A Legacy Publisher’s Digital Playbook
Insights into digital strategies being adopted by legacy media
In Episode 12 of The Media Room, media journalist and author Vanita Kohli-Khandekar talks to Anant Goenka, Executive Director of The Indian Express Group about the future of legacy media in a digital-first world. From competing with influencers for attention to holding ground in an algorithm-driven landscape, Goenka shares what it takes to stay relevant without losing credibility. He opens up about the need for domain expertise in journalism, the promise and pitfalls of first-party data, and why The Indian Express is betting big on regional expansion, video, and a return of the iconic Screen brand. The episode also explores the challenges of media measurement in India, the fading role of serendipity in content discovery, and why Goenka believes that being “with it” doesn’t mean becoming like everyone else. Tune in for insights into digital strategies being adopted by legacy media.
NOTE: This transcript is done by a machine. Human eyes have gone through the script but there might still be errors in some of the text, so please refer to the audio in case you need to clarify any part. If you want to get in touch regarding any feedback, you can drop us a message on [email protected].
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TRANSCRIPT
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: Good morning, Anant. Welcome to the media room. Nice, lovely to have you and you know this is my first in-depth interview with you.
So, I'm a little nervous because you're a newspaper baron.
Anant Goenka: No, I'm nervous. I've been reading your work for 20 years now. So, I'm nervous and I read your book also and I've been following you very closely.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: Flashlighting my age for the audience but you know one of the things you did in the last 10 years since you joined is you've led the digital journey for Express and before that Express was a power in itself as I said in my introduction to this interview. Can you just give my listeners a sense of where Express is placed right now and then we get to dig deep into the whole digital ecosystem and newspapers. I want to look at where good journalism, the newspaper business and contextualise all of that using the Express as a protagonist, if I was to put it that way.
That's the whole purpose of this conversation.
Anant Goenka: Let me come back to you with another question. In your estimation, you would know best how many newspapers you think India has? How many newspapers are like daily newspapers?
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: There are lakhs of them, if I remember.
Anant Goenka: 1.48 lakh which is a publication. I think the daily newspaper count is around between four to five thousand copies.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: I think INS should be above 100 members, I could be wrong.
Anant Goenka: But I think 20 applies. In this crazy crowded space, I mean I don't think any market in the world has so many print publications that are dealing in new space. I think in all of that and through all the ups and downs that Express has gone through, we started in 32 over the last 90 years.
If I look back and think about what has kept us going, what has kept us growing, I think it is that we're not very adventurous as a business. On the one hand, you look back on it and you look back and you think with frustration, so many guys have got enlisted and they've done this, they've done that. But I think for whatever reason, good or bad, sometimes by design, sometimes by accident, we haven't been very adventurous as a business.
But we have been good at doing what we know to do which is just good journalism. I don't know how but I think and maybe I'm sounding like I'm sitting on a high horse when I say this, but I feel that 4,500 newspapers, lakhs of registered publications, 500 news channels, I don't even know how many Twitter handles, YouTube accounts, etc. I think in all that space somehow we are a growing organisation as a newspaper company and a digital entity and we are doing that because we are differentiated and our differentiation is just that we are sticking to credibility, integrity and doing good journalism and I feel that that is our space.
So when you ask me where we stack up in this context, I just think that good journalism is working and I think I'll be in my 13th year at Express now. I mean, I've been born and raised in this organisation. I've literally grown up in the office because there was no distinction between office and home.
I mean, everything just kind of mish-mashed. I live in Express Tower, that's where I'm sitting right now. The office used to be on the second floor and the ground floor was the press and I don't think anybody really knew the meeting was happening at home or in the press or in the office.
Everything was just kind of mish-mashed. So I feel like I've grown up here but my formal, I joined Express but I think it's been 13 years and I must, if I look back, I was sceptical when I joined it. I was young and I was very sceptical with this whole thing about is good journalism good business, the age-old question but I do think that I've got a lot of conviction today that good journalism is good business.
Good journalism has helped us be a good business.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: Define and elucidate. I'm sorry, I'm sounding like a school teacher but in today's world, what do you call good journalism because you're living in a world where the internet determines our social life, our information sources, our entertainment life, our private work lives, everything. So what is good and don't even get me in the question of algorithms and other things but how do you define good journalism?
Anant Goenka: I mean, it's tough to talk about a media business today without recognising and talking or if I can be honest complaining about algorithms as cliche as that is but no, I think good journalism is, you know, let's just take Sindhu, right? What we saw that what TV news was doing is not good journalism, is the opposite of good journalism and you know and I think, okay so let me, you're calling yourself a school teacher, so I'll also try to, I'll give a boring school teacher answer but let me break up what I think, you know, today across the world, not in India. You know, I think news media, if I can put it in three, four buckets, right?
I think the first bucket is just propaganda, that is one bucket of propaganda. Second bucket is public broadcasters and public broadcasters are all types, right? Like I think in Germany, there are two big public broadcasters, one that is for the internal audience and there's another public broadcaster which is for the foreign audience.
