.
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Siddharth, you were mentioning earlier when we were chatting before the show that you
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started working in 1976.
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What brought you into journalism?
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So, one story that I give out is that jobs employment in those days was difficult for
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The services were obviously one option and I was not good enough for it and I was interested
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The State Bank of India probationary exam was the other and banking did not excite me.
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So really by and large, the chances of getting a proper job, employment was difficult.
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The economy was growing a bit slowly and there was the emergency.
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So ironically, joining as a journalist during the emergency looked like a very counterintuitive
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But I got to know that there were some jobs going for trainees in the free press journal
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which was in those days a very, very feisty, small, independent-minded newspaper.
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There was a test of general knowledge, writing skills, etc.
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Some 30-40 people applied, they took three, abysmal salary.
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But I had a kind of fondness for writing, I had actually written for them as a freelancer.
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So got it and that's how I began.
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And as I said, it was the emergency.
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In fact, it was bang in the middle of that 19-month period.
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Difficult times to be quite honest, even I at my level felt those things.
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You couldn't write so many things, copy had to be sent to censors.
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But as I now like to say, you eventually get through the darkest periods.
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And so because those were the days of the emergency and you said you picked free press
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journal in particular because of a feisty, were you then also driven at the time by a
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What was journalism to you?
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What was your duty as a journalist?
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No, I don't think I at least, and there were hardly any training institutes, I don't think
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I don't think that kind of mission, sense of mission was driving any journalist.
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But you always understood a few things instinctively.
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First of all, the emergency had made even largely political types into political animals.
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It didn't show up in the media, but we were kind of there.
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And as a student in a college which had all these lefties hanging around, you know, even
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Bombay was pretty fired up in those days, there was a sense and somehow writers and
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those kind of people came into one's orbit and you got to know about journalism.
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So that sense was there.
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The sense of mission unstated, unwritten, non codified was there in the newsroom and
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it permeated your DNA very, very rapidly.
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In many ways, for example, you sense that you had to write the underdog's point of view.
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The citizen's voice made it to the pages of the newspapers, including the bigger ones
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rather than, you know, business did not dominate the economy the way it does now.
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So if you wrote something about big business, no harm done.
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Business sections were small, there were hardly any papers.
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You covered trade unions.
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Again I wish to make this a special point, the city, this city was a working class city
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at that time, strong trade unions, mill workers unions.
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You went to their press conference, the railway strike had just happened in 74.
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So it came in that not that you were an activist, none of us were allowed to be activists.
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But you realized that you needed to get common voices into the pages of paper.
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So I suppose if you want to term it as a mission, that gets in.
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The mission, of course, you mentioned the truth.
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I don't think that was our mission.
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Our mission was to get the facts right.
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I always say leave the truth to those guys in the Himalayas.
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And I think we have started playing fast and loose with facts.
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Siddharth, when did you see this changing?
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In two or three different ways the changes have been coming.
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One of the big changes was, this will sound very unconnected in the beginning, but when
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salaries started going up.
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In the 80s, a better class of educated journalists came in, magazines sprung up, and businessmen
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started investing, magazines which were glossy came up.
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So there was a demand for journalists from publications.
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There was a lot of movement around.
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And when salaries started going up, two things happened.
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One is that the old wage board system stopped, and the contract system came in.
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And the contract system allowed you to get really handsome salaries, no longer controlled
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The second thing that happened is that journalists started becoming part of the establishment
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because now they were getting paid better, they were wearing better clothes, they were
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moving around in circles, business journalism had come in.
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So your journalists started thinking that they were on equal terms with big business,
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When that happened, you come close to the people you're writing about, and really honestly,
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journalists shouldn't have too close friends from anyone in the establishment, political,
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I'm sure you read the film press or the sports media and all that.
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You'll rarely see critical articles because they're so close, in a sense, embedded.
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The same thing with politics and the same thing with business.
#
The other shift came when in the 90s, this new concept came of invitation price.
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I am sorry I'm taking up too much time, but the invitation price of a publication, I got
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my morning paper for two rupees, one rupee actually when it began.
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This was a Murdoch formula.
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If I'm getting it at one rupee and the cost of production is nine rupees, who subsidizes
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The advertiser subsidize 80, 85, 90% of your price goes to show that the advertiser has
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control over 80 to 90% of your revenue and therefore your space and your thought process
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and your decision-making process.
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So large organizations and everyone says Bennett Coleman started doing it, but the fact of
#
the matter, Bennett did it most successfully and the others jumped in as they have jumped
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in with Medianet, as they have jumped in with other things, paid news and all that kind
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To be quite honest, sometimes if you read the Times of India today, you get a far more
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comprehensive picture of what's happening in the city, in the country and all that because
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they've also invested in people.
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And that, you know, that core strength hasn't disappeared.
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But a lot of people have given that up and started introducing these.
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As a columnist for the Times of India, I'm kind of glad you said that.
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But this shift therefore basically what happened was that you're saying newspapers, instead
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of producing journalism for readers, started producing readers for advertisers.
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People have said publicly, we are an ad platform.
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This is, I think it was Beaver Brook or somebody who said that, you know, news is what you
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And was this driven by compulsion or greed?
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Like, did the earlier model not work for them to have to do this or was this simply more...
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Well, look at it this way.
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If you're chugging along very well and you're happy with a 40-crore turnover, the model
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Because you're making a profit of five crores or six crores or whatever.
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You're a profitable organization.
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Influence is fantastic.
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Everyone says salam to the bosses.
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But if you go from 40-crore turnover to 250, then 500, which model are you going to choose?
