Dear newslaundry team,

I am a subscriber of your website and regularly listen to NL Hafta and consume other content available on your exceptional news portal. In fact, I am one of the early addicts of newslaundry. I discovered it when I was a graduate student in the US and recommended it to my fellow Indian students. At that time, I tried to subscribe to your website, but your website was too nationalistic to accept US dollars. So, with my guilt at bay, I continued listening to you for free. When I moved back to India, I had no excuse for not subscribing. Anyway, thank you very much for putting a sane voice out there. Also, I am indebted to Madhu Trehan for introducing me to Ravish Kumar — I am ashamed to admit that I discovered him through his interview on newslaundry. 

I wanted to know your thoughts on the following point since you seem to ponder a lot on the role of media in India:

I wrote an email to your team a few years back requesting you to not allow comments in your website. I wrote a short email and got an even shorter reply saying that you believe that all opinions must be expressed. I was disappointed that you oversimplified a complicated issue, but was later happy to see that this issue was touched upon in NL Hafta several times. Let me tell you once more what I was thinking, this time in greater details. 

I believe the job of the media is to transfer information from its complex form, as produced by field experts or as recorded in raw form by field reporters, in a form that is easily digested by the masses. On the one hand, this definition of media role forces us to limit the final output to be matched to the intellectual appetite and interest of the masses. On the other hand, it is clear that such an operation can be run only through various layers, with each layer serving the information to the next layer, simplifying the information at each step, yet keeping the essence intact. 

I can’t help myself from drawing a parallel with engineering research. I am a faculty at the Indian Institute of Science and work in a theoretical area. In theory, we are used to arguments that are airtight, like a complete list of assumptions, and look for flaws at every small step. However, all this theory is finally used to deliver an engineering product. Clearly, the engineer cannot operate keeping in mind all the issues, or even be aware of all the issues. The research community has organically arranged itself in various layers, with each layer serving only to the next one. One person’s theoretical research becomes another’s practice and vice-versa.

In a similar spirit, there must be a myriad of media sources, starting from a layer just below technical journals and ending at newspapers and TV channel. In this hierarchy, where does newslaundry see itself. I was hoping that you place a portion of your articles at slightly higher layer where comments from field-experts are included in reports and airtight arguments are given. To an extend, some of your articles do that. For articles of this category, I believe that comments are only a distraction. This is not a debate, these are simply arguments valid under their set of stated assumptions. One may find flaws in the assumptions, but under those assumptions there is no gap in the arguments. Comments generally reflect personal takes on issues, without any deep insights. Why should we readers be bothered with those. Note that TV channels cannot afford to do this or they will loose their audience. Ravish, inspite of his articulate Hindi, is very clear of his agenda and political leaning, and does not seem to have many deep, nontrivial insights into most situations. Nevertheless, he presents a common sense intelligence in its best form and is therefore ideal for TV. His artistic fervour helps add colour to otherwise dry and repetitive media debates. I think newslaundry can explore several of the aforementioned layers at same time and have a section on expert articles with no comments. Pure bliss!

Besides that, I like what you are doing. Please keep up the good work, and I will keep on paying for one of the cheaper subscription options (sarkari naukar hoon bhaiya).

Regards,
Himanshu

Dear Subscription-Khors,

First of all, congratulations to Manisha, Sandeep and all other members of the team for grabbing the prestigious RNG award. I was led to this site while looking for the stories that got RNG awards and now I am listening to the Haftas for last eight hours straight (and counting). This informal approach of discussing news is well above the average. Anyway, this communication is not to praise the good work that you are doing. Rather, I would like to mention some not-so-praising observations.

Firstly, I am a voracious news-consumer, and still your site took this long to come under my radar. First pages of Google search results are not showing your contents. Get your technical team to do some serious SEO (Search Engine Optimization)! Now!

Secondly, the whole site is focused towards the National and the Hindi Media. You can think of sections to cover the Regional Media as well. Being a bong, I do not get sense of even Tamil happenings (forget the Assamese or Naga) unless The Hindu covers it. This situation should change. News should not spawn from metro cities and capitals only. Do something, the future is yours. Moreover, the same national publication covers the same story with different tone and tenor in different city editions. Look at first pages of The Telegraph Kolkata and Jamshedpur editions on the day the SIMI “encounter” was covered and you will understand what I meant.