Then there is of course, good old independent journalism which, you know, I think less and less people are understanding what that is, what that means. You know, if you talk to college kids today, they don't know the emergency happened in India, they don't understand what independent journalism means. I was, you know, so I think so that's but that's a third bucket and I think the fourth bucket is, you know, commercially opportunistic media masquerading as independent journalism and I think in these four buckets, there is less and less independent journalism, right?
Number three, independent journalism, what I mentioned, independent journalism. There's less and less of that happening. There are more and more of the other three types and so it looks like everything is, you know, like shit-shitting the fan.
We saw with Sindoor, in Sindoor, all these four kinds come together and they all start looking the same. So even for a very seasoned media analyst like yourself or anybody, you know, you will just say all media is terrible, right? Or all media is unreliable, untrustworthy and it makes, you know, you paint all these four buckets with one brush, it makes the audiences lose trust even more in media today than they did earlier and when the audiences lose trust in all four, then, you know, you're just shooting yourself in the foot but in Sindoor, we, I think, stood out.
Like, I think, I mean, there was definitely, I've got proper hard evidence to show that we stood out because we, you know, we were publicly saying, listen, we are going to, even if we're going to be slow, you're not going, you might not get it to the first at Express but whatever you get here is going to be a hundred percent accurate. We started marketing that, you know, as a thing on social media and here and there, it got a lot of traction, I think. So we have a tiny digital subscription business which we've been fiddling with since COVID and we can get into that in more detail but that spiked in two days during COVID.
So in two days during Sindoor, that just spiked, right? Because of that messaging and because we were living to that, we were living up to that messaging. So we didn't publish anything which wasn't said by an authorised, you know, sort of like an authoritative figure, whether it's military or whatever, somebody with authority.
We only publish what somebody with authority said or we publish what our own reporters on ground were present and verifying and reporting. Now, that concept is dead. So that is good journalism to me but that concept is becoming more and more alien, right?
So if you ask me what is good journalism, I think what Express did during Sindoor for instance, you know, is what I define as good journalism and I saw that having a positive effect on our business. I saw audiences appreciating it and I think that if we are consistent and we have, I think, I'd like to believe we have been consistently doing that for a long time now, I think audiences are appreciating it, you know. We're not picking sides, we're not here to push narratives, we're not here to shape a narrative, we're not here to bring a government down or to bring some other government up, we're not this, none of that.
We are just doing our job which is to put out facts, it is to ask tough questions of people who are in positions of power and if you do that consistently without an agenda, right? I was at this wave summit when I'm giving a long answer but that means I'm going too long. I was at this wave summit, you know, which was an interesting media.
Were you there? You would have been, I'm sure.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: I had a session too.
Anant Goenka: I'm sure. So I was at this wave summit, it was an interesting place to be honest because it was, I've never seen anything like that in India before, right? For various reasons, we won't get into exactly why, but I was on a panel with the Managing Editor of Russia today and she asked me, "What is objective journalism?
What does this thing mean? What does independent journalism even mean? You know, and I really enjoyed giving her an answer, you know, which is that, listen, because obviously she's like, it doesn't exist and I said, listen man, like, you know, people ask me all the time that there is no such thing as objectivity, it doesn't exist.
Yes, but you can aspire to it, right? At least try. So what does that mean for journalism?
It's not the same paper, it is the same reporter in the same paper who has broken, who has investigated stories that have embarrassed Congress when Congress was in power, has investigated and done stories, same byline, same reporter in the same paper when the BJP is in power has done stories that have embarrassed the BJP, have done stories that have embarrassed corporates, you know. His most recent story I'm talking about was, you know, the fact that we fact-checked Trump. I mean, we literally, I mean, I was, I mean, I felt so proud, right?
Like we literally got, you know, this journalist, he got into the weeds of Musk and Trump together alleging that India got $21 million of USAID to increase voter turnout for the Indian elections. He fact-checked, he said that's not, that money was for Bangladesh and it was spent in Bangladesh, right? So I think these are all good journalism and I think it helps the business.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: No, very nice to hear that as a journalist, but Anant told me, but isn't this what you're supposed to do in any case?
We have become heroes for doing our job.
Because you mentioned something in the beginning, you said, I've spent a lot of time figuring out that good journalism can lead to good business. What has that, how has that helped? How can you show us the correlation between the two using express?
Anant Goenka: No, I mean, that's what I'm saying. I mean, I think I'm giving examples to tell you that, you know, I mean, last week we launched an edition in Patna. You know, my friends who I was in college with studying journalism in America, you know, they can't believe that we have launched a new edition in the year 2025.
Right. My, you know, I think that we are, I mean, as a business, if you look at our numbers over the past 10-12 years, you know, I mean, I don't think I'm ever going to have the opportunity to, you know, fly in to interview you in my private Gov stream or anything like that. But, you know, but, you know, but we're doing fine.