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As a businessman who, you know, you have to do right to your shareholders.
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You're talking at this moment.
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In the 80s, I remember a multinational chief executive at once said to a few of us, your
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publication making more money than I am in this country.
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And I've been here for a hundred years.
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So once that happened, the journalists became the tool or the vehicle to deliver content
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and to give those this.
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Now how does it show up in real terms?
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It shows up in the following way.
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The morning when a family person, you know, husband, wife, whatever gets up, reads the
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newspaper, has a cup of coffee, is about to tuck into the cereal.
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And there is a photograph of somebody bleeding on the front page.
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And that day either his or somebody else's product is in the solar space.
#
The company is not going to like it because that's off-putting.
#
So you start feeding Babylon and, you know, keeping the reader happy, the advertiser happy
#
and generally creating this mythical, sweet, growing world.
#
News naturally takes a hit and not all money gets funneled into news gathering because
#
some idiot will want to go to a village and come back with a story of atrocity.
#
And I know I'm simplifying it, but my bigger point is these things started having, it's
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What we are seeing today has been speeded up in the last four years, but it's a long
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process of devaluing the idea of good journalism.
#
Peter, good time for me to turn to you.
#
Siddharth just sort of been talking about how through the 70s until the 90s, the incentives
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for journalists changed.
#
First of all, the incentives changed because they were no longer producing the main product,
#
which was the journalism, which would, you know, attract readers to buy the newspaper,
#
but the readers were the product and they had to sort of, you know, everything had to
#
be therefore done at the behest of advertisers and so on.
#
And this process became exacerbated, so to say, when the business model changed where
#
instead of relying on subscriptions, you start relying on advertising because it's far more
#
Now, as I was, you know, we were chatting earlier while we were on our way to the studio,
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I consider you a bit of an anomaly because even though you work as a senior editor in
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an old media organization, I've always thought of you as someone who is right at the cutting
#
You know, I've known you from the time we were early bloggers and you did a lot of innovative
#
stuff with new media, such as, you know, crowd sourcing relief at the time of the cloud burst
#
and later on the terrorist attacks in Mumbai and so on and so forth.
#
So you've kind of seen the changing state of the media from up close.
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When did you begin to feel that in some way journalism and the media were fundamentally
#
changing because of technology?
#
So I think I saw these changes starting off in the 90s when, before journalism, okay,
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I was a journalist first, a cub in a magazine, then I went off into advertising and spent
#
years there, became a creative director and then got disillusioned.
#
But during that time is when I saw the first elements of technology changing, where, you
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know, I had to do the kind of things like we were doing the first digital artworks.
#
My advertising career went through the age of manual artworks where you are assembling
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stuff on pasteboard to having fights with the studio on saying that you could do digital
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far easier and they were seeing, you know, unable to.
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I made presentations in the office that said here is the price of an email account.
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Here is the cost of a peon.
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If you can ferry your artworks via email, so to speak, you will be saving this much
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So I've come from that.
#
So I, so there's a sort of long winded way of answering your question of seeing the media
#
But I saw it from a different way.
#
I saw it from the enemy camp, so to speak, from the advertising agency point of view.
#
And the big lessons I took from advertising is that when we realized this was, I was fascinated
#
listening to Siddharth all this time, we were the interruption in advertising.
#
They were consuming it for the media and we had to try and make our way there and be interesting
#
because no one bought a newspaper for the ads.
#
At least that was my perception.
#
I'm learning differently from what you guys have been talking about right now.
#
But you know, no one put on the television to watch ads except weirdos like me were fascinated
#
by advertising and put on the television just before Ramayan.
#
Because that's when you saw the biggest chunk of ads altogether and you could see everything
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That's what made me want to become a copywriter.
#
But I saw that change happening as the internet came in and technology came in.
#
I would have had a different perspective on it, I guess, if I had been involved more with
#
print at that time, because I was looking at it from the advertiser side.
#
And so I would not have seen or remarked on the changes that Siddharth just talked about
#
because we were the other end of it at that point.
#
I started writing in the press again, freelance a little bit here and there in the mid 2000s,
#
I've always been a features guy rather than a news guy.
#
And I saw the process of change happening in multiple ways, in the way news was gathered,
#
in the way you could produce news, all of that.
#
I don't have much of a view on ways to pay for it and what it was and what it isn't.
#
That was educative, in the sense that you could have been making money purely off your subscribers
#
and it was purely because of the dropping of prices to sort of kill the market for your
#
competitors that caused the change was something that had not registered on my head.
#
But I guess, I mean, going back, for example, I remember one of the moments where we called
#
also got to know each other was when the tsunami struck and I went through the coast of Tamil
#
Nadu, basically live blogging it in a sense, which sort of made my blog at the time India
#
Uncut just sort of explored into everyone's consciousness.
#
And what you did at that time was you put together a very interesting system.
#
I don't know if you noticed what Peter was doing in those days, which was that you collated
#
SMSs from people all across the affected areas and you put them on one blog so people could
#
get real updates and people could, you know, I forget what you call that.
#
So we did a number of different things.
#
In fact, the guy who came up with those thoughts on using text and whatnot is a chap called
#
Taran Rampasan from the Trinidad and Tobago.
#
And as he has pointed out and others have pointed out, it was Twitter way before Twitter.
#
And I don't think he's got enough credit for that.
#
But anyway, so we did a number of things.
#
So like you were doing it in a state using your blog, using digital to do the old fashioned
#
Yeah, except in real time.
#
So you're not beholden to the new cycle.
#
This is what I came into that, which is now you were not bound by anything, but you were
#
doing it the old fashioned way, right?
