Print revenue models are weak; Online subscription demands exceptional content: Anant Nath

Anant Nath, Editor of Caravan who is also the president of Editors Guild of India, in an exclusive interview with e4m, critiques the current state of mainstream media, emphasizing its failure to challenge government narratives and stressing the need for objective reporting in a post-truth era.

He also highlights the growing influence of independent media as a response to this gap and reflects on the challenges faced by both mainstream and independent outlets. 

Anant Nath also discusses his ambitious plans for the magazine's expansion into multiple languages, aiming to broaden its reach and impact. Nath also shares insights on Caravan’s transition to a subscription-driven model and future plans, including experiments with multilingual editions and diverse content formats.

Excerpts: 

With around 50 crore social media users and several websites and social media pages that publish fake news, where does mainstream media stand in the post-truth era?

The mainstream media has to commit its energy and resources towards objective and fact-based reporting evenly spread out across issues that are of importance for a healthy and functioning democracy. The problem is that large parts of the media end up being participants in the government's narratives whereas their primary responsibility is to question the government and the claims of the governing establishments, in the centre and the states. 

If you are a business paper, your primary responsibility is to question the claims made by the corporates. If they have proclaimed some initiative, some numbers, then the responsibility of a business journalist will be to question them. Similarly, a political journalist would be to question the government and their policies.

Very often, and especially in the last few years, the government's narrative is being published unchallenged. It's one thing to publish the government's narrative, which they should. The problem emerges when you don't question it, and you only publish the government's narrative.

As a result, your paper just becomes a PR mechanism for the government. Any government, good or bad, will always try to paint a rosier picture than is there and they will try to selectively lay out facts, and bring out details, which will put them in the good light.

Which is nothing different than post-truth, because you can't expect the government to be extremely balanced about their affairs. 

Nobody will tell you very honestly that they've done a bad thing. It's the job of the press to find out the reality behind the government and its robustness; challenge it and put perspectives together. This is not happening, unfortunately, at least in the last few years. So the outcome is the media is becoming a propaganda arm of the government in many cases. 

The small and independent media houses are growing gradually but they have less credibility and reach. Most people believe in the narrative set by mainstream media even as their viewership is declining. What should they do to survive? 

We have to understand why these independent media outlets or independent content creators are getting traction. At the end of the day, most of the population, irrespective of their voting patterns, want some kind of independent questioning of the government.

Since mainstream media is not doing it despite consumer needs, the big gap in the market is being filled by independent creators. And you are absolutely right. The independent creators obviously do not have the kind of credibility because those independent creators are residing in an ecosystem where there is so much fake information, sort of misleading information, that for an average reader, it is impossible to differentiate who is correct and who isn't.

The larger media houses, since they have certain editorial processes, have a certain legacy and credibility. If the same news is published by them, it carries more weightage. Hence, the responsibility of mainstream media to be the objective conscience keeper and have questioning mechanisms for the government is even more. The only way to come out of it is to take the responsibility seriously, question the government, publish objective reports, and restore the faith of readership in the credibility of the press, which is at a very low level, admittedly.

Despite pressures from all quarters, some media houses like you try to maintain the balance, trying to bring out the stories which are not told in the mainstream media. How challenging has it been for you? 

So the experience of difficulty has varied. Some of the independent publishing houses have been subjected to a lot of investigation, so-called surveys, IT raids and ED raids, on financial grounds. And then, of course, for the independent journalists, who are independent reporters or YouTubers or journalists who publish on a freelance basis, cases have been mounted against them. So the environment has become extremely vitiated. 

As far as Caravan goes, we haven't directly had any government-driven sort of attack. But we have been slapped with cases, there have been FIRs against us, and we are challenging those in the court of law, which is part of this profession. But more importantly, they have selectively done it against a few sets of media houses and individuals, setting a chilling effect. Because the goal in these cases is not to go after every media house, but to go after a few and make them an example and expect and hope that the others, especially the larger ones, will follow suit. There is a certain fear factor that large publishing houses have. Even smaller ones always wonder whether they should do a very independent story because there is a fear of some kind of backlash.

And that has been very carefully and smartly done by the government. However, we have very strong social media platforms now. Even if someone wants to suppress a story, it is very difficult now. The story will come somewhere or the other.

Caravan is known for critical reporting and in-depth investigation. How challenging has it been to get revenues? 

Caravan is primarily a reader-driven revenue model. We don't get too much advertising for various reasons, so therefore, we have to turn to our readers, and it's primarily a subscription-driven model, all our content is behind a paywall, our content is of such depth, and people find enough value with it, that enough of them are paying, they're paying for the magazine, they're paying for the online subscription, and fortunately, with the last 5-6 years, since the time we started the subscription journey, we now have enough number of subscribers, we can more or less pay for our editorial news operations. 

Do you have any plans to expand your publication?

We launched the Caravan Hindi earlier this year. It's a quarterly magazine. We'll see how it goes. If it picks up soon enough, then we would like to make it monthly. 

We also want to expand Caravan into multiple other languages, especially southern languages, because we feel that there is a great appetite for readership, which is again anti-establishment, which is objective, which gives them an independent view, and which brings out the kind of long, richly, deeply reported journalism, that Caravan is known for, because there is no such journalism being put together by any media house in the country. So, the appetite is there. So, we feel that in the next few years, expanding to southern languages will be a natural extension.

Of course, we are experimenting with a bit of video content, and some amount of audio content, but we feel from a publishing point of view, a greater possibility lies in language expansion. 

We see a lot of magazines come into the market but eventually die down. There are very few magazines that are still surviving. What would be your advice to new entrants in the market?

It's not a great time to get into publishing right now, especially print-driven publishing. Revenue models are extremely weak, getting subscriptions and circulation is extremely difficult, and that has got nothing to do with journalism per se, that's just the way consumer habits have moved to online, away from print. sO any new print publication is going to face challenges. 

Even online, the problem will be similar to how you make revenue from your readers and advertisers. It's going to be far more challenging because your advertising revenue per reader is a fraction of what it used to be in print. And when it comes to paying for content online, again, your content needs to really stand out for people to pay because there is so much content available. Indian users are getting used to pay for online subscription, but your content has to be extremely unique.

And if you can answer that question convincingly to yourself that there is a certain readership which is sizable enough and has the appetite to pay for quality content, and pay decent, not just 10 rupees, 20 rupees, but in a year, 1000 plus rupees, per reader, then you have a case for publishing. Otherwise, it's going to be very difficult. 

Your cost of news generation has to be met somehow and subscription and reader revenue should be a very important part of it. Of course, advertising should be and will be an important part, but only relying on advertising, I don't think it's going to work out now.