We're doing okay. You know, it's sustainable. It's not, look, listen, money, I think that's the main thing.
And I think this is a big philosophical question. And people can, you know, roll their eyes at me when I say this. And I, you know, to what extent can journalism be a pure business?
You know, like, can any news organisation become an Adani or Reliance or a JSW or anything like that? I don't know. I don't know.
I think maybe sticking, if you just stick to news, that is tough. But I think there's enough to be a sustainable growing business. And your rewards are other places.
I mean, I'm not saying we live a life as, you know, we don't live a life of poverty. Right? I mean, we, you know, we can, you know, we give increments every year, we hire good talent, you know, of course, everybody can always ask for more and want more.
But Geeta says, right, like, whatever you need, the universe will provide. So whatever you need, we'll get it. I think, so I think, I think that's the point, like we are able to do good journalism in a sustainable growing business model.
And I think we've cracked that. And I agree, I don't understand why. Like, I'm not telling you earlier, maybe I wasn't clear enough.
The fact that exactly what you said, we're doing, what is our job? Why is that making us a hero? Why is that making us a differentiator?
It's shocking to me that our differentiation is that we're just doing our job. But I think that's what it's coming down to. And why that's happening, I think is, yes, there's challenges in the business.
I think this, like I said, there's a lot of commercial opportunism, there's a lot of people, I think a lot of media organisations, news organisations are very reactive, you know, you know, something, there's always something and they're reacting very fast to all these changes. And sometimes I don't know whether that's actually paying off as a business. I think, you know, slow and steady is the way this business is, I think so far in my 13-14 years as an active part of Express and longer than that as a family.
I think that's been our, I think that's helped us, it's helped us to be slow and steady.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: One minute, I'm going to go back to something about you certainly, your American friend. Newspapers in India do well. I mean, it's not that they are going madly, but they're doing well.
Especially if I look at languages, etc. Maybe there are, I haven't seen an IRS for now, five, six years. So honestly, I don't have a complete picture.
But if I look at revenues, at least many of the larger groups seem to be doing okay. But my point is, there is a perception problem. And I'd asked this Girishji also this of Bhaskar, that we are dealing with a perception where when you any room you walk into, people will talk about how TV is dead and newspapers are dead and radio is dead and blah, blah, blah, which is, you know, my first job as a media analyst is to tell people that more than 800 million people watch television.
Last I looked 421 million people were reading a newspaper. So you can't just write off a medium like that. How do you deal with that as a business?
How do you deal with this perception problem? And especially because globally that is the ecosystem.
Anant Goenka: Yeah, no, look, it's a tough problem. And I think a lot of it like, I don't know, I blame my friends in the media industry, in the advertising industry, a lot of our agency friends, you know, when you talk to them, they are, I think, you know, if I can be honest, and that's my problem, I get in trouble for being honest sometimes. But you know, I think the problem is, they're trying so hard to be with it to their clients and to show that they're with it to their clients.
They're, I mean, they're shooting themselves in the foot every time. Where Google and Facebook are going to give the ad agencies their commission, they want to do a self-serving model to the advertiser, they want to disintermediate the agencies, agencies are going in India, which agency took a premium for creatives, agencies only work on media buying commissions. That's still the case, where do you get your commissions from, you get your commissions from legacy media from TV and print, which has shown no metric has shown a sign of degrowth.
Like almost, I mean, you know, if you look, I mean, we are still what 20% of the ad buys as print. There are several I would say, like of the top 30-40 news organisations, I think like what seven or eight of them last year showed a 20% advertising revenue growth. Right?
I mean, you know, that was better than I do. I'm just remembering from top of my head. So I mean, why on earth would an agency go and say, Oh, no, no, you know, print, it makes no sense.
But they were just so I think, you know, their growth is coming from acquisitions. And their sort of ability to walk into a room is coming from, you know, I know the next best thing, or I know the next big thing. And I'm going to help you get to the next big thing is what the agency guy sells his clients.
But the fact is that it looks like, I mean, I don't know anything about TV, every effort I made to do television, luckily didn't pan out. So I, you know, but, but print definitely has a solid impact. So I mean, forget everything else as somebody who does has a large formative, I mean, I feel like we have a formidable, formidable digital presence, between our digital and print, if we do something big on print, and we're going big on digital, the impact that print brings in India, unmatched, unmatched, I think even television doesn't come close to it.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: So just look at it, look at the front pages of newspapers. Every day you have a full page advert, I get the Express at home and I get Times of India, among other papers, every day. So how you these are the same people advertising in these papers, and then saying print is dead and TV is dead.
I find schizophrenia sort of very weird. But anyway, I'm glad we addressed this question.
Anant Goenka: You know, I also think it's more Times of India's problem to address than mine. Why? Like more times or more jargon, because you know, the kind of audience size that they are talking about, right?