#
Your method of delivery and your schedule and everything was now wide open.
#
What we were doing was so the SMSs and all that were part of it.
#
We were collating information for a world that wanted to help.
#
So most of us were in India, there were a few people abroad as well, and we were putting
#
together that information in a way that could be useful for, there was a surge of goodwill.
#
We were able to channel that.
#
We were relying on stuff that people like you did, who went out there and talked.
#
We had this diverse set of networks, people in the NGO world, people who were journalists
#
feeding us information, finding out which are the reliable organizations.
#
So we were doing something in a sense, the kind of task we did was not available to be
#
able to do that in real time before.
#
And we became an aggregator of a variety of other things and became a channel in that
#
So that in a way also, I remember Ashok Malik talking about it, where he said that this
#
was a case of actually an innovation here that had then been exported to other parts
#
And at that time, Google's People Finder, I am told eventually evolved from something
#
that some of the team did there when Hurricane Katrina was happening.
#
One of our collaborators from the Tsunami blog sitting here in Bombay, another one who
#
was in Kuwait at that point, and another woman in London, were operating a call center for
#
people seeking help in Houston using a free Skype number and so on and so forth.
#
So I'm saying the technology kept widening out.
#
What we did, what a whole lot of us were doing, I think at various points, was looking at
#
things and saying, okay, this is a blog, a blog is meant to be a diary, why does it have
#
It can do X, Y, Z things.
#
And you were repurposing as you went along.
#
And what was exciting about those times was that suddenly the means of production was
#
And it was at times like this where you're not relying on mainstream media, you're getting
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important information out there in real time.
#
There are people curating it for you.
#
And even as a regular blogger during those times, this was one of the most exciting things
#
And I always used to think that fine, there'll be a lot of good content, there'll be a lot
#
But you let the people figure it out, you let the markets operate, that's fine, everything
#
And it was tremendously exciting.
#
And at that time, there seemed there's no real downside to this.
#
But then what started happening was, and I still maintain all of this is a net positive
#
and thank God for this technology.
#
But then what started happening was that this led to what I referred to in the introduction,
#
the fragmentation of the media, where suddenly you're not relying where mainstream media
#
essentially falls apart in terms of being the one place that people go to for the news
#
and for the views of the world.
#
And instead, they can pretty much find something that caters to however they want to see the
#
They can form their own echo chambers, they can live in their own little constructed,
#
And what you see today is sort of an extreme version of that where so many people who get
#
their news from WhatsApp forwards, and we are inundated in an age of fake news.
#
And to me, there seems no way around it because all of this content is put out freely by people
#
expressing themselves and you don't want to fight their free expression.
#
And at the same time, there is an organic market for it, which is saying that we don't
#
give a damn about what you think the facts might be.
#
This is what we want to believe.
#
How do we get past this?
#
So a lot of interesting stuff here, especially I was paying extra close attention to the
#
idea of leveraging digital.
#
And the one big takeaway from many of the things you said was that means of production
#
now are a little democratic, democratized.
#
And it is a net positive because I am now increasingly finding out that Twitter, for
#
example, what we call Twitter, but the Twitterverse, that whole is a far more independent voice
#
collectively than the mainstream media.
#
And in India, I can say this with some confidence that the mainstream media is breathing its
#
last if they go on like this.
#
So I want to stick to this point for a minute.
#
For example, TV in India is dead.
#
News TV in India is dead.
#
News TV in India is not just echo chambers, but it is echo chambers for extraordinarily
#
small demographics, all of whom, while knowing that they have confirmation biases which are
#
being met, they know that the screaming at nine o'clock about how awful the opposition
#
is, et cetera, they know that it is meeting those biases.
#
For example, let me put it this way, does anybody who follows any of these noisy channels
#
want their son to become that and say, when you grow up, I want you to become this?
#
I think there are more and more children nowadays being named under, but I think that would
#
be an aspiration for a lot of people.
#
My point is everyone has an instinctive understanding, but this formula, and Fox TV in India, in
#
the US has been successful for a long time, but this formula has a self-limiting.
#
But when you say News TV is dead, if I may ask you to elaborate and we can stick on this
#
So you're not saying from a point of view of some journalistic ideal, but commercially
#
Yes, because look at the investment you're putting in, a simple channel with bureaus
#
and equipment, equipment is getting miniaturized, but people have not switched to it yet in
#
You still have to pay satellite fees.
#
You still have to pay the cable in this country.
#
And is the result in polarization a result of that?
#
Because it's a race to the bottom now, it's a race to get eyeballs.
#
I don't want to go into deep detail about it, but if you were to do even a cursory research,
#
the set-top boxes are more in Ahmedabad than in the entire Northeast.
#
Where are you going to pitch your argument to?
#
You're not interested in the Northeast, firstly getting people there, secondly getting people
#
all excited, thirdly what will the advertisers say?
#
So if it's skewed like this, commercially you've already geared your model around that.
#
Then you've set up 200 growers to set it up.
#
Still there are 437 other news channels.
#
So you've got your small universe and maybe you're making money.
#
Government changes, are you going to change?
#
Are you still going to be in the same mode?
#
All those journalistic factors will feed into the larger economic reality.
#
The larger publications are thriving, doing very well, literacy is growing up, increasing.
#
The newspapers themselves have solid revenues and they have not totally sold themselves
#
You can still read a newspaper, but worldwide the bigger newspapers, so many have shut down.
#
As this kind of digital world and technology world, I'm a dinosaur, but the person who's
#
now 28 already consuming in quotes the news from those kinds of sources is reading everything
#
I don't think anyone gets five newspapers at home.
