Digital disruption? Journalism startups in India

Abstract

India’s large and thriving news media is going digital. Spurred by an exponential increase in Internet use and digital advertising, a number of digital journalism startups have been established in recent years. These startups have received popular and academic attention, often narrated as disruptors and revolutionaries. This study considers these claims of disruption from the perspective of those doing the supposed disrupting. Based on 31 semi-structured interviews with founders and journalists working at 18 such English-language startups, this study examines how they work with and against the grain of established media in India. Participants critiqued existing media practices with regard to the business model, the content of news coverage, and the values underlying their journalism and then offered their own site or work as possible redress. While the critiques were aimed at legacy media writ large, they also aligned themselves with and sought legitimacy from print journalism. Their coverage, audience, and values were all oriented toward English-language newspapers, which have historically formed the elite public sphere in India. Participants saw themselves operating in concert with print media, ultimately offering not a disruption to the established order of journalism but rather a distillation of how the English-speaking elite in India access news.

Keywords

Digital journalism India media financing online political economy startups

Introduction

India’s large and thriving news media has gone digital. Citing the steady increase of Internet connectivity and digital advertising in the country, Sen and Nielsen (2016) noted that the growing sector in India includes digital arms of legacy media, Indian editions of international digital outlets, and several independent startups. These startups have been the focus of much attention, and occasional adulation, within both popular (Ciobanu, 2016; Panchal and Chaudhary, 2016; Russell, 2016) and academic discourse (Harlow and Chadha, 2018; Sen and Nielsen, 2016).

Juxtaposing them against the corporatized mainstream media outlets, Chaudhry (2016) chronicled the rise of these news startups, positioning them as digital revolutionaries that may yet transform the larger sector. Chaudhry is not alone in her optimism. The narrative of disruption, the upstart startup, is a reliable trope which foregrounds the promise of these news outlets. This study considers these claims of disruption from the perspective of those doing the supposed disrupting. What are these outlets seeking to disrupt and why? And what could be the implications of their rhetoric and practice, perhaps even success, for the broader media sector?

Based on 31 semi-structured interviews with founders and journalists working at 18 such startups, this study examines how they work with and against the grain of established media. Building on initial research on the business models and distribution strategies of these outlets (Sen and Nielsen, 2016), work on the social identity of the founders of these sites (Harlow and Chadha, 2018), as well as scholarship on entrepreneurial journalism, I assess how these startups position themselves in relation to mainstream media. By making this cohort of startups the focus of my analysis and examining what journalistic values and practices they seek to disrupt or affirm, I aim to understand how these startups interact with and impact the wider field of Indian journalism.

The promise of journalism startups

Journalism startups have emerged around the world (Price, 2017; Wagemans et al., 2016), in part because, as in India, technologically driven reductions in costs have reduced the risk of striking out on one’s own (Compaine and Hoag, 2012). Although these startups emerge in the context of the journalism crisis in the industrialized West, the discourse about them is one of optimism about their ability to revitalize the news industry (Carlson and Usher, 2016; Vos and Singer, 2016).

Despite the optimism, digital journalism startups are in a precarious financial position. Existing business models have lost relevance, but a new model for financial sustainability has yet to emerge (Picard, 2011). Naldi and Picard (2012) pointed to the ‘double liability of newness’ (p. 72) – these outlets are new, and they must compete in a new industry with no clear recipe for success. Bruno and Nielsen (2012) argued that for journalism startups ‘survival in itself must be recognized as a form of success’ (p. 102). Sen and Nielsen’s (2016) study of six of these Indian startups found that low advertising rates and the continued dominance of legacy media made their financial viability a tough prospect.

The struggle for financial feasibility poses a range of challenges for these outlets. Journalists-turned-founders often have limited business knowledge (Price, 2017; Wagemans et al., 2016). Despite the language of disruption, many founders are veterans in the industry who are able to mobilize social and symbolic capital that can be transformed into economic capital (Moore, 2014). Of this new cohort of startups in India as well, most are established by so-called legacy refugees (Chaudhry, 2016), people with significant experience and reputations in newspaper or television journalism. Without these advantages, Powers and Vera Zambrano (2016) showed that startups can flounder. Other tensions arise due to the conflation of the roles of journalist and publisher (Vos and Springer, 2016). Crowd-funded journalism, Hunter (2015) argued, could undermine journalists’ sense of autonomy and their notions of objectivity as they felt compelled to provide a particular point of view to their funding audience.