You know, I think that they will be, I think, I mean, yeah, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe we're being late. I mean, I think it's there. They have that and they're trying, I think they try to do it, right?
They try to do all these, you know, put it in print, they tried all these campaigns, which honestly, I think looks, I mean, it looked a little bit defensive, rather than on the front foot. I mean, it is honestly the agencies that need to realise this, that it is in their interest to show the reality, which is that print is working, print is thriving. I mean, it's not growing at double digits as an industry across the board.
But Vanita, look at the number of players. I mean, some consolidation is way overdue. So people who are growing, we've had a good few years, right?
We've had a decent few years. We are growing because, I mean, we are growing, obviously, everybody else is not going to be able to grow at this pace. And a lot of these newspapers have no real reason to be in business.
I mean, they're just being there because, like I said, there's that commercial, there's other commercial interest, which they are sort of funding the journalism for. So they should weaken, bad business models should perish soon, that helps the industry.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: So you're at 200 million uniques as a group. How's that journey been?
What's the big stumbles? And what's the big learning? And then I'll come to the ecosystem because I have an ecosystem question also.
Anant Goenka: Look, I think up until 2020 or 2021, it's been a solid, like, you know, straight hockey stick kind of a journey, right? And honestly, I mean, I can't give, the only thing that I could give our team credit for in that journey is the fact that we never lost money in riding that hockey stick. We never took like a pot of money and said, we'll invest and we'll grow.
And, you know, we never lost money. Like literally, like, every year we made a profit, we broke even, whatever, you know, we did it sustainably. But when I joined the organisation, I think India was at, I don't know, 30 million, 50 million smartphones, right?
By 2020, we will have 800 million smartphones.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: You joined in 2015 or 2013? 2015.
Anant Goenka: 2013, yeah. 2012, right? I can't remember.
But I'm saying that the hockey stick growth was also coming along with audience growth. So it was, you know, we were able to ride that. Of course, it's not easy to ride it also as an AK, you know, you just kind of, you know, you have to be with it.
And we did, you know, at that time, I remember, I'm sure a friend of yours who, our editor back then, somebody who I love watching on YouTube. But I remember he met me in the newsroom and said, Anant, Twitter, Indian Express should not be on Twitter. No, it's a place and Express has nothing to do on Twitter, right?
So I had to get into these, you know, I had to, you know, I had to kind of make sure we had a Twitter account. I had to open a Facebook account. And, you know, I did uncomfortable things back then.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: I should say Anant is referring to Shekhar Gupta, okay.
Anant Goenka: Yeah, I mean, but, you know, I mean, look, listen, I don't blame him. A lot of people thought like that, you know. But, you know, we were the first to go on a cloud server.
I mean, you know, everybody else, I remember that time again, I mean, I'm having some fun here. But, you know, Shekhar uncle at that time said, Anant, put the server in the basement of our office, put a watchman standing outside. So we were the first and all news industry thought like that, we were the first to go to AWS, get onto a cloud platform.
And AWS for years was so grateful because the entire media followed us, you know, like Network AT, all these guys. Why am I saying all this? I'm saying all this because that journey, you know, so we grew with India, we grew with India, we grew with the audiences, we created, we did like off the, I mean, I think of the 800 pieces of content that IndianExpress.com would publish a day, right?
Like 70 or 80 would come from the newspaper. So we did a lot of original fall digital stuff. You know, we had no entertainment, we did a lot of entertainment coverage.
So we did a lot of things and we rode that wave. 2021, you know, when COVID happened, our growth was explosive. I mean, the way all of us grew.
And I think a large day of the infodemic, not the pandemic, but the infodemic was fought by legacy media. It was not fought by the digital first, the Chotu Motu digital, you know, or even the large digital only organisations. It was legacy media on digital mediums that kind of fought, it was legacy media on the digital media that kind of fought the infodemic successfully.
And I think because you were growing so, you know, we just exploded, like we were like our numbers had become like 60% over, like in one month, we grew 60% audience. So to ride that we over invested. And I think that definitely, I would say that post COVID years, two, three years, we were struggling because when COVID went, when COVID was finished, legacy media recovered, print recovered.
I can't say, you know, like, I mean, I can't quantify exactly how with data, but there were enough audiences that went back to print, there was news information fatigue. And all our investments, we bit off more than we could chew. So we had internal issues that kind of caused, you know, that made the pain and look unhealthy for a few years.
And it happens everywhere. But also what happened in that journey was, we, you know, that Google decided to start downranking news, Facebook decided to hate news, unfriend news. So all our business risks, which we knew, we knew there's a lot of dependency on platforms for the audience.
That got exposed, right. And the first time in my career, I saw the universe, what you know, in Comscore, you define it as the universe, the audience universe, and then the news and information sector as a sub-universe of that as a sub-category of that universe. For the first time, I saw that number decline.
Yeah, in India. So the total number of people consuming news on digital platforms had declined for the first time. And you know, you saw globally, but more in India, you saw the large, if you take a top 30 publishers, you saw them lose between five to 50% of their audiences in the year after COVID.