#
I still do, but they are not going to.
#
So your sense is eventually as this trend grows, even the Times of India, Hindustan Times or
#
In the long run, they will have to modify, adapt, perhaps have smaller circulation, up
#
their journalism game, maybe open new bureau, consolidate, many papers will come together.
#
In 2005, when I came back to India after living abroad for a while, five newspapers started
#
in this city within six months, DNA, Mirror, Hindustan Times, Mint, and one more.
#
DNA's budget in those days, marketing budget, you remember those ads, was humongous.
#
Hindu was coming into Bombay, et cetera.
#
So the mirror was the Times reaction.
#
Now those heydays are gone, journalists are losing jobs, newsrooms are tiny.
#
So it's going to have a commercial impact.
#
It's a myth to think that setting up a digital site is actually quite a modest investment.
#
It is not because even with those modest investments, you still have to invest in people and people
#
are very, very expensive.
#
News gathering is very, very expensive.
#
But it allows us to be nimble, sharing his name of the game.
#
Some freelancer from somewhere will pop up high quality and deliver.
#
A lot of journalists are getting fed up.
#
I want Middle East coverage.
#
I have a Middle East site whom I have never met in my life.
#
I shake hands across the digital world.
#
They say, take our stories.
#
So my coverage is going to get beefed up.
#
So that's going to happen.
#
Television, the first two companies, NDTV, et cetera, were nimble operations started
#
They didn't come from Times of India.
#
The Times of India's first foray into television was a flop.
#
Hindustan Times had home TV, it was a flop.
#
You guys had something in the Hindu, you know, but Raghav came out of nowhere and started
#
And the same thing is happening with digital.
#
So what at the moment we are doing and several others are doing is bringing strong journalism
#
You were talking about how you live blog.
#
You may be in a responsible person, but filtration is critical.
#
The process is because there are several fake news while I will tell you not a single Christian
#
has died in this because Christian missionaries are paying for their carolite apple.
#
I think people want to read, they love the taste of chutney and they want their chutney,
#
but they can't live on it.
#
So hygiene, news hygiene, nutrition, et cetera, will have to come in the game.
#
And some will start, some will die.
#
We also lead a very financially precarious existence and all that.
#
Journalism will thrive, whether it's a blogger bringing news and facts.
#
As you said, we were aggregating just simple facts of what was happening in people's appeals.
#
You can do it via Twitter and Facebook and several other platforms.
#
But media is an extremely dynamic situation at the moment.
#
On that wonderfully hopeful note, we'll take a commercial break with the promise that we'll
#
come back to discuss darker matters.
#
So it's been another great week on IVM podcast, just like it is every week.
#
You know, if you aren't following us on social media, you should.
#
We're IVM podcast on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
#
Send us a message, send us a comment.
#
You know, let us know what you think about the stuff that we're doing and the stuff that
#
This week on Cyrus's, Cyrus is joined by writer Rishali Talang.
#
She speaks about jumping from TV to books and her memories of producing MTV Loveline.
#
On the scene and the unseen, Amit is joined by founder editor of The Wire, Siddharth Bhatia
#
and senior editor of The Hindu, Peter Griffin.
#
They discuss the current state of Indian media and the role of journalists today.
#
This week, Indranil Guha, co-founder of Finpeg, talks to Anupamant Paisa-Paisa about Alpha
#
Last week on Know Your Kanun, lawyer and host Amber Rana took us through the history and
#
scope of Section 497 and the time when adultery was first recognized as an offense.
#
On the Kinetic Living podcast, Urmi spoke to IVM's co-founder Kavita Rajwade about
#
her love for functional training, food and the morning workout routine that she strictly
#
And again, guys, I just really want to remind you, you know, I mean, like the best way to
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spread the word about podcasting is you, you're our ambassadors.
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Please go out and tell a friend.
#
Ask them to listen to something that you have enjoyed and that you think that they would
#
And with that, let's move on with your show.
#
Welcome back to the scene and the unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Siddharth Bhatia and Peter Griffin.
#
So Siddharth, when we were on the break, you were just talking about how you love Twitter,
#
but isn't Twitter also a reflection with what's happening in the media to our discourse in
#
the sense that it's incredibly polarized?
#
What I find on Twitter is that everything has become shrill.
#
All discourse has become personalized where people don't talk to each other.
#
They talk past each other.
#
And often they are, you know, virtue signaling in different ways to lift their status within
#
And dialogue is almost impossible.
#
So it's not a dialogue platform, let's be honest, nor was a typical newspaper.
#
Because I am a great admirer of the newspaper model.
#
So when people rubbish it to say, oh, who are these editors on high?
#
The editors on high are people with great amount of qualifications.
#
They have studied the subject or they expected to have studied the subject.
#
Even what they write, forget the reporter, passes through three layers, news editor can
#
look at it and fact check and it comes out after a 24 hour cycle.
#
So that thing that you say, there is a, you know, I will not name this person, a very
#
smart alecky, media commentator, stroke, you know, he writes and talks about the media
#
all over the place, very hip, very this who once said I was at some meeting to an audience
#
of students that the day of the editorial is over, editorial comment, because who are
#
these bunch of old farts trying to tell you what you should think?
#
And you know, I can kind of break it down and rubbish it.
#
But basically what I'm trying to say is filtration in a newspaper is critical.
#
But it was not a dialogue, letters to the editor and which got cut and very few people
#
papers really give it much thought was no dialogue.
#
You didn't like a piece, you lumped it.
#
The editor has no dialogue, but there is a chance that somebody will respond.