Carlson and Usher’s (2016) study of American and European startup manifestos found that these outlets emphasized the affordances of digital technologies to their journalism. This emphasis was a part of their strategy to levy ‘soft critiques of conventional journalism’ (p. 569) as a way to differentiate themselves from the extant field. European startups’ critiques are harsher, employing the language of crisis – democratic, economic, and ethical (Price, 2017; Wagemans et al., 2016). What was common was the reliance on core journalistic norms to attack established media. Usher’s (2017) study of venture capital-backed startups revealed that through their complaints about journalism they ‘actually reify journalistic doxa; most notably, the importance of the traditional function of journalism to inform, to orient, and to engage’ (p. 9).

In order to understand how journalists gave meaning to their work, Deuze (2005) conceptualized journalism as an ideology. He argued that this occupational ideology allows journalists to self-legitimize their position in society. Waisbord’s (2013) conception of professionalism similarly identified it as a process of making ‘occupational claims to control a social jurisdiction and maintain boundaries’ (p. 175). Usher found that startups do not question the implicit normative foundations of the field but can challenge its habitus by centering new technologies like algorithms and machine learning. Harlow and Chadha’s (2018) work with some founders of Indian news startups identified four separate types: those focused on profit and survival, those focused on serving the community, those working toward a clear mission, and finally those who were focused on quality journalism. Technological innovation was only important to one of the four types, those most focused on profit making.

Scholars, including Waisbord, have drawn on Bourdieu’s field theory as a useful framework to analyze journalism. For Benson (1999), field theory highlighted processes of change, particularly valuable for the matter at hand. Bourdieu conceptualized fields as arenas of struggle where, as researchers working on entrepreneurial journalism above have shown, new entrants seek to establish themselves by marking their differences from those already in the field (Benson and Neveu, 2005).

Benson (1999) argued that ‘a rapid influx of new agents into the field can serve both as a force for transformation and for conservation’ (p. 468), but that the dynamism brought by new actors would largely reproduce the structure of the field, unless the field was simultaneously subject to ‘a second kind of transformation: external factors such as ‘political breaks’ or technological, economic, or demographic changes’ (p. 488). In the United States and Western Europe, media startups are frequently framed in relation to a journalism crisis that might necessitate and make possible a transformation in the field (Price, 2017; Usher, 2017), but that association is complicated within the Indian context.

News media in India

The prevailing narrative around Indian media is one of exponential growth since the liberalization of the early 1990s, going from a single television channel under government control to 800 TV channels, half of which focused on the news, by 2014 (Rajagopal, 2016). The newspaper industry, which struggles in the West, thrives in India with over 90,000 newspapers across the country and its continued growth in vernacular languages (Chadha, 2017; Udupa and Chakravartty, 2012). The Internet connectivity is also rising. India has the second highest number of Internet users in the world, although that corresponds to roughly 30 percent of the population and the vast majority of these subscribers are in urban areas (Bhattacharya, 2018).

Simultaneously, scholars and media critics have noted the growing commercialization, corporatization, and concentration of ownership within Indian media (Chadha, 2017). Notably, in 2014, India’s largest corporation, Reliance Industries, acquired a network of TV channels, Network 18, in the largest ever deal of its kind (Baruah and Mishra, 2014). Both corporate and political ownership work to curtail press freedom and orient coverage (Chadha, 2017; Parthasarathy, 2013; Saeed, 2015). Since the election of Narendra Modi as Prime Minister in 2014, there has been a reported increase in self-censorship among journalists, and greater reprisals against journalists ranging from arrests to threats to attacks. India has also seen an increase in the number of sedition cases and criminal defamation cases, all with the aim and effect of chilling speech (Prabhu, 2017). Offering some relief, the Independent and Public-Spirited Media Foundation (IPSMF) was established in 2015 to fund independent journalism, including many of the startups in the study (Chaudhry, 2016).

This privatization of the media is tied to the declining credibility of journalism (Rao, 2016; Saeed, 2015), especially in the wake of some high-profile corruption scandals (Chadha and Koliska, 2016b). Waisbord (2013) argued that although ‘professional journalism’ has gone global, there remains a diversity of ethics and norms within the field globally. Chadha and Koliska’s (2016a) study of regional television channels in India found that although these journalists did not reject the ideological underpinnings of a Western model of professionalism outright, they did dismiss them as unachievable, impractical, and largely meaningless in terms of their work.