We also got stuck in that.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: If I look at the chart from 2020 to now, you can see the Unix falling.
Anant Goenka: Unix falling. So I think so that it's not been in fact, print has been doing far better than digital post 2021, 2022 till today. That's just interesting.
That's how it is. But so it's not been a, you know, easy journey.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: Where is digital as a percentage? What does digital bring in for the top line right now?
Anant Goenka: Um, I'd say digital is about 20% of our top line, approximately. Really? Yeah.
Okay. That's very good. Yeah.
But I also think that there are a few events that the digital team does. So whatever. So let's say about 15, between around 15 to 18%.
See, the point is that you have a, you have a, you have a growing audience on digital, you have a growing audience in print. We're living, honestly, it's funny when I say this, but the reality is that we're living in paradise right now. Indian media, in a sense, in one way of looking at it as living in paradise, because you've got the legacy growing, you've got digital growing, advertisers who are interested in both.
There is, you know, and the category news as a category, as much as it's, you know, bandied about and is spoken, you know, like as a, as a dead category. I mean, news in India is exploding every day. There are 10 things that, you know, that are just, you know, incredible, like just shocking or big or this.
I mean, news is very, very effective, like a, like a very impactful and a, and a very large audience base comes for news. Right. On the one hand, there is an active avoidance of news around the world.
Even in India, there is an active avoidance of news. But I mean, India, actually, we're a country of news hounds. We're a country of opinionated people.
We all consume news. You want news in different languages. You want news in different media formats.
Actually, in a sense, living in a paradise. I think digital is actually wrecking the paradise before printers.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: I accept that completely. We're doing very well. But essentially, isn't print still subsidising the growth of your online art?
If it was a standalone business, would it be profitable? And this is not only for Express. I'm saying this for most publishing businesses.
Anant Goenka: Of course it is, right? Because the content, I mean, the salaries of the journalists are being paid by the print organisation. So I mean, a lot of the journalism, a lot of our best journalism, you know, comes from the print team.
You know, we have, you know, our opinion page, our explain page. I don't know. I mean, as a media person, you might obviously know these sections.
You know, they're very popular. And the audience that comes for that, for those sections, are very, very loyal to the platform, very loyal to the brand. And they power our digital subscriptions.
They power our virality. They, you know, they are the base. They are the bottom of the funnel that we kind of bank on.
Which is actually what I thought we can kind of talk about is exactly that. Maybe now the conventional wisdom until a few months ago really, I would say, was top of the funnel. Keep growing that using Google, Facebook, all the tech platforms that you can.
And, you know, the bottom 20%, the bottom 10%, in fact, the bottom 1% of your funnel is going to be your loyalists who will pay for digital subscriptions. And, you know, they will be the people that you find ways to keep monetising in different, different ways. The top of the funnel just keeps growing.
And this is the, you know, this is the factor of that. I don't think, you know, my friend Uday Shankar will mind if I quote him and I met him recently, and he was telling me that, you know, that we have to rethink this, you know, he was suggesting I rethink this whole idea now, like, you know, you don't need that to do this, you can just grow this, the bottom can just grow like that, which I think FT did, to some degree. But I think this is where we have to start thinking now, because, you know, artificial intelligence, algos, all these things are going to change everything.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: Yeah. But you are in an ecosystem when you talk about digital growth and print is okay, steady, etc. Where 80% of the traffic and 80% of the revenues go to two players, global, it can vary from 60 to 80%.
But that's the general global trend, which is Google and Meta. And they are the guys who decide on the algorithm, which drives that traffic. How do you deal with this ? By the way, this is true for entertainment also, so it's not, you know, if you look at Netflix, it's true for everything.
Anant Goenka: So how do you know, ecommerce, everything, everything.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: So how do you I mean, and these are the same guys getting to the same thing through Amazon, this retail media on Amazon, I don't know if you've seen the growth of retail media, it's crazy. You know, all the Walmarts, not Walmart, Amazon, the flip cup, Myntra makes more money from retail media than probably from selling clothes. So the point is that this is the world we live in.
And therefore your product, which is news, just becomes a glue, which is there to get people in or stick them there. And we'll get and still play only in the 20% of the pie game. How do you get in?
A, should you be trying to get into the larger portion of the pie? And how do you do that?
Anant Goenka: Yeah, I think that the answer to this question a year ago, I would have said that we have to be, you know, frenemies and figure out a way to have been mutually beneficial with both Facebook and Google. And that would have been true a year ago, and we were all working, I was figuring it out, I was trying to figure out a way to do that with them. You know, then I was trying to, you know, use them as a tool.
I think now with AI, that's kind of changing. And I honestly don't have a very good answer for you. You know, it's an area of uncertainty now.
I don't think anybody has a good answer to this question. I don't think it's worth us running after 80%.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: Why do you bring AI?