#
There is that small band and world of people who will talk to you, engage with you.
#
I don't engage with anybody who trolls me at all.
#
I block if I don't block 10 people a day, I feel like there's something.
#
So you've got your mosquito swatter with you and you're swatting and that gives you great
#
I stopped blocking the other day I met somebody and said, well, you blocked me and I'm known
#
him for about 30 years and I had blocked him, but socially I was a bit embarrassed.
#
I thought I had muted you.
#
And he's listening to this now, so your cover is blown.
#
So sure there are those, but I welcome criticism.
#
There have been times when mistakes have been pointed out.
#
I welcome that people have said, Hey, I can't read your website.
#
I welcome that people have said, you know, why are you biased in the favor of X or against
#
Y if it looks like an intelligent person, the profile says, you know, reasonably sensible
#
That also, I will perhaps if this comment is sensible, but if she or he is a coffee
#
snob out, I don't do coffee snobs, a lot of coffee snobs on their Twitter, but I do respond.
#
That's my feedback and what I also like to tell myself, I must respect my Twitter followers
#
And what you talk about, you know, the importance of the editor and being a filter for content.
#
If you think about it in one way, all of us are our own filters.
#
That's what we use social media for.
#
Like what you will find on my Twitter feed will be quite different from what is on yours
#
or on Peter's because we've all already been our own editors in terms of what we want to
#
But I can follow everybody and get a variety of views.
#
I'm not saying send me this thing every morning, which only there are people who subscribe
#
to let's say us, but they would subscribe to something that's not us, except that subscribing
#
to a rabidly right-wing lying website fill in the blanks.
#
Because I know you have a huge audience, so I don't want to get into legal issues.
#
You're welcome to say whatever the hell you want.
#
But that is not the counter to that is not the wire is not that the counter to the wire
#
is to say, look, I like you, but I think your views are too extreme or too not to my liking.
#
I will read something that balances.
#
So here's whatever it may be.
#
Here's a subject I want to explore.
#
How does journalism today make money?
#
Is a wire profitable, if I may ask?
#
Or is there a part to profitability?
#
So we there is no question of profitability, because we are donation led, we are not for
#
We began with three of us putting in I say this, we had a lot of things lacking, we had
#
That's all one lakh, one lakh, one lakh, that's all.
#
And for months, we never took a salary, we worked out of each other's homes.
#
When I went to Delhi, I stayed with my friends, they came down, they stayed with me.
#
That's how we managed some old karma must have played a role because for about 10 months
#
or 12 months, we never paid people.
#
But because we just called in favor, left, right and center halfway through, people realized
#
this was a platform worth writing on.
#
So more people started writing.
#
After about eight months, a high net worth individual came to us and says, I'd like to
#
He was turned out to be super generous, gave us 50 lakhs.
#
And since then, we've got money from foundations from grants.
#
And now, of course, we have a very active online donation program.
#
So there's no question of profitability, but we are always short of what we want.
#
You know, what you just said both gives me great hope and also great despair, great hope
#
because it's wonderful to know that there are people for whom journalism is a labor
#
of love and they will do it no matter what.
#
And you know, they will fight the odds to do it like you guys started it from your homes.
#
But it also gives me despair that one has to depend on the passion of individuals and
#
on the magnanimity of philanthropists here and there and the common donor, rather than
#
actually be able to make money from it.
#
And that makes me very sad.
#
And my question here, Peter, is, and we were discussing this earlier, is that, look, I
#
think everyone who reads Wire or who reads Scroll, another excellent magazine, or Prakriti,
#
my own magazine, everyone who reads any of these publications is paying for it.
#
They're paying for it because they're spending a certain amount of time on it.
#
There's opportunity cost, except there's no way for the publisher to capture that value.
#
Now, earlier, the old school value was you bring out a newspaper, readers read it, you
#
capture that through advertising.
#
That is clearly not working.
#
You know, you've worked with Network 18 for many years and now with the Hindu.
#
Advertising no longer is enough to make money of digital media.
#
Subscriptions, really, I believe the KEN is doing very well and more power to them, but
#
haven't really taken off to that extent.
#
How do you make money with journalism is my question to both of you.
#
Okay, so, you know, it wasn't just the subscription price that killed that caused the introduction
#
price that caused problems.
#
What came up was that no one, I think, from the beginning, learned how to deal with the
#
internet because even if you're paying two bucks for your newspaper and I could get the
#
same thing online for free, paying the cost of my internet subscription, which was pretty
#
high at that point, you know, prices have dropped there, but we got accustomed all over
#
the world for the internet to give us stuff for free.
#
And if the internet didn't give us stuff for free, if somebody tried to, you know, charge
#
you money for it, there were others who were giving it free.
#
So in a similar way that you couldn't combat the two rupee invitation price and keep your
#
money because the moment someone else succumbs, you have alternatives who are giving you,
#
you know, your news at lower rates.
#
Then the guy who's charging higher will say, okay, fine, we don't, even though that's,
#
you know, a trivial amount is the cost of a Vada power at that point or whatever it
#
is, you would still go to the cheaper alternative.
#
Now the problem is I don't think any of us in the traditional media have really learned
#
how to, what we think enough about the internet.
#
I think that in India we have had a bit of a cushion.
#
In the more developed parts of the world, newspapers closing down, shutting shop, slashing
#
the sizes of their newsrooms and all of that.
#
In India we have a few fortunate things happening.
#
One is that we're still a poor country.
#
We're still a country with a large amount of, a large gap in literacy.
#
There are new literates coming in every day.