Indian news media is also fragmented by language. Rajagopal (2001) proposed the notion of a ‘split public’, wherein English-language media comprise and address a ‘rarefied elite field’, and vernacular journalism in regional languages targets the majority of India’s readers and viewers (Chakravartty and Roy, 2015). Udupa’s (2015) ethnographic work on newspapers in Bangalore nuanced Rajagopal’s heuristic by reframing the split as one of distinct sensibilities that often, but not always, mapped onto language. But Udupa and others (Rao, 2011; Stahlberg, 2001) confirm the elevated status ascribed to the English-language media. The outlets studied here are new entrants to this exalted arena.

Through their ethnographic studies of print journalism in India, scholars have also demonstrated that the growing logic of commercialism in the press at a national and regional level and growing urbanization drives coverage of an urban aspirational consumerist life, regardless of language (Rao, 2011, Udupa, 2015). Rural India and poor Indians are conspicuously absent from mainstream discourse. Mudgal (2011) analyzed coverage in six major English and Hindi language dailies and found that only 2 percent of their coverage was devoted to rural India, which makes up two-thirds of India. Indian television channels are similarly in thrall of the urban and the global, and as subsidiaries of large conglomerates, celebrate and champion private enterprise and market-oriented policies (Chadha, 2016).

These startups emerged within this landscape of commercial and corporate media. This study aims to contribute to the body of work on news workers in India and understand the digital startup space from their own perspective. It also aims to speak of the work on entrepreneurial journalism, by offering empirical evidence from a global south context, where startups must contend with a still-thriving print sector.

Methodology

The analysis presented here is based on semi-structured interviews with founders, editors, and journalists at 18 digital journalism outlets, the large majority of which were established since 2014. I began with a purposive sample of 10 most prominent online news outlets and their founders, and then employed a snowball technique to include additional outlets. Outlets in the sample are diverse, ranging from a one-man operation that published on Medium and relied on freelancers for content, to a well-funded outlet with multiple bureaus, a proprietary Content Management System (CMS) and over 100 staff. Except for the bootstrapped startups, none of these outlets were turning a profit at the time of the interviews. In all, 3 of the 18 were nonprofits.

The sample includes general news sites, verticals focused on a specific industry or topic, as well as specialized approaches to journalism such as data journalism, citizen journalism, or explainer journalism. Two of the outlets in the sample had digital versions but also published magazines. I included them in the sample because they were recent entrants in the field and were identified by others in the sector as being part of the same cohort.

In terms of their format, the outlets ranged from long form narrative-driven journalism to infographics. Video was frequently central to their strategies, especially with the advent of Facebook Live. One of the outlets was experimenting with podcasts. Newsletters remained valuable for the smaller outlets that paid close attention to subscription and engagement metrics.

While the large majority of the founders were industry veterans, or ‘legacy refugees’ (Chaudhry, 2016), the staff of the outlets, with some exceptions, were largely ‘freshers’, young and new to the field. This was justified in one of two ways: younger people were cheaper to hire and/or they were expected to have a natural affinity toward the digital medium. Participants frequently referenced startups in the global arena, from Vox to Politico in the United States to Mediapart in France, or AJ+ from Qatar’s Al Jazeera. Many of the participants had worked or studied outside of India.

The majority of the founders in the sector were male (Chaudhry, 2016), but I sought out the outlets established by women, both general news sites and those that were explicitly feminist. In total, I conducted 31 interviews with journalists, editors, and founders. The participants included 18 men and 13 women and 17 founders (5 of them women), and 14 journalists and editors. The interviews were conducted in July 2017 and typically lasted between 45 minutes and an hour. A total of 21 interviews were conducted in the outlets’ offices or coffee shops in Delhi, and for participants based in Mumbai and Bangalore, over the phone or Skype.

I relied on a mix of narrative and key informant interviews (Lindlof and Taylor, 2010: 180) to ask a broad set of questions about how the news professionals understood their work and gave meaning to what they did. All the interviews were recorded and transcribed. I analyzed the interview transcripts through a combination of open coding, using descriptive coding in the first cycle, and pattern coding in the second cycle to surface themes in the data (Miles et al., 2013). Participants are quoted in the following section using pseudonyms and their professional roles.

Findings: Responding to mainstream media

When discussing their work in interviews, participants commonly advanced a critique of existing media practices and then offered their own site or work as possible redress. The findings below follow that structure and are organized to highlight the complaints levied by participants toward legacy media and how their own work either avoids or addresses these pitfalls. These critiques addressed the political economy of the sector, content of news coverage, and the professional norms guiding the journalism.