Anant Goenka: Because, you know, at least when there was a vibrant search environment, you were getting traffic from Google. Now without any, without search dropping and Google see, I mean, we spoke about this about five, six years ago, I think during COVID maybe, that more than 50% of Google, of the search results on Google, land up in Google. So more than 50% of search queries on Google land up inside Google.
So you're talking about the balance 50% that news in a sense, news and everybody else is kind of vying for. That was still a growing audience for you. If you were able to do SEO right, you were still a growing audience and Google was funnelling traffic, you know, good enough traffic for you to be a growing business.
Now when Google search altogether is becoming less and less, it's getting tougher. So that's why I say AI, how much to expect from Google now? It's a question.
But you know, the fact that the tech platforms still need your publishing and still need your news to be able to make their tech engines intelligent enough to give accurate news information as a summary or whatever, you know, as an answer to a question. So they have a lot of dependency on us. They still do.
And I don't think that will ever actually go. I think, like I get a sense that Google understands that. I think Google understands that it's news.
Meta, I don't think it's quite getting it. I think Meta doesn't really get it yet or they believe the other way. So we'll see how it goes.
And you know, now it's a game of regulators working with big tech and news organisations around the world. This is every geography. What's happening is that there's a regulator involved, there is the tech platform and there is the news industry and they all kind of come together and figure out a way where it's all sustainable for everybody.
So it hasn't happened in India yet. I hope that at some point that happens in India. But, you know, I think, so AI is making it trickier to answer your question.
So I've gone a little bit off, but to answer your question, it is possible, I think, to operate in the 20% and keep a growing business there. Because firstly, the pie is big. Secondly, we haven't yet done anything to really show the richness of our audiences.
We haven't yet as a news industry, we don't have any solid first party data, which we have been able to monetise in any meaningful way. All attempts at doing that have been either too small or they've been too premature or whatever. There are lots of reasons why it hasn't worked out.
But I can tell you that something, I think, I mean, I'm expecting something there to click. So whether I'm a 100 million base or a 300 million base or even a 30 million base, you need to have some critical mass. If you're too small, I don't see it working.
But you have some critical mass. And you have good actionable first party data with you. You can, I think, create, you know, I think there is a theoretically, there is a model, I think also over time now, we have seen a few success stories where these models have gotten proof of concept and have been working.
I think there is one in Spain, there is one in the Nordic countries that has done all kinds of interesting stuff in these organisations. So there's some experiments in the Nordics that kind of show that. FT is always an example that's thrown at us, you know, FT is a tough business to kind of recreate anywhere in the world.
But FT has shown some of that as well. I think to a large degree, NYT, WSJ. So I think there are enough examples to show that if you have good actionable first party data, there is a good ad business that the 20% can kind of work with.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: Okay. But many of the examples you mentioned, FT, for example, is there's a trust, there's a trust component in their ownership. In economies, there's a trust component.
I always wonder that many of the Guardian trust components, many of the guys with a trust component in their ownership find it easier to, you're of course, a private limited company, the ownership structure, therefore determines how long you're willing to wait or what you're willing to invest in. But to come back to AI, before I also get digressed, is, so you have AI and search and all the dynamic stuff happening there. But you also, within that 80%, there are two distinct content ecosystems you can see emerging.
One is the user generated one, with completely different economics, you know, whether it is branded content and ad and influences and all of that. And one is professionally generated, you know, whether it is series shows, or journalism of the kind that you and I would call professionally generated, or professionally created, curated journalism. That part of it is becoming smaller, more compact. It was the logic that you talked about, you know, whether it's an FT logic, would that apply?
Similarly, we look at it as, you know, I'm in the professionally created content ecosystem versus, but they are all talking, fighting for that same 24 hours and fighting for the same consumer and fighting for the same wallet. And that person is probably watching this interview that you and I are shooting. So how does, you know, you can have separate sorts of silos in your head?
Or how do you operate in that? Sorry, that is the long and short of it.
Anant Goenka: And look, I think we're doing a bad job in that. And I think we're doing a bad job as legacy media, we're doing a bad job in that because we're not speaking the language, which is, we're not with it. And the people who are with it are losing credibility, because we're trying to be with it, they're doing things that are just, that are making them sound more like the UGC.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: I also think many of them are not trained to do this.
Anant Goenka: They're not trained to talk like that. And their whole sense of purpose, their sense of identity comes from the fact that, hey, we are not them, we are something else. But then when the identity comes from that, but then that something else is now trying to compete or trying to get into the, like you said, the time spent on the UGC.
At one point, Shakespeare was at the box office. Right?
You know this better than anybody else, right? Like Shakespeare would fill, there'd be lines wrapping around the globe. And, you know, it was the most, do you ever think, the network went off?
Yeah, okay, I'm back. Did you ever think about when did Shakespeare become renegaded to a library or to academia, from box office to academia? Right?
I think it happened like 30 years after he died, right? Because he wasn't able to speak in a language which people were consuming anymore. His stories were still, we are still consuming Shakespeare in stories, right?