#
We're not a mature market in that sense, right?
#
So when new people are coming in every day, they want something to consume in terms they
#
want information, they want to be able to read it.
#
It has given us the illusion that the media is continuing to grow because there are new
#
And when you come in newly to literacy, you're not going straight to literature, right?
#
You look at functional information first.
#
What is the price of X?
#
Where do I get good sales for, you know, find my markets for my produce, find out the basic
#
information and then the media delivers that.
#
But we have, we could have been using this time, I think broadly in the Indian media
#
to figure out how to find paying models.
#
Whether it is as Siddharth was talking about where you've decided that your funding is
#
going to come from philanthropists and donors or the Ken model, which is entirely subscription
#
based or the hybrid models or some other stuff we haven't thought of yet.
#
How are you going to deliver that content?
#
We should have been having these conversations and been thinking about it for years now.
#
We haven't because we've been growing in smaller and smaller jumps, but we've been still continuing
#
The fragmentation that we were talking about, all the other stuff that comes in, you know,
#
just one little point out there.
#
We're talking about Twitter and everything and the thing is that all the Twitter and
#
early blogs and everything, all the big accounts, mainstream media noticed them, gave them that
#
and you know, your credibility came from having been written about.
#
The tsunami help blog came, got credibility from being featured in XYZ and then the New
#
York Times picking it up and then suddenly we were world famous for like five days.
#
All of that stuff, there's still a huge amount of power in the media is what that tells me.
#
Things are being discussed in opposition to the media, but you're still opposing that
#
It's still important enough to oppose.
#
So that gives me in a strange kind of way hope that enough people take enough time to
#
combat and debunk or fight against what they see as the oppression.
#
That's the more important.
#
It's because they see value in it that they think it's important enough to counter.
#
Even the ones who are saying this is all bloody fake news are still taking the trouble to
#
say that it is fake news.
#
It's worth attention and that in a strange way actually gives me hope that you still
#
think it's important enough to fight that the old fashioned battles are still being
#
fought in new media kind of ways.
#
That someone with the solid credentials of Siddharth and the team out there are still
#
out there being able to deliver this stuff.
#
This does give me hope, but I'll tell you where the gap is and what the dilemma is.
#
Let's say that it gives both of us hope that someone like Pratik Sinha of Alt News is doing
#
It's just magnificent, which is basically debunking fake news all the time.
#
It also gives me great hope that he has so many followers and Alt News has so many readers.
#
What worries me is that they are not supremely profitable.
#
That is sort of where the gap is.
#
I understand that some of it is because of inertia in our mindsets.
#
A lot of newspapers sell simply because I'm used to the daily newspaper coming to my house
#
and I just don't cancel my subscription.
#
They also sell because advertising in newspaper is also information.
#
It's very important to understand.
#
Do people buy newspapers for advertising?
#
40% of a newspaper buyer is because of classifieds, even today.
#
Because we don't have Craigslist.
#
A lot of people still want to buy and sell cars via that rather than the digital world.
#
A large advertising display is also read by a lot of people.
#
Advertising is a critical part of the information package.
#
Those are the two kinds of inertia I was mentioning.
#
One is that people who wouldn't otherwise read newspapers still pay for them in one
#
The other one is that in the early days of the internet, no one wanted to pay for anything.
#
Part of the reason is the friction in payment.
#
Who's going to give you a credit card detail?
#
How do you make micro payments happen?
#
Most of that friction has actually gone away now and you can set up systems to do it really
#
easily and yet that model hasn't really taken off.
#
So I think part of your answer is in your question and that is that I can point out
#
several things today which were unheard of and people were skeptical about.
#
A lot of newspapers even in India are now selling their archives.
#
You have to subscribe for the archives.
#
I think your own newspaper, The Hindu, after seven days you need to pay to read anything
#
before seven days if I'm not mistaken or register at least.
#
Payment is going to come.
#
You can't read The Economic Political Weekly.
#
A lot of people want to read it.
#
You have to subscribe for the online version.
#
So everyone said nobody pays.
#
The New York Times had a huge flop when they tried to introduce payment in the early days.
#
Then they said, okay, columnist is payment, the rest is free.
#
Now only three articles or five articles or whatever and all the legacy brands around
#
the world in every country, whether it's Der Spiegel or whether it is Le Monde or whether
#
it's The Economist, The Times, in London, The Guardian not.
#
But everywhere else you've got to pay.
#
Business Standard is trying it here.
#
I don't know how successful they are.
#
But then Business Standard's own columnist post their articles on their blog.
#
So you are getting something.
#
But it's going to change.
#
It's going to definitely change.
#
Who thought donor-led news media would take off?
#
Now there are, as you said, a hybrid model.
#
There are at least two or three people who said they call it subscribe.
#
So can we see the day when the Wire and Alt News are hugely successful by themselves and
#
So the model for hugely successful is flexible.
#
I would say we are not going to become a 5,000-crore company anytime soon.
#
But if I can get, say, 35% of that influence, 50% of that influence and a piece in the Wire
#
gets the attention of policymakers, I think we've got it.
#
So I would love to make 5,000 crores and probably we'll put 4,999 crores into news gathering.
#
As a promoter, I don't get anything.
#
My salary is low and my dividend is zero.
#
So there's no money for me.
#
But I would love to do it.
#
Who would have thought that Vinod Dua, long forgotten, resurrected by us in the sense
#
that mainstream channels wouldn't touch him, would have a confirmed subscriber base on
#
And that's an immaculature.
#
700,000 is our YouTube channel.
#
We are people who know nothing about that world.
#
Does he make a lot of money?
