Diversity + regionalism = new news

In southern India, there’s a vibrant news media start-up scene that is shaking the country’s media free from the grip of its traditional Delhi-centric culture. Think of it as that place where diversity meets regionalism. The result? A remaking of what we understand as “news”.

Here’s a recent example: The NewsMinute. We profiled TNM in the recent edition of the fortnightly newsletter The Story (where “we” means me and former Himal editor (and friend) Bangalore-based Laxmi Murthy. (Here’s the plug: You can sign up for the newsletter here.)

The NewsMinute team are mostly young and female and they are steadily chipping away at misogyny and casteism -- too long a staple of mainstream media coverage -- with a clear feminist perspective that is slowly getting mainstreamed. Currently they are busy putting in place an innovative membership model supported by the Google News Initiative, building engagement with the southern diaspora in north America, the UK, west Asia and Australia.

Editor-in-chief Dhanya Rajendran (listed in Fortune India as one of the 40 under 40 entrepreneurs in 2018) came out of eight years as southern India bureau chief for traditional media to launch TNM as a portal dedicated to news from and about South India.  Not satisfied with what she calls “scratching the surface”with English, she intends to launch TNM in the four south Indian languages - Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam, believing regional language journalism can make a real dent in the political discourse.

“I strongly believe that Kerala and Tamil Nadu behave politically differently from the rest of the country because they have better regional media. The focus should be on regional media,” Dhanya told us. You can read Laxmi’s longer report on TNM on The Story Medium page.

Of course, “regional” means different things in different countries. In southern India, TNM has access to an audience of about 250 million people across the country’s five southern states -- although unless TNM speaks in their own language, they can only reach a fragment of the audience.

We found a similar example with Suno India, which is aiming to supplant a podcast culture of bantering talk with deeply reported narrative and story-telling in the under-served language Telugu as well as Hindi and English. There are about 80 million Telugu speakers in southern India, making it the 11th most widely spoken language in the world -- ahead of, say, German or Korean.

And there’s Banglaore-based Broadsheet, which we matched with Australia’s The Squiz, in this report because both build on what women do best -- share.  (We dubbed them as “the share-y godmothers” of email newsletters.) The South China Morning Post’s Laura Warne also wrote a great take for us on how to engage women as an audience.

Here’s the big take-away from our reporting on new media: When it comes to news media, looks like diversity is deep in the start-up DNA.

By Jacqui Park, senior fellow for Asia Pacific journalism and innovation

Image Credit: Newsminute Facebook