One of the top OTT shows in this whole last 10, 12 years is its definition of Shakespearean plot, Shakespearean characters, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But look at the way it's been told. It's very young, it's in a way with it, relatable, whatever.
It is with it, right? Like the way that they are, the character, everything is like, it is present tense. It is for this generation, for this audience.
The news is becoming a little bit like Shakespeare. If we don't talk in a way, if we don't, if you're not going to communicate, but also be authentic to yourself, you know, the news, right? Like, I mean, I, you know, I, I, I could not do some of the interviews or I would not like anybody from Express doing some of the interviews that some of these podcasters have done and have gotten lots of views of, right?
I would not, I don't think it'll help. I don't think it'll hurt us to do that, to become like, to become, to do those kinds of conversations, but it's also the same interview we did 30 years ago. So, you know, so, so, so we find a way to be with it, but also like, you know, by asking the tough questions, by recognising that, you know, when you're giving an Express interview, it's very different from giving an interview with anybody else.
You know, we don't share in advance. We don't, you know, it's all spontaneous. We don't, you know, we do the lots of, the lots of things that kind of differentiate solid journalism or solid interviews from, from, you know, from, from flippant ones.
And there's room for both, I think.
There is a conversation I've had with several people, Prasoon Joshi. I met the head of music for YouTube recently, and that serendipity is going out of the window. One is because it's algorithm driven.
So you know, if I'm watching a person kind of shows the algo, and I'm not using, I mean, deliberately using a non-news example. But the algo is going to, even the algo at Netflix or Hotstar or wherever is going to expose me to stuff I like. And that's true for the news aspect.
So serendipity goes out. Mission Impossible, this analyst told me that people are marketing Mission Impossible to people who are going to watch it. But you've lost the 20-30% audience that you could get.
And therefore, you've impacted the theatrical. So it is across media segments, I can see this. So deluge and serendipity.
How do you deal with this in the fact that we live with the algorithm, it is a reality of our lives. And AI is going to make it even more ghettoised, if that's possible. So how do we deal with any thoughts there?
Anant Goenka: No, listen, like I wish I had an answer. No, for the news, I lost what you were saying.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: Sorry, I said for a news organisation even more so, because you are then accused of polarising, because you're serving the audience's needs.
Anant Goenka: Exactly. So listen, we grapple with this and we talk about it. And this is a challenge that the business model is making you choose a niche and double down on that niche.
And it's a huge perspective. A, you're a supermarket. You've got something for everybody.
As an organisation, you're something for everybody. But you don't have the depth of anything beyond the point. You don't have the depth that a cricket.com does or whatever has for cricket, but you have great cricket coverage. You have a certain amount of depth, but you don't own the micro niche. We've got great legal coverage. But then you've got Legally India and Bar and Bench, which really go down.
So every lawyer just has to force a website. So this is a problem at the supermarket. It's a problem from an ideology perspective.
I think in the West, you've seen the New York Times and The Washington Post. They've taken hard left turns. Other organisations have taken hard right turns because the business model has asked you to do that.
That's helping you kind of know your niche and then create a subscription business out of it. So these are real challenges that the algorithm is creating. I don't have an answer for you.
How to solve it? I wish I did. Except to say that there is, I think, some faith in the audience.
I think the audience is very smart and they're realising that they don't want to become or that they are becoming and they want to find ways to not become a victim of the algo themselves. So our only hope is that the audiences get smarter.
And I think if Indian Express has grown in any significant way at the bottom of the funnel for a digital platform, it is that people asking and wanting that, like not wanting polarisation, not wanting just an algorithm to feed them news information. They want somebody, they want to have a trusted place to do it. So it's only early days, but that's my hope.
And I think that's a game that we are playing. That's the hope we're kind of building towards.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: But it's very unusual for audiences to be aware that the algorithm, they may be aware that they're being bombarded with ads around a similar topic, but to be aware that they're being ghettoised by the algo is interesting. It's very nice.
Anant Goenka: But also, first, it's a hope. I think that happens. But also, like you asked me, what is a journalist in this day and age?
A journalist is somebody, and I'm giving you Sri Srinivasan's definition of journalism. When I was a student in college, I used to teach journalism at Columbia University. And he gave me a great answer, I thought.
He said, digitise and specialise. So as a journalist, I mean, like you are a specialist in media, right? So whatever the platform is, whatever platform, whether it's Instagram, or whether it's a podcast, or whether it's a newspaper, or whether anybody who's interested in the depth of the media industry, you're the specialist, I will trust what you say, I'll trust your opinion, I want to know your perspective, right, wrong, but it'll be an educated perspective, because you're a specialist.
So if as a journalist, I would say that's a big differentiation for us is, can we be the real specialist, can we be the authority in whatever field we choose?
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: And that's a high investment game, if I'm not mistaken.