#
YouTube gives us advertising.
#
It's very easy to become a YouTube one-put advertising.
#
I mean, they are very, very cooperative.
#
But we don't have an ad manager and we don't have a show sponsor on our channel.
#
And that's because we can't afford an advertising manager.
#
But tomorrow when we can afford an ad manager, that person will get sponsorships for that.
#
I'll give you another tiny example.
#
You know, these summits held by newspapers and all that kind of thing, right?
#
And there are a lot of these award shows, cocktail parties, promotions, brand promotions,
#
all kinds of innovative names.
#
I think almost all, maybe barring a few here and there, are free events.
#
Of course, there are tickets for certain shows, certain summits and all that.
#
We've been holding small ticketed events, small.
#
Arun Chauri talks to Karan Thapar, 800, 700 people, tickets sold at something like the
#
first five rows or something, 2000 rupees.
#
Who would have thought?
#
You know, so these are tiny drops in the ocean, but things do change.
#
You know, there are websites which are trying the subscription model.
#
They may not succeed today.
#
Some are trying the embedded advertising model.
#
Some are getting, so things are changing definitely.
#
We are innovative enough.
#
From where, you know, let's move on to from the commerce to let me ask you guys about
#
the media climate in India, given what's happening politically, given that there is this interplay
#
between money and power that does affect the way the mainstream media reports on things.
#
For example, you pointed out earlier that Jai Shah's case on the wire was not reported
#
by any of the mainstream.
#
No, it was reported the next day, but the emphasis was on the case that he was to file
#
And no one called you for a comment.
#
Don't think anyone called and used our comment in any substantive way.
#
And I also, I mean, you know, others may have got private phone calls.
#
I did not get a single call of solidarity and I've been in the business for a while.
#
So the big newspapers reported it and you've seen with Rafal, Olaan contradicts Mr. Modi's
#
statement is the headline, obvious headline it should be.
#
And it says that it sparks off a, you know, crossfire, a political crossfire in India.
#
That's hardly the news.
#
I was shocked to see one of the headlines in one of the mainstream newspapers.
#
I won't take the name, but we are recording this by the way on September 24th, so it'll
#
come out a bit later, but it's in the context of what's going on now.
#
I'm just letting the listeners know.
#
And does this worry you?
#
Yes, of course it worries me.
#
I'm a practicing professional journalist.
#
I think my duty is to my readers all the time.
#
You know, this sounds like a grand mission statement, but it's there embedded in my,
#
so of course it worries me that the media state in India at the moment.
#
As I said, I'm a professional journalist.
#
I'm not constantly motivated by what the reader may feel.
#
I don't want to be second guess or second guess that reader of mine.
#
I think she's intelligent, articulate, and if she comes to us, definitely curious and
#
eager to know what's going on.
#
But I do instinctively, intuitively realize and understand that ultimately all this is
#
to bring my reader up to speed with what's happening.
#
And when I see that reader being taken for granted with this kind of thing, how many
#
people have turned around and told you that, you know, we don't trust the big media anymore?
#
Some have said it because it's a kind of a, you know, everyone says it.
#
Some say it because it's not meeting their requirement, but some say it because they're
#
not getting what they think is authentic information.
#
If we are, of course, called all kinds of things, you know, Raoul Gandhi is funding
#
If they were funding us, we'd be in a 10 times better situation.
#
We ran to mouth basically, but yes, it does worry me.
#
You know, when I speak to students, I'm reminded of something that I may have read years ago.
#
By the way, I was never told about these things by any senior.
#
There was no mission statement in my organization or anywhere else, but it gets into your system.
#
But I remember reading, I think it was H.L. Menken who said, you know, journalism is about
#
comforting the afflicted and affecting the comfortable.
#
And I think we are comforting the comfortable.
#
And afflicting the afflicted by ignoring them.
#
But you know, all the stuff that is appearing is about so and so, IIT topper gets this salary.
#
This is kind of mollycoddling your reader with all kind of good news.
#
Indian cricket is covered as though we are the greatest in the world.
#
And I'm sorry, we are not.
#
England did not win alone.
#
There's a fantastic headline in one of the papers in Shekhar Kapoor's film, Elizabeth,
#
went to the Oscars and it's a foreign production with a foreign cast, with a director who happened
#
to be of Indian ethnic origin.
#
And it lost in the mainstream, they got only one or none awards in the Oscars.
#
And the headline in this paper in Delhi was, and the Oscars goes to apartheid.
#
I mean, look at the sheer idiocy about this statement.
#
You have firstly no idea what apartheid is.
#
And secondly, is it racism?
#
Or were they better films?
#
Is the world against us?
#
I mean, this sense of victimhood, this sense of wanting to win all the time.
#
Victimhood and populism kind of go together.
#
This is, I'm sorry to say, Deutschland, we've got Alice all over again.
#
So I'll end this episode by asking you guys one question with two parts each, which is
#
what makes you hopeful and what makes you despair about the state of the media in India
#
Peter, let's start with you.
#
So hope is that we're having these conversations, for instance.
#
You work with Pragati, which is a startup in that sense, it was a relaunch of the magazine.
#
You're finding ways to fund it.
#
You're sitting here and doing this podcast and have been doing it for a while, have built
#
up readership and are not making money on it, but you're doing it to build an audience.
#
Siddharth and the team that he's working with have found ways to deliver old fashioned journalism
#
And as I was saying just a few minutes ago, that people find the media still worth fighting
#
with or against is actually makes me optimistic because there's enough power there.