Political economy of news media: ‘Broken business model’

The most frequently levied critique against legacy media was rooted in the political economy of the media industry. Participants argued that legacy media were compromised by their corporate ownership or their advertising-supported revenue models. With regard to ownership, they pointed to a ‘corporate-political nexus’ prevalent across the Indian private industry, which was manifest in a cozy relationship between large media companies and political parties that would impact coverage of both corporations and affiliated political parties. As Jay, a journalist, asserted, ‘the more you have these political powers liaising with corporate interest, the more newsrooms will lose their independence. The more these channels which have vested interest will keep popping up, because you have a propaganda to build’ (Interview, 25 July 2017).

Some participants directly or indirectly referenced the Reliance takeover of Network 18, known to be friendly to the reigning Modi government, as a watershed moment that drove them to seek other venues for their work:

When Mukesh Ambani did buy over the Network 18 group, I felt as a journalist that, although I was never given an instruction saying, ‘Hey, you should cover it in a certain way or you shouldn’t, you should toe this line’, but I felt overall as a news channel, as I watched, that it was leaning towards the government of the day and there was a lot of coverage of Modi’s pet projects, his initiatives. – Priya, Journalist (Interview, 25 July 2017)

Participants pointed out that media outlets were frequently a part of larger conglomerates and that government pressure was often levied indirectly, through control and influence over licenses or permits for other businesses. ‘They have all sorts of vulnerabilities’, Rohit, a founder-editor argued, and ‘their other investments, that hold their media investments open to scrutiny, or their media businesses open to scrutiny. So journalists in many outlets are paying the price for their owners’ other interests’ (Interview, 15 July 2017).

Digital news startups, participants overwhelmingly said, could solve a number of these problems. For one, the reduced costs of establishing and running a digital news site meant smaller entities could operate with greater independence:

I think more and more people are turning to digital right now because the digital media is still far more independent than television. Television because it’s so resource-intensive, requires large funding and is largely a couple of corporates that are running all the media networks. They are compromised because of the ownership in many ways, which is not the case for The Quint or Scroll or The Wire or all these digital sites. – Shivani, Founder-Editor (Interview, 11 July 2017)

When they designed their own institutions, this critique of media was salient in how they offered a solution. Atul, a Founder, spoke of wanting to ‘break with that model’ that had compromised journalism (Interview, 14 July 2017). For him, a nonprofit model was the solution, because they would not be beholden to shareholder interests and could be independent voices. Nilay, also a Founder, argued for ‘distributed ownership’ where no one voice could impede editorial independence (Interview, 17 July 2017).

Most of the participants expressed a wariness toward advertising, which they connected to a sub-par experience for readers. Zara explained, ‘if we try to advertise or try to put flashy pop-ups or anything that’s very jarring … anything that dilutes from the content, they are not likely to stay on the page’ (Interview, 5 July 2017).

Participants working on the smaller, more specialized sites also felt that advertising, especially through networks like Google AdSense, compromised their editorial vision:

One is that advertisements suck. They kind of clutter your site. People are coming to read stories not to click on ads … [Secondly] We realized that it’ll actually be extremely unfair if we’re putting up a post about how fairness creams are bad and there’s a fairness creams ad on the side. – Mudit, Founder (Interview, 18 July 2017)

Despite their misgivings, roughly half the outlets were in part or wholly dependent on advertising for their revenue, and this was primarily native advertising. When speaking about native advertising, participants stressed both the internal firewalls and the external markers that separated their editorial content from the native advertising. Externally, they spoke about different borders, background colors, or typography that were meant to clearly mark advertising content. Internally, they stated there was no overlap between people who worked on the editorial side and the content marketing side, to ensure editorial was free of the influence of business pressures. Founder-Editor Anushree said:

none of the editorial staff write. It is written by somebody else … I don’t even know what is happening. I don’t want to know. If you’re taking money from somebody for native advertising, well and good. I have nothing to do with that. (Interview, 24 July 2017)

Beyond advertising, nearly all the participants touched upon the necessity of diversifying revenue streams. Outlets relied on a combination of grant funding (primarily from IPSMF), events like workshops or policy discussions, and increasingly experiments with models of subscription. As of this writing, only one of the outlets relies primarily on subscription revenue. The Ken, similar to The Information in the United States, publishes one long form business journalism story a day, all behind a paywall (Wang, 2017). A number of other outlets had instituted some form of subscriptions or were actively weighing that decision, but some participants also expressed a conflict between their public service mission and paywalls:

Subscription is a model that we are looking at right now, but we have a decidedly public interest approach to what we do. So it’s hard for us to go in behind a paywall because we don’t feel we’re doing the duty that we want to do, if people have to pay for everything that they read on our site. – Nikhil,¹ Founder-Editor (Interview, 12 July 2017)

Some outlets resolved this tension by making content available for free, but proposing subscription as a form of membership, where subscribers either received bonus content in the form of a podcast or passes to book events. They believed this model required converting only a small percentage of their readers into subscribers, in order for them to be financially sustainable:

We are not going out there saying subscribe otherwise you cannot read. The journalism we provide will be free to readers. But we’re saying, to that subsection of readers who feel particularly strongly about the importance of the journalism that we produce, can you step forward and make a donation? And if a large enough number of them make that donation, the size of the individual donation falls. … Modern journalism requires a new social contract between editor and journalist on the one hand and the reader on the other. – Atul, Founder-Editor (Interview, 14 July 2017)

But this new social contract needs an audience both willing and able to subscribe, and participants rarely discussed how their models were predicated on the privilege of their audience. Some participants voiced concerns that they were inherently limiting themselves to English-speaking Indians with Internet access, a small proportion of the population, while others argued that such a subsection still numbered in hundreds of millions and was not an audience that should be dismissed. Even those who discussed the presumptive class position of their audience worried primarily about who they were able to reach. Only one participant worried about how their own journalism was shaped by that dynamic.

Priorities regarding content: ‘Cover things that the big media chooses to ignore’

With regard to the content of mainstream news, participants pointed to the gaps in both what was being covered and how. Television news, they said, no longer left the studio, relying on talking heads and debate shows. Abhishek, an editor, maintained, ‘broadly if you look at the Indian media space, the last five, six years, you’ve seen effectively TV channels have given up on going out into the field’ (Interview, 20 July 2017). And newspapers did not leave the cities. ‘Take even the bigger papers, as many of them are not investing in the content to the extent they should. The news budgets are not there. Barely anyone from the newsroom travels to remote parts of the country’, claimed Founder-Editor Pranay (Interview, 26 July 2017).

Participants linked this retreat to the business model of mainstream media which compromised quality of coverage through a drive to garner more eyeballs, underscoring Bourdieu’s (2005) argument that the journalistic field was losing its autonomy due to the commercial pressures and its focus on advertisers and ratings:

The logic of television of newspapers was, he who has the largest circulation commands the highest ads rates, therefore, the incentive, is to get a bigger and bigger circulation … so fundamentally, in its structure, the incentive of success in news is actually in conflict with what news is supposed to do. – Nishit, Founder-Editor (Interview, 28 July 2017)

In direct contrast to these models, the large majority of participants said they did not factor traffic metrics into their editorial decisions. One participant spoke of a ‘wall between the traffic imperative and the journalists’:

We don’t run counters and we even remove them internally for my colleagues, so nobody knows how many views their stories have got. Because I realize that this was setting up unnecessary anxiety. You could do a quick twitter joke story that got 200,000 reads in two hours and a story that took much longer to report would get a fraction of that and that’s just not fair. … The priorities we set are not by what we think people are reading but what we think are important. – Rohit, Founder-Editor (Interview, 15 July 2017)

Participants said their digital news sites offered better coverage, by addressing the gaps that emerged because mainstream media was focused primarily on power and politics. Kanishk, an editor, said, ‘it was quite clear to me what [were] the issues that don’t get covered. The issues that I had to really fight for space in the newspaper. Those are the issues that we focused on’ (Interview, 10 July 2017).

While mainstream media clustered in the capital and cities, participants spoke of a concerted effort to report from the parts of India often hidden from view:

We focus on the border states which is a neglected area in the Indian media, specifically Kashmir and the Northeast. When I say we focus on the border states, we don’t focus on them by saying, you know, we’re sitting in Delhi and we’re commenting on what’s happening in Kashmir. We have people that are based in Kashmir that write for us on a daily basis. We have people that are based in Assam. That are based in Nagaland and various other states. that are again under reported in the Indian media. – Kavita, Editor (Interview, 20 July 2017)