Anant Goenka: I guess, but like, I guess that's why Express has been different. We've always invested in domain experts, you know, like our agriculture guy, Harish Damodar, the top guy, you know, our investigative journalists are the best in the country, our agriculture guys are the best, our political guys, I mean, when I say the best, I'm not giving him a title, or them a title, I'm just saying, you know, you have to invest in them.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: Tell me what are your priorities in the next two, three years?
Anant Goenka: I don't want to say it publicly, I shouldn't be saying it publicly because I'm nervous that I won't succeed, but you're asking me. I think our first party data play, you know, we have to figure that out and make it more robust. So I think that's going to be a big part of our thought process now.
Our own data, so our own user data and how we can use that to create a better personalisation engine, increase engagement and loyalty of our audiences, make the bottom of the funnel more sticky. How do we make programmatic advertising perform better? You know, you know this.
I mean, the New York Times on programmatic will sell ads at $20 CPM. In India, we're selling for 80 rupees, right? It doesn't, it just doesn't make sense.
And 80 rupees CPM, I'm saying, is our sort of mixed number with all the regions that we have. All the other languages, English is, you know, but the regional guys, they're selling at 40 rupees, 50 rupees. I'm just like, what are you all doing?
Like, just don't sell it now. Just don't put any ad, forget it. But you know, but so I think that's an issue.
So I think first by data is a big answer to that. I think we have launched a Patna edition, which is very exciting for us in the year 2025, like I said earlier. I think people are not realising that there are a lot of young college students, just graduated students, who are interested in becoming intelligent and smarter and impressing their employer in a job interview or impressing their peers or just kind of being smarter.
And I think that that is an audience that is not in Bombay, Delhi, Bangalore, Calcutta, Chennai only, it is across the country. And I think that's an audience that we are going to continue focussing on as a newspaper and as a digital entity. We have a new app, a very nice, shiny new app that's come out, which I'm sort of excited about.
And yeah, last but not least, Small Passion Project, we bought the screen back from Star TV a few months ago. It's something that I felt an emotional attachment to, but also I feel like something that I think there is an opportunity as a business to explore, to do entertainment news in a very credible way and in a very express way. We have been doing, I mean, we've got about between 20 to 40 million user base a month on entertainment news.
But people don't know that because nobody associates express entertainment. It's all sideways traffic. It was all sideways traffic.
The audience base became loyal and steady, which is what gave me the confidence to get the screen back. So now all that is on screen. So I think that will be an exciting thing going forward.
And we're also excited about some cool innovative things we're doing on Financial Express because there is a higher yield on financial news and information than on the general news and information. So that's exciting. And for whatever it's worth, I think, I mean, I'm to blame for this.
I think we've been struggling to get the video piece at Express right for a long time. A bug stops with me. But I think finally I'm feeling some confidence.
I'm reasonably happy with our first video presence on Instagram, with our YouTube channel. We're getting better and better. So I think we're finally going to be a good multimedia news destination.
So yeah, that's the thing we're working on.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: Just to come back to this whole question of corporate ownership and structures which help you to dig deep and invest in digital and do all the things because news to me seems and if I look at some of the most successful brands globally, they all have a trust for a not-for-profit element in their ownership. So I mentioned Guardian, FT, I think many others. I mean, I did a research piece on this.
What is your sense? Is that an ownership structure which is more friendly to doing credible news and yet building a good business?
Anant Goenka: So look, I mean, the first thing I'm not sure that FT is, I don't know about FT, but Guardian of course, Axial Springer is trying to put most of its news in a not-for-profit. I know I think Le Monde also is trying.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: FT is 50% owned by employees, if I'm not mistaken.
Anant Goenka: But I think they think of it as a good business to have employees owning the company. So but I think if you look at it, I don't think we have come to a point in India yet and maybe India is different where news has to be charity. I had an Adda with Bill Gates recently where I asked him this.
I asked him, would you prefer being, if you had to choose between being interviewed by an Instagram influencer or a newspaper, who would you choose? And he said, 100 times in a newspaper. And he said that, you know, he said, but I am concerned that, you know, that the kind of the way they have governments to account around the world, especially in America, you know, if that fades, then what happens to local governance?
And, you know, he said, maybe there is some kind of a charity or some kind of donations that kind of roll in. And I think this is, I think it's important that we realise that we have to think of this very long and hard. It's a very important question, right?
Like, I think we don't realise how much the world needs news, good sort of credible news. I think the tech platforms need news the most. Google suddenly needs news.
All the AI engines need news. No way that an artificial, any artificial intelligence engine can answer any question about India if it doesn't have at least 10-15 sources of news information that it can learn from, right? Now, just because it's been published on a website, you know, shouldn't mean that that's fair play for them to use that information and provide a service to its audience, to their audiences without compensating the original IPO, right?
I think this is a tricky part that we really need to figure out. And it's very important. I think if there is, I think if the law can create an incentive for original content, I'm saying original content, financial, there should be enough financial incentive to produce original content.
