India’s Citizen Matters finds a future for local news by empowering the community
To build local news media for Indian cities the size of countries, Bengaluru’s Citizen Matters found a model that empowers both local communities and journalists for impact, write Laxmi Murthy and Jacqui Park.
The future of local news is being rebuilt online with journalism that empowers communities to engage in finding solutions for their own city. One of the leaders in South Asia has been Bengaluru-based Citizen Matters which has built a local model rooted in the activism of the community. The success of this model has fueled its launch in other metros, including in Chennai and most recently Mumbai, backed by a donor.
Stuck in Bengaluru’s notorious traffic jams inhaling noxious fumes, inching past stumps of once-magnificent trees and piles of garbage, the city’s residents can thank Citizen Matters for designing a journalism that “catalyses better cities by empowering the public with the knowledge and understanding to become active and engaged citizens”.
While many local media are trapped in old thinking that puts traditional print reporting online, this citizen-oriented digital news website focuses on less sexy but bedrock issues of civic affairs and governance.
Citizen Matters (CM) launched just as Bengaluru was bursting at the seams, triggered by the IT boom. “Seeing the city unable to deal with sudden explosive growth, I wanted to do something about local issues. I had questions like: why is this flyover project taking so long? Why is the garbage bin overflowing?” says Meera K, who with Subramaniam Vincent (Subbu) and Ashwin Mahesh, launched the media organisation in 2008.
They adopted a magazine format, taking deep dives on hyper local issues, a big departure from the Indian media’s usual obsession with national news..
Sitting in the library of Cornell University in 2005, Subbu had an epiphany: “I was stunned to see that day, the NYT’s metro section had 23 articles of local news (not celebrity, not gossip) about the city’s public affairs scene. I felt there was a deep civic coverage gap in India’s English newspaper market,” he says.
While working in the US, Meera also became fascinated by the power of a local non-profit news magazine in Colorado that was talking about everything from 9/11 to concerns of local university students, all with a unique local voice. “The idea that local media could mesh an independent spirit and community identity was unique,” she says. She went looking for more — and found a gap in her hometown in India.
The founders wanted to go further, beyond the US models of community reporting and investigative work, seeing the power of meshing the craft and principles of journalism with community activism.
“We created a platform for civic participation in journalism to be a more reflective and inclusive publication, that drew from the truth of people’s experiences and push for change, as a guide to newsworthiness determination,” says Subbu.
“Editorial stewardship is critical,” Meera says, “to ensure that what citizens develop is journalism — and not just a rant like on social media. An editor facilitates this process — we handhold and mentor community reporters to tell the story with truth, accuracy and fairness.”
The pair identified a serious local news gap for Indian cities when problems were compounding faster than solutions amidst massive corruption.
“We did bland business work on gaps — demographics, ad-rates, retail market size, distribution, civic association numbers, three different sub-segments (activists, artists and stressed out, busy, citizens). There was no platform for active citizens’ voices that did not diminish their worth,” says Subbu.
“Indian cities are like countries everywhere else. Bengaluru is bigger than Belgium in population. So the idea that we make do with a couple of pages as supplements in dailies never made sense. We have to cover the city like it is a country. City council became Parliament for us. That was our model. Cover the city seriously with the help of community knowledge and involvement like it is a country.”
They were also able to keep costs for investigative story-telling down. “Because we collaborated on documents, litigation access, dates in courts, hearings, etc., our time to cover and percentage of reporters’ time spent tracking was much lower. Fusing community journalism and local investigative work filled gaps of both social-good and professional-boundaries,” says Subbu.
“We have built a collaborative approach that engages citizens deeply, helping them understand change is possible, and sharing the knowledge that can guide them to take action. Citizens bring in lived experiences, understanding of ground reality and practical insights. Professional journalists are critical for their skills in digging out information, and accessing the right sources, providing multiple perspectives,” says Meera.
Community journalism as a relay race
Citizen matters was “hybrid” from the word go: a combination of a professional “core” team of reporters, some freelancers, plus the stories, voices, and opinion/commentary from city residents. Several angel investors, and the founders’ personal savings got a print fortnightly off the block, circulated freely in South Bangalore for four years.