A large majority of participants placed heavy emphasis on this notion and practice of ‘ground reporting’. As Rakesh, an editor, said, ‘we are a website which is reportage-driven. Okay. Most of our pieces are reportage at the time where almost every website is putting opinion first’ (Interview, 24 July 2017). Some participants like Nandini, a reporter, acknowledged that criticism, ‘Because it’s hard, they’re all startups, for them to get to anything like a newspaper with bureaus’ (Interview, 19 July 2017). Others expanded on their limitations:

Mainstream media publications or an organization as big as Hindu or Indian Express will have their reporters everywhere in each state capital and they have a network of people within the state. They do a lot better news gathering … As we expand, we plan to have more bureaus across the country where we also focus a little bit on news gathering. – Suresh, Reporter (Interview, 24 July 2017)

The tension between the ability and ambition of these outlets was readily apparent in these discussions. ‘Ground reporting’ here also functioned as an identity marker. As outlets firmly situated in an upper class, upper caste, and urban milieu, ‘ground reporting’ referred to reporters leaving that environment. It was invoked repeatedly in reference to something that was necessary, something they did that set them apart, or something they hoped to do more of. Although many of the participants possessed significant social capital as successful professionals in the field, nearly all participants avoided or de-emphasized discussing their own proximity to power and privilege. Ground reporting then functioned not just as an approach to comprehensive news gathering, but also core to performing their identity as news outlets set apart from the mainstream.

Professionalism: ‘Broad based ethics of journalism’

Discussing what gets covered and how was inextricably linked with the values that motivated the work of these digital journalism startups. Like news startups elsewhere, these outlets also affirmed and critiqued the prevailing values of traditional media (Usher, 2017). With some exceptions, such as the citizen journalism outlet, the professional identity of journalist was pertinent to the overwhelming majority of the participants. In line with Deuze’s (2005) work on the ideology of journalism, values such as objectivity, public service, and autonomy all emerged in the discussions. However, in response to the exponential increase in politically motivated misinformation campaigns and rumor-mongering on platforms like Whatsapp (Dixit, 2017), participants often asserted an adherence to a seemingly more elementary value of journalism – accuracy. Here again, they faulted legacy media for participating in and furthering a dynamic that allowed incorrect information to circulate:

Now one person, one organization puts out a story, everybody puts out a story, like a herd without any fact check. It can’t get any dumber than this. At least six organizations have put up the identical story with no fact checking, and it is a complete false story, and Times of India has it as a print story. – Varun, Founder-Editor (Interview, 26 July 2017).

Participants spoke at length about the importance of fact-checking in their daily routines. Ground reporting emerged again as practice to help them meet their value of accuracy – to get their facts straight:

We go to the ground and we really look into what happened, especially when there are conflicting narratives. There’s lot of reports where there were times when we found, actually the news reports completely got it wrong. So we started off with that. Our interest in ground reporting started off with tracking the newspapers, looking at conflicting narratives and then going to the ground and bringing out that one definitive clear piece. – Rekha, Reporter (Interview, 30 July 2017)

Here, they were not just responding to the inadequate or inaccurate coverage by mainstream media, but also demonstrating their own values about what counted as newsworthy, often using the language of either mission or public service. Some embraced their own subjectivity, highlighting the inherently political nature of their news judgment:

How do you not come from somewhere? You can say that this happened, but even then you’re saying this happened and you’re not talking about something else that happened so that’s already a choice you’ve made and that’s your point of view. I think it would be stupid to deny that that exists in any organizations and yeah [we] embrace that, reporting certain kinds of stories and bring certain kinds of stories to light and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. – Nandini, Reporter (Interview, 19 July 2017)

The stories they chose to tell, or at least stress during the interviews, were rebukes to the news judgment of mainstream media. Their mission, as they explained it, was to exit the halls of power, and serve as a ‘yardstick for the people over the rich and powerful’:

I do have a hierarchy in my head of what is important and does this impact the elite of the country or does this impact the poor? If I had to make a choice, I’d any day put resources in stories that look at what is impacting a larger number of people in India. – Arpita, Editor (Interview, 28 July 2017)

For others, the public service of journalism was to serve as a watchdog (Norris, 2014), keeping those in power in check:

Specifically, my idea is to make the establishment accountable on whatever decision it takes. (…) If you think of minority issues, if you think of human rights issues or if you think of politics as a whole. We think that the government is in a position where it should be made accountable and that is our perspective. – Suresh, Reporter (Interview, 24 July 2017)

Although participants frequently found fault with contemporary mainstream media, they also sought to align themselves with an idealized past of journalism:

Even though we’re a digital newspaper, our aim is to go back to the ethics of print journalism, and this is print journalism when it started. The media has been compromised a lot with the rise of TV journalism, and even the print now has absolutely none of the old ethics that it had. So our entire USP (Unique Selling Proposition) is to try and bring the ethics of old journalism, try and get our reporters that kind of training, that kind of exposure, but in the digital media. – Kavita, Editor (Interview, 20 July 2017).