#
Those are all, I see young people, there are the young people who will be happy to reproduce
#
press releases for sure, but I've seen a huge number of young people who are still burning
#
with that desire to go out there and tell truths, find out, dig.
#
Young people in my organization, interns who are willing to, we had a kid in here who didn't
#
even do a one month internship.
#
She interned with us for six months doing a full time college course just so she could
#
get experience and for free, as in she wasn't even getting paid expenses.
#
All these things give me optimism for the future.
#
What makes me despair is this entire thing of the internet enabled, I guess in some ways
#
the polarizations that have happened that we will retreat and be content to have our
#
opinions confirmed rather than challenged.
#
For me, I've always, I mean, this is doing what you, I know you don't like very much
#
virtue signaling, but for me, conversations like this are bloody interesting because I'm
#
learning about things that I don't know anything about and it's going to make me sound like
#
I'm trying to make myself look good, but I think there's not enough of that, that we
#
want our opinions confirmed more than challenged, that we want to be made to feel good rather
#
All of that feeds into one another and it's sad that as Siddharth was also just saying
#
a little while ago, it's why are people pissed off with the mainstream media?
#
We need to do a lot of introspection on that as well.
#
There are lots of things I think that we in the big media have not got right by any means
#
and that's why people were so ready to believe the worst of us and if we don't figure those
#
out and find ways to deal with that and if we don't figure out how to make it commercially
#
viable to produce good journalism, we're screwed, but I hope we will while I'm still earning
#
a salary in the media and I've not found some other way to make an income, but it makes
#
So despair, I thought I was spooning out the despair substantially.
#
My despair is, apart from all the things I mentioned, is that a lot of fantastic youngsters
#
who are coming to this profession, full of passion, full of ideas, full of willingness
#
to do work and journalism schools are full as you know, but are either not willing or
#
not encouraged to walk the streets and get the story, Google, mobile phone, Wikipedia,
#
phone code, formula and there it goes and you need bosses who say sorry, not working.
#
So when I meet a, we've just taken a guy who will go to extraordinarily remote places
#
and come back with stories on not the usual rural distress and all that, but and not even
#
rural hope, that's the other thing, everything should not be hope or distress, but come back
#
with state of the ground, a state of the grassroots stories, you know, bread and butter, legwork
#
and I, if any young reporters listening to me, I would say to her, please go out and
#
When you were talking about how you travel down the coast of Tamil Nadu, you were doing
#
old fashioned solid ground reporting.
#
You could have easily, you know, sat there and kind of assemble this, that and the other.
#
So I, that's a professional despair that really, the hope is equally kind of, it's actually
#
I get invited to speak to students everywhere.
#
I'm in Pune the day after tomorrow, speaking to, at a university, large numbers turn up.
#
I like to think that we must be doing something which wants them to connect and listen to
#
us, not because we are evangelists.
#
I'm a corporate evangelist because I'm constantly looking for money, but we are not media evangelists
#
But that gives me hope.
#
Student union elections in JNU have given me hope, not because the leftists won, because
#
they saw something about uniting that these opposition parties have not been able to understand.
#
So all those things give me hope.
#
You know, people say, oh, the emergency all over again, rubbish.
#
The emergency was terrible.
#
Things are not good, but it was terrible.
#
But what really pisses me off and despairs is that the establishment, media establishment
#
is letting down the site and its own staff and its own readers.
#
So I would end on when I see all these small efforts popping up and when you said somebody
#
is making money on subscriptions and all that, they are not successful in a huge way.
#
The Times of India is 180 years old, but in a few years, you are going to see more and
#
more youngsters coming and saying, hey, this is not working.
#
I want to start something of my own or join somewhere, learn and then go out and do something
#
So on the whole, I think I've been listening to you intently, Peter, technology is going
#
to be a huge driver of ideas and innovation.
#
And if those old and new worlds can be married effectively, I think we are onto a damn good
#
That's a great note of hope to end on more power to all the young people listening to
#
the show want to make a change and more power also to my fellow old fogies here, Peter and
#
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
#
You ain't no old foggy, Amit.
#
Well, relative to the young people who are going to be.
#
He said the two old foggies.
#
I said to my fellow old foggies, I regard myself perfectly as an old foggy, irrelevant to this
#
new world, but please someone make it happen.
#
Thank you very much, Amit.
#
If you enjoyed listening to the show, please do go over to the wire.in, donate if you can.
#
You can follow Siddharth on Twitter at Bombaywala, B-O-M-B-A-Y-W-A-L-L-A-H. And you can follow
#
Peter at Zigzagly, Z-I-G-Z-A-C-K-L-Y.
#
You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A. You can browse past episodes of The Scene
#
and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in or thinkpragati.com.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
Hey, this is Shiladitya Mokopadhyay and I'm Amit Doshi.
#
And we host Shunya One, the weekly podcast based on conversations about startups, entrepreneurship,
#
across verticals like food tech or fintech and digital payments, logistics, e-commerce
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and of course, all the stuff from VCs and investors as well.
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Over the course of our run, we've had some really great entrepreneurs.
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We've had Zishan Hayat from Topper, Naya Sagi from Baby Chakra, Ankur Sachdev from
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Shared Chat and Akrit from Haptic among many, many more.
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And we continue to get some of the biggest, smartest and most innovative folks in the
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country in this space coming here, talking to us, all for you guys to listen to.
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So tune in every Tuesday on the IVM app website or wherever you get your podcasts from and
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get a chance to be a part of all of the tech banter and entrepreneurship conversations
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All you have to do is request an invite on ivmpodcast.com slash junior one.
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Tune in every Monday on the IVM podcast app to IVM likes.
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