Reporting destructive road widening schemes, or corruption in infrastructure projects were the stuff that the journalism was made of. Subbu describes the process as a “relay race”: “Communities run one leg (issues, identification, sentiments, comments, full stories, eye-witness work, etc.), then pass the baton to professionals who develop an enterprise or investigative piece, which is then followed by more community pieces and so forth.” This “relay race” (more solemnly, “fostering civic participation in journalism”) has even won them awards.
While anti-corruption civic groups are suited to collaborating with journalists, not all of them share common values. “Our hybrid system allows us to sort through the chaos and determine which associations, civic groups, activist networks were in line with the broader democratic value arc of equity and justice (both social and environmental). So there was always intentionality,” says Subbu.
CM also balances the voices of an increasingly active and vocal middle and upper-middle income group, and the needs of marginalized communities, such as those in this award winning story: “Government ignores us because we aren’t educated and rich”.
The pivot to not-for-profit
To commercialise the value of their explainers on civic problems, CM launched a series of guidebooks in 2012: Living in Bengaluru, Get to Know Bengaluru Better, and Buying, Investing and Renting property in Bengaluru. This venture broke even, but couldn’t be scaled for other cities.
By August 2014, it became clear that local news would continue to struggle in a for-profit business model. They had already launched the Oorvani Foundation to raise donations to fund journalism. While there were conversations with a potential buyer for the startup, they decided to hold on to editorial freedom as a non-profit operation through the foundation.
Their inspiration, says Meera, was the NPR and local community radio stations model. From the beginning, they turned to their readers for support, relying on the city’s civic-minded traditions of readers valuing in-depth journalism
Limited ad revenues, poor media support infrastructure and too few grants, together with tighter restrictions from the Modi government on NGOs has forced them to be flexible in fund-raising strategies.
Some grants support specific projects, like the series on Bengaluru’s biodiversity or on climate change and environmental sustainability in Tier 2 cities.
“We make it very clear there will be complete separation of funding from editorial policy, decisions and focus. All our donors have been very professional and have never tried to influence the coverage.”
While some readers contribute, many are still unused to paying for journalism. Limiting the work to subscribers or members would also limit Citizen Matters’ goal of impact. Separating sharing from revenue means that their stories are available for free reads on the website and social media, as well as with other publications as part of their Open Media Initiative such as FirstPost, Prajavani, The News Minute and Himachalscape which have all republished stories from Citizen Matters.
Pre-Covid, live events have been used to drive conversations and bring more voices into the public discourse, not for revenue.
“We just focus on retail donors (individuals), high net worth individuals (HNIs) and foundation grants. Contributions from individual readers make up around 20 percent of total revenue, grants around 25 percent, the rest are from HNI and other sources,” says Meera.
Rich understanding of urban issues
From 2015, Meera worked to keep Citizen Matters afloat in Bengaluru and slowly expanded to other cities (Subbu, meanwhile, had moved to the US for the John S Knight Journalism Fellowship). Meenakshi Ramesh from Chennai came on board as a trustee and coverage expanded to other metros like Delhi, Hyderabad and cities like Pune and Ahmedabad..
This has given the organisation a perspective of urban issues across cities, with similar patterns of development. TR Gopalakrishnan, former Editor-In-Charge of The Week, joined as consulting editor, and they started commissioning writers from many smaller metros.
Their journalism has evolved over time. When they started in Bengaluru, says Meera, they did a “really good job” of covering the local and hyperlocal space. Over time, the dailies started to cover more local news. (“Were we a reason? I think yes to an extent”).
“So we did fewer brief reports and took a step back to look at the big picture of cities — more analysis, more in depth pieces, that could connect the dots and add perspective. Our focus on answering the why (things are broken) and how (they can be fixed) questions — has truly made a difference. This is what we do in the three cities we are present now. And this is something hardly any other media does.”
The post-Covid world has pushed new conversations and reporting on urban issues that has acquired a new urgency in a post-pandemic world. “We see the ongoing crisis is an opportunity to ask what systemic factors affect urban resilience particularly in healthcare, livelihoods and education,” says Meera. Back to the basics, back to the local.
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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
