From print to YouTube: News Wave washes over rural India
A news wave is breaking over rural India, as the all-women Khabar Lahariya fights disadvantage by leaning into hyper-local journalism, writes Jacqui Park.
In a network of villages across central India, Khabar Lahariya (News Waves) is using the power of hyper-local journalism to fight discrimination, promote literacy — especially among women — provide practical income support and keep communities informed about the practical issues that affect them on the ground.
Beginning as a weekly printed paper in 2002, the network embraced the opportunity of smartphones in 2015 to pivot and within two years, they abandoned print as video exploded through YouTube — “where the action is and where our audience are” according to co-founder Disha Mullick
Now, as part of the country’s digital media boom, Khabar Lahariya has added a new layer, acting as a news agency reporting from often overlooked rural India for the country’s national media.
The paper was launched by Nirantar, a Delhi-based NGO in 2002, as a women’s collective led by a group of urban and rural feminists, including current editor in chief, Kavita Devi. Now under the umbrella of Chambal Media, it operates as a collective of women journalists employed in their home villages to report on issues that impact their community in eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar. It publishes in the local Hindi dialects such as Bundeli, Bijjika and Avadhi.
It drew its all-women team from historically marginalised groups: Dalits, Muslims and Adivasis. Many of its journalists were functionally illiterate before working on Khabar Lahariya media, and have since finished their schooling.
As a paper, it had about 80,000 readers of the 8,000 copies it printed each week. Now, on YouTube, it has about 5 million viewers each month — about 60 percent of them across the 14 districts they serve and about another 20 percent from the region’s diaspora in India’s mega-cities like Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai.
Although the hyper-local model doesn’t scale, it can replicate and the Khabar Lahariya network sees no reason — other than resources — why it can’t expand into the hundreds of rural districts across the country.
The major cost is the salaries for journalists in the districts, which provide greater stability for staff reporters than the traditional stringers on retainer engaged by mainstream media. The major revenue was through philanthropic support.
Now, Chambal Media, in an effort to make hyperlocal content sustainable, is sourcing additional money as a news agency, reporting rural issues for national media audiences, and as a content supplier, both news and features, for example to NGOs, foundations and institutions engaged in rural issues.
The commissioned content could be a film on rural issues for an institution or a foundation, or a high end video documenting the impact of an NGOs work, helping subsidise their news-related work.
Training’s the Buzz Word
They invest heavily in training their staff, actively looking for potential reporters who are women from within the disadvantaged communities. The training goes back to basics, often addressing basic illiteracy and education.In fact, the paper was first conceived as a literacy project, the success of which pushed them to expand and challenge the very idea of journalism. What makes news, and who could tell those stories? The salary empowers the women, some of whom are the key income earners in their family.
The team invests plenty of resources in training because it views it as an intrinsic part of the editorial process. “Every time we would produce an edition of the newspaper, it would serve as a training in politics or development or gender or technical skills or writing,” says Mullick.
The cost and the investment is consistent and doesn’t really ever end. But, although training is somewhat of a buzz word, it’s not something that they’d hire two people from a different background to do. For them to fit into the newsroom and to actually have a voice is a constant, consistent kind of process. So training at Khabar Lahariya goes hand in hand with actually running the newsroom.
They approach their journalism by asking: if you’re living in a small community, what do you want to know? “We’re sort of like a local watch-dog with a feminist lens,” says Mullick.
“We do development reporting, but then in a hyper-local context, development reporting also means politics, right? Because how does public money get spent? What are the kinds of corruption and scandals? We expose corruption and the way that public money gets handed around, talking about what kind of welfare schemes are being rolled out, at what point and in what area. How do those actually pan out on the ground?” Mullick asks.
“We do a lot of reporting around human rights for gender and caste. Our crime reporting is also from the lens of examining the perpetrators of crime. Why do certain crimes have impunity? How does violence against women happen? What exactly does it mean? How does it change?”
Paying for the news
This year, Khabar Lahariya started experimenting with putting some of the content behind a paywall, and also starting subscriptions.
The hope is that the recently-launched bulk subscription program can become a serious revenue earner at some point. With discounts for more than 50 subscriptions at a go, institutions, including those outside the country, have shown interest. Rural India might finally be a viral news phenomenon.
Jacqui Park is head of network strategy and innovation for IPI and a senior fellow at the Centre for Media Transition at the University of Technology, Sydney.
This story is part of the IPI global network report: Around the corner, around the world: How local news media around the world are rethinking everything
