The NewsMinute found an audience gap for its journalism mission in southern India
The NewsMinute centres its southern Indian audience, minute by minute, in a news landscape dominated by the capital in Delhi, as Laxmi Murthy and Jacqui Park report.
“If a mango falls from the Delhi tree it’s important, but if two mangoes fall from a Bangalore tree, it doesn’t matter,” quips Dhanya Rajendran, co-founder and editor-in-chief of digital news portal The NewsMinute (TNM) headquartered in Bangalore.
Rajendran wanted to fill the gap — not with mangoes, but with journalism focussed on the four (now five) southern states in India because, she says, regional media matters.
“ I strongly believe that Kerala and Tamil Nadu behave politically differently than the rest of the country because they have better regional media. The focus should be on regional media.”
Now, soon to launch a membership program and product aimed at the overseas diaspora, TNM is also planning to eventually publish in other local languages.“I want more niche sites in regional languages rather than English, ”says Rajendran, “To make a difference in India we’ll have to do it in languages.”
The TNM journey started in 2014, when Rajendran took her eight years experience as South India bureau chief at a national television channel and a few years in print media, along with modest personal savings to build journalism focussed on the 250 million people int, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and, later, Telangana after it became a separate state.
She set up TNM in 2014 with her husband Vignesh Vellore, (now the CEO) and veteran journalist Chitra Subramaniam famous for breaking one of modern India’s biggest stories — the “Bofors scandal” involving then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.
Her attempt to fill the gap in the Delhi-centric news media began low-key. “When we started, there was just me and two other people, so I was not confident that I could do enough reporting. I started out thinking I would be an aggregator of good southern India stories from regional media and newspapers. After two or three months of aggregating, the journalist in me wanted to do my own stories,” she said.
Now with a staff of 30 and bureaus in all five state capitals, TNM is the go-to portal for stories in and from the south.
Despite being named one of “India’s best entrepreneurs” in Fortune India’s 40 Under 40 in 2018, Rajendran is a journalist at heart and says that she plunged in without a business plan, confessing that she thought of the internet as a free place to “put up anything you want.”
After a year and a half of surviving on her and her husband’s savings and revenue trickling in from Google ads, they took their first funding from media investor Raghav Bahl and scaled up.
Leveraging feminist sensibility
While ad revenue has increased with traffic, it is still not enough. Sponsored content through TNM Marquee, which promises a “pan-India reach with a South focus” is run by a separate team, with strict rules and disclaimers to distinguish it from news. Apollo Hospital, Airtel, Amazon and Netflix have featured in the section.
Another experiment to generate revenues was by working with NGOs and the Telangana police, sensitizing them on how to deal with trafficking victims.
“It’s about making money and also doing something you believe in. When that falls into place it makes it that much easier,” says Rajendran, who is planning to replicate this success with other police forces in the South.
Small city-focussed events about specific topics related to road traffic sponsored by an automobile company, also brought in revenue. And plans are afoot to organise larger events on women in cinema, popular culture etc.
A strongly women-driven team (65 percent of the team are women), mostly young, helped steer TNM to venture into a fresh kind of journalism. “Even if it is a crime story, the guys in our office, the crime reporters, also know what questions to ask about rape and sexual abuse, without further victimising women, ,” says Rajendran, who describes TNM as “a very feminist organisation” with a huge focus on child and women’s rights. Popular culture, politics or crime, the stories are imbued with feminist thinking.
“I may be over rating our impact,” Rajendran says, “but I think it’s been quite important.
“I’ll give you a small example. Four years ago, a young woman was killed at a Chennai railway station. The guy who hacked her to death was a stalker. We had written about how Tamil cinema glorifies stalking like no other movie industry does.
“We got a lot of flak for that article, with people saying that there is no empirical proof, and cinema doesn’t impact people. Over the last two to three years we have mainstreamed that so much that now everybody does it.