This ‘old journalism’ was specifically print journalism, and a majority of the participants underscored the enduring salience of newspapers. Participants spoke often of ‘print ethics’, or ‘old school print reporting’, much as journalists at French startup Mediapart spoke about ‘a return to “traditional” journalistic values’ (Wagemans et al., 2016: 171).

The ‘unified ecosystem’ of newspapers and digital news sites

Conceptualizing journalism as a field allows us to study ‘the entire universe of journalists and media organizations acting and reacting in relation to one another’ (Benson and Neveu, 2005: 11). For these digital news startups, ‘entry into the journalistic field requires acceptance of the basic rules of the game’ (Benson, 1999: 468). The discussions of values described above were also discussions about establishing and performing credibility for these new actors entering an already crowded field. In their reformist stance toward Indian journalism, these startups are engaged in a process of field repair (Graves and Konieczna, 2015). As they critiqued existing practices and norms, their contestation was not just ‘within but about a field’ (Graves and Konieczna, 2015: 1979).

For these participants, newspapers continued to occupy the central position within the field of journalism. Their understanding of their business model, content, and their professional values were all oriented toward the English-language newspapers in the country. When television news was referenced, it was primarily to dismiss it as political theater, particularly compromised by crony capitalism (Saeed, 2015).

When participants harkened back to a storied past of journalism, they were motivated by the supposed heft of print media, the ‘purest’ journalists of the print press which retained the most cultural capital (Bourdieu, 2005). Newcomers to the field, such as Aditi, who had yet to establish their own reputation worried that ‘there is a general distrust. ‘Yours is an online outlet. kuch bhi chalega’ (anything goes)’ (Interview, 25 July 2017). And therefore, Founder Abhay felt that an association with print brought ‘a certain sense of seriousness and gravitas’ (Interview, 16 July 2017).

With regard to the content of their coverage, participants like Atul described a ‘unified ecosystem’, where startups and established print media fed off each other. ‘Newspaper editors when they get up in the morning probably go online to see what the websites have. Just as websites in the morning look at newspapers to say is there a story we can follow up’ (Interview, 14 July 2017). In that context, participants expected newspapers to continue to thrive and believed that online journalism could ‘co-exist with print’. In part, this was driven by an acknowledgment of their own limited economic capital and subsequent reliance on newspapers as primary newsgatherers. Pointing to the infrastructure of newspaper bureaus across the country, one participant appreciated their ‘breadth of coverage, even if it is not contextual’:

Indian newspapers are phenomenal for the amount of sheer news that they can give you. You’re not going to get it on TV. TV is completely low cost and no news gathering. But newspapers have huge amount of news gathering still. And however bad the TOI (Times of India) might be in terms of reputation, it gives you far more news than any other newspaper. – Jyoti, Founder-Editor (Interview, 27 July 2017)

Seen in this vein, startups’ focus on the gaps in coverage, their pursuit of the interstitial, was possible because the mainstream media freed them from any obligation to be the paper of record. As a part of this unified ecosystem, the newcomers drew from the same audience as established media, to earn the cultural and economic capital necessary for their survival. Some participants defined their target audience as someone who reads The Indian Express or The Hindu. As English-language and online-only outlets, the possible audience of these outlets was inherently limited to the ‘rarefied elite’ public in Rajagopal’s (2001) formulation:

I think by its very definition, ‘elitist’ would be the wrong word, but it’s not something the non-connected people can access. In this country to say ‘digital digital’ is fine, but it’s a country where a lot of people are not connected … For me, it’s a fairly elite phenomenon. – Jyoti, Founder-Editor (Interview, 27 July 2017).

Through the design of their revenue models, startups further underscored the habitus of their audience. Native advertising, which commonly featured luxury goods and premium brands, and subscription are both models predicated on the class position of their audience – the educated urban professionals, including Indians in the diaspora. When they discussed subscription models, which have become more common in the sector since the interviews were conducted, they talked about changing the quintessential Indian morning routine of newspaper and chai, by swapping a tablet or smart phone for that newspaper.

