How India’s Scroll is building the journalistic hits factory
Quality is winning in digital news. But it’s a market that demands hit after hit, thinks South Asia’s digital news leader, Scroll.in, write Christopher Warren, Laxmi Murthy and Jacqui Park.
The architecture of the modern web disaggregates content. So, how do native digital media build a reputation and audience when their stories float free from their brand? Through a succession of journalistic hit-singles according to Scroll.in editor-in-chief Naresh Fernandes.,
“We’ve moved from the age of the LP to the age of the hit single. Now, every track has to hit, bang-bang-bang,” he says. “Otherwise readers will desert you.”
Right now, they’re drawing attention with their latest hit single: an in-depth investigatory report on a systematic police crack-down on demonstrators involved in the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests earlier this year. The attacks on dissent, Fernandes says, has a chilling effect. “There are plenty of cases against people which are all about serving a warning. It’s supposed to have a chilling effect, but you can choose not to be chilled.”
Journalists, he says, have a clear sense of what a masthead — digital or traditional — stands for. But readers don’t: “Our readers are reading 20 different things from around the world and what they’ve found out is not necessarily due to their loyalty.” (That’s why, he says, almost no-one comes to a story through the web page.)
Quality wins out on the web, co-founder (and now CEO), Samir Patil, recently told an Omidyar Network forum. (It’s one of the big surprises of the past five years, says Patil of this, his first rule of the internet). Fernandes emphasises the hope their stories carry a literary quality like their recent powerful piece by Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy on caste and rape.
When he was approached to launch the title, it was envisaged as an Indian Granta. It continues to invest in cultural reporting that can have a longer life than news, such as book and film reviews.
Media need to optimise for discovery. Says Fernandes, that depends on the quality of the journalism and how you tell the story about that quality. For Scroll.in, that’s a mix of in-depth reporting and commentary — sort of a cross between an up-market wire service and quality magazine.
“Early in the day, we realised that click bait is not a good idea. The only thing that works is to stay true to your values — and when you make a mistake, you own up to it.”
Once, media could use their organisational heft to signal the importance of a story, by for example, putting it on the front page and a headline in larger font. Now, says Fernandes, “you need to work out new ways of signaling that a story matters, try to explain the value of the story, for example special investigations.”
To ensure the newsroom can focus on the journalism, Scroll.in distribution (including some algorithmic distribution) is run by a separate arm of the company. It works through optimising for mobile, through their web-site and mobile app, and through social media channels.
“Build an audience, not traffic,” says Patil. It’s not about aspiring for the viral smash.
Fernandes cautions against predictive data analysis supplanting journalistic editorial judgement at the story level. “I used to have Google analytics on my phone but that drove me crazy because I wanted to pull my phone out in the middle of the street to check how we were going.” In fact, he says, it’s never certain why one story will be shared and another not. As a result, he says, he follows daily total traffic, but not each individual story.
Unlike most national media, Scroll.in is headquartered outside Delhi, with Fernandes based in Mumbai and reporters in other centres such as Srinagar, Guwahati and Bangalore. “We don’t really cover cities,” says Fernandes. “We don’t really cover cities. Most of our stories are national stories. Unless it is some big infrastructure project that says something to people in another part of the country, so we need to explain why things are important.” .”
But, he says, “We are not burdened by a vision from Delhi like so many other publications.”
Scroll.in is believed to be the largest (by audience) in India’s growing digital news media scene, claiming to reach about 11 million people — 8 million within India and 3 million in the broader diaspora and overseas users. It launched in January 2014 on India’s Republic Day (“the values of the constitution are the values that drive our journalism,” says Fernandes).
The founder of the business (and now CEO), Samir Patil, is a former US-based McKinsey consultant who returned to India with a plan to enter new media. (Pre-launch, he told the New York Times: “India deserves a better national newspaper than what we have.”) He bought a comics business (Amar Chitra Katha — every Indian child’s piece of childhood) to learn the mechanics of the local industry, before joining with Fernandes to found Scroll with support from philanthropic investors, the Media Development Investment Fund, the Omidyar Network and the Independent and Public Spirited Media Foundation.
It collaborated to grow. In 2014, it partnered with Atlantic Media to launch the Indian edition of Quartz (subsequently bought by Japan’s Uzabase) and, the year after, merged with Hindi language publishing company Satyagrah. It continues to publish a Hindi version under the Satyagrah brand, which runs original stories, not translations from Scroll.in. In 2018, it linked with Deutsche Welle to launch the weekly environmental program Eco India and has grown a significant video operation for this work.
Patil points to 2016 as the break-out year for digital media in India: the moment where the decades-long literacy boom crashed into the smart-phone driven digital explosion. Now, India’s digital media scene is overtaking the old media players.
Scroll.in started intending to rely on advertising, but pivoted to a greater emphasis on subscription and donations in 2018. In 2019, the advertising shift from news forced the organisation (like many Indian publications) to cut back staff, closing some of its city offices and specialities.
Patil says that while there is an important role for advertising, the future is with readers paying. Netflix has showed us the end-point here, he says.
Fernandes remains optimistic: “The people have suffered greatly over the past few years. We had the agitation against the Citizenship Amendment Act showing people are willing to go out. We haven’t seen this in previous years. That means the media will be free because people will want free media.
“Much of the old media serve up propaganda and daily distractions about Bollywood. That gives me confidence that people will see through that and turn to organisations like us,” he says.
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Christopher Warren is a writer, journalist and media commentator for Crikey Daily.
Laxmi Murthy is a journalist, writer and researcher based in Bengaluru.
Jacqui Park is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Media Transition at the University of Technology, Sydney and advises the International Press Institute on membership and strategy.
This story was written for the October 2020 issue of The Story, a fortnightly newsletter on reinventing journalism in the Asia Pacific, published by Jacqui Park. You can sign up for the newsletter here: http://bit.ly/TheStory-AsiaPacific