“People will now not write about popular culture without a feminist perspective. A lot of writers thought similarly but were held back by their organisations because they thought the backlash would be too severe. We didn’t care about the backlash.
“The entertainment industry in India works like this: If you write something that pisses them off, they will not talk to you, they won’t give you another interview.”
Building a community
The Covid-19 shock has changed the newsroom with field reporting drastically restricted to reduce risk to reporters, especially those with health challenges. But a new innovation has been incubating these past weeks.
With support from the Google News Initiative, the team is launching TNM Connect in a couple of months. The new membership programme will cater to the Non Resident Indian (NRI) community in places like North America, west Asia and the UK with targeted content, newsletters, a dashboard for comments and discussion forums to engage with the NewsMinute community.
Their GNI proposal explained their thinking: “TNM Connect will continue with The News Minute’s niche of covering south India, from the south, and identifying that the reader is not a monolith. There are 16 million Indians living abroad, and we recognise that all of them are not the same, nor do they want the same things. We will drive diversity of coverage and diversity of ideas, through diversity in the newsroom.”
“In fact, because Covid was happening and people were finally appreciating journalism, we thought this might be the time to do it and ask Indian readers also to contribute.” So the membership for Indian residents was soft launched at Rs 999 (USD 13) annually.
Ragamalika Karthikeyan who leads the membership program says: “The way I see it, subscription is purely transactional, whereas membership is ‘more than’. In the news industry, people have always subscribed to newspapers, magazines or television channels, and they’re readers and consumers of these news products.
“With the web, everyone went the ‘free’ route from the beginning, and now, it’s difficult to get people to actually pay for news on the web. And in a world where there’s so much fake news — and so many options to ‘consume’ information and content for ‘free’ (Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp…) should news organisations even be considering restricting access to our journalism?
“For these reasons and more, we don’t see subscription — or going behind a paywall — as the right route for us. A transactional relationship with the reader is not what we want.”
Membership, she says, is a good solution, since they are asking their readers to become a part of their journey. “We have had people telling us that they would like to support us in whatever way possible — well, now we have a way.
“We have done some informal and some formal surveys, and we believe there are enough people who like and respect our journalism to pay to support us. We promise them, in ‘return’, good journalism for everybody, a community of like minded individuals, and a chance to contribute to our work and to society at large in whatever way they can.
“The Indian diaspora wants to contribute to what’s happening back home. We have seen this time and again — whether it’s floods or other natural disasters, or big news events happening in India, the diaspora is involved. We hope that they see our journalism as an objective worth supporting,” says Karthikeyan.
Rajendran also feels that in smaller organisations, it’s the personal connection to which readers respond. “It’s a give and take relationship. You don’t want a huge community of 50,000 or lakh members. You want a small committed group of people. For example if I want to organize a meeting in Chennai, they would turn up for it, or maybe even organise it.” And each connection brings more.
“The moment you establish direct engagement with your readers they become your brand ambassadors, right? News cannot be in a vacuum where it doesn’t understand what the reader wants.”
Readers have not hesitated to reach out to TNM, through Twitter, Facebook, e.mail and it’s a win-win. “Readers are some of the best sources for story ideas. With social media, we’ve seen so many new forms of stories coming out with people putting up their experiences online. The Me Too movement is a big example of this.
“Journalism followed where people took us. With a membership program, this can be more streamlined and structured, and our members can point us to stories minus the noise of social media. Since we started the membership programme for Indian residents — which is less than a month ago — we’ve already worked on a bunch of stories that we got tip-offs for from members,” says Karthikeyan.
“For regular news, mostly the local matters. Especially in the digital space where you have the choice to not click on a story. People choose and read only what they want to read. They read things about where they live in, or where they were born,” says Rajendran. Indeed, even as the TNM community reaches around the globe, the news focus deepens to uncover the local.
Laxmi Murthy is a journalist based in Bangalore and co-editor of The Story.
Jacqui Park works on network strategy and innovation for IPI and is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Media Transition at the University of Technology, Sydney.
Together they write The Story.