Chadwick’s (2013) conception of hybridity is helpful in unpacking the interactions between old and new media. Chadwick argued that new media is best understood ‘in a system of interdependent relationships with other media’ (p. 24). Drawing attention to the messy, complex process of transition and coexistence between the two, according to Chadwick, sheds light on the power of various actors within the media system.

Analyzing the audience these startups address is particularly helpful in conceptualizing the startups and their relationship with established media. Participants acknowledged that bureaucrats and politicians responded to what appeared in newspapers and, in a singular nod to the power of television news, the debate shows. Their own audience – even if it numbered in the millions, and despite its status – was only a small sliver of the voting public. Participants therefore valued established media for their enduring influence. Rekha held, ‘in that way I don’t think you can replace them in terms of impact. … Something on the front page of Indian Express will make it, will be discussed in the parliament. Yes, so that is its importance’ (Interview, 30 July 2017). That was not to argue that startups lacked power, but rather their exercise of power was tied to legacy media:

We are actually influencing the public discourse slightly differently. I might not be read by the bureaucrat of the ministry that I’m writing about, but my work has added to the body of knowledge where it signals something to reporters in other newsrooms who might pick it up and take it further. – Arpita, Editor (Interview, 28 July 2017)

Arpita’s argument, echoed by many participants, further indicated that digital startups were not seeking to upend the status quo of news media in India. In terms of the cultural capital they sought, the audiences they served, or the coverage they pursued, these startups were not disrupting English-language media, but rather sought to carve a niche for themselves within the already niche English-language media (Rajagopal, 2001), marking themselves as doubly elite.

Conclusion

As newcomers to Indian journalism, these sites argued for their relevance by pointing to the problems plaguing the field as a whole. They overwhelmingly cited the business model of corporate-owned and advertising-supported journalism as detrimental to the quality of news. Although still reliant on advertising, they are also attempting a variety of solutions to avoid the same morass, including subscriptions and running events to offset costs, although the success of these measures remains an open question. In terms of coverage, participants differentiated themselves by highlighting their in-depth reporting, especially when they left the urban centers where they are all based. Their value, they argued, derived from the quality of their coverage, which they connected to either their business model, or an organizational commitment to high standards. Although they critiqued the coverage by both newspapers and television news, they aligned themselves with and sought validation from newspaper journalism. Unable to and uninterested in replacing newspapers, nearly all participants spoke instead of serving as a valuable supplement to print media. They ultimately reified both the cultural position of newspapers, as well as the class position of their audience.

Harlow and Chadha’s (2018) study of the founders in the same sector offered a taxonomy of four types of founders, who were focused either on profit, community, mission, or quality journalism. This study included not just founders, but also journalists and editors working in the sector. For these participants the categories were not as distinct, and they frequently emphasized both mission and quality journalism. In doing so, they echoed Usher’s (2017) finding that journalism startups do not disturb the fundamental doxa of the field, tied here explicitly to newspapers, but can challenge practices within it. Participants’ understanding of their work and position were largely in line with what Graves and Konieczna (2015) termed as ‘field repair’. They saw themselves as members of a larger field and sought to address the failures of and threats to this field in how they perceived and practiced their work.

While the subfield continues to expand and evolve, this article was limited to the perspectives of founders, editors, and journalists at 18 outlets. The sample did not allow for a systematic analysis of how participants’ views differed across revenue or funding models, which could have refined the arguments about business models and their impact on journalism. It also cannot demonstrate whether and how the larger field has been impacted, let alone transformed (Benson, 1999), by these new entrants. There is anecdotal evidence suggesting that investigative work by some of these outlets (Singh, 2017) has set the news agenda for others, including mainstream media, to follow. However, a systematic analysis of news coverage between digital startups and mainstream English-language newspapers could establish whether the enthusiasm and optimism that greeted these startups (Chaudhry, 2016) was warranted.

In addition, there is an urgent need to study Indian news media beyond English-language journalism located in major cities. In the digital space, new outlets are using videos in local languages (Shaikh, 2019) to cater to the non-elite news consumers that English-language journalism misses. As more Indians get Internet access on mobile devices, these platforms could reshape how the majority of Indians access news. The field of journalism in India is contested ground, with legacy, digital, English, and vernacular media all vying for readers and influence. Understanding how they interact and conflict is critical in understanding whether and how journalism serves Indian democracy.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Revati Prasad

Notes

Author biography

Revati Prasad is a PhD candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies global media and technology, focusing on issues that shape information access, including infrastructure, policy (and the politics thereof), and the journalism industry.

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