Third, there should be some podcast on the science and technology field as you are doing with the entertainment and sports beats. Dr. Ranganathan is well equipped to handle the bio-sciences, but the physical and engineering fields are also to be covered. I can put my resume if the perks are good enough 😉

Fourth, in the last Hafta, Abhinandan have mentioned about the ethical practices of the Tatas and how they declared the extortion money in their audit book and all. Man, this happens when you follow corpo media! The fact is that Tata Tea was caught in a real bad mess, played to the tunes of IB, got their officials arrested and everything was dumped down. The conversation between Mr. Tata and the head of Bombay Dyeing was taped and fed to news media. In those leaked communications, Mr. Tata mentioned about giving shelter to some top ULFA leaders and this whole episode almost squeezed them out from Assam. Then there were the Radia Tapes. The suicide of Tata Steel’s Head of Corporate Communications in 2013 also punctured the moral high ground the Tatas used to take. Had NL been there in the early 90’s, you would have gotten your impression about the Tatas right. When the Tatas pay, the Tatas are served.

Lastly, though most of the interviews are brilliant and you have got Abhinandan as a really witty and skillful anchor/interviewer, the humour put to the scripts of Dhobighat is disappointingly crude and dull. You can do much better than that, as evident from Hafta.

By the way, you have provided Vivek Agnihotri the space to tell his side of the story about the Jadavpur University incident, but I did not notice anything from the other side. It is not that difficult to contact some of the students to get their versions. Having been actively associated with the student politics of that university until 2012 and having won consecutive students’ union elections at that time, I still have got some connections there. With that background, I can say with full conviction that when six to seven rival organizations are organizing something together and someone wants to know who is the leader there, at least ten people will come forward. So, the story of sipping tea without sugar that Mr. Agnihotri fed you in the interview was not the purest truth.

Now, am I a subscriber? Not yet, but I am willing to be one. I just want to see the emerging indie media to engage with its audiences, listening to them. You get surprised that you have got so many intellectually elite listeners, but is not that pretty obvious? I guess your audience base is pivoted on that section. How many petite middle classers are supposed to be interested in getting news from a obscure website? You are hatke, and you deserve your listeners to be the same. You should try to engage your audiences in more creative ways. You can and should keep on nagging for suggestions and/or contents in the same way you ask for subscriptions! Your listeners are more than willing to contribute! You have got listeners who compose for you (for free!), who send you costly equipment!! Your audience is what other media can only dream of! Fucking exploit it!!       

Read out this letter in your podcast and something good will happen within the next few hours. If you ignore, it will bring upon you the wrath of the mightiest Dr. Susu Swamy.  

Sumanta
IIT Kharagpur

Hello Newslaundry team,

First things first, I have been following Newslaundry almost since the very beginning. I finally subscribed this week after your new website made it easier to do so. To compensate for my negligence in the past, I have gone with a 6-month Liberator plan and may upgrade it in the future based on my financial situation.

I have a lot of things to say, so I have divided my letter into independent sections. You can pick the ones to read out in Hafta based on available time. (I am not sure if Abhindandan will read this out, though since I live in good old Delhi and not in Frankfurt or Boston . But I did spend half my Saturday on this. So there’s that).

Sections:

1. My background
2. Views on Hafta panel
3. My question on journalism to Hafta panel
4. A case for NL science journalism
5. Feedback on website and general salutations

My background:

I am an engineer by training, currently working on some hobby AI projects. I worked as a product manager in one of India’s hottest startups for a few years before quitting to travel and indulge in a bit of self-learning.

Growing up, I used to read 4 to 5 newspapers everyday – both Hindi and English along with at least 3 weekly news magazines. A number of my relatives are in journalism. So even though I am not a journalist, you could consider this mail as a feedback from a heavy consumer of news media.

About 3 years back, I completely stopped following any newspaper or tv channel. Quality of reportage was definitely an issue and so was the high dosage of ‘opinions’ journalism (I’ll elaborate on this later).

Views on Hafta panel:

I think you have a great diverse panel on Hafta. I disagree with a lot of your opinions but greatly respect you for the these two reasons:

1. You seem to have genuinely good intentions
2. You have skin in the game and have stood your ground on the business model

As for individual panelists, I think Abhinandan is a hidden gem who is unnecessarily hated upon by everyone. I like how he plays the Devil’s advocate in a lot of cases. I also like the fact that he looks at issues from a simple first principles perspective.

This is also something I admire about Manisha. Also, Congrats to her on the RNG award. She has a long way to go!

I think Anand complicates things a lot. I guess, this happens when you leave a scientist around things that do not follow natural laws. As for his religious views, I’d suggest he read the short book ‘Sum’ by the neuroscientist David Eagleman. It made me question my militant atheism without resorting to God or religion.

As for Madhu, I think she brings a lot of journalistic perspective from her long years. However, I do think she falls for the temptation to give high-level fundas a lot of times.

And I think Deepanjana does a decent job of summarising the opinions (something Abhinandan should ideally do but I am not complaining).

Also, I think you guys do a great job at production with limited resources. I tried my hand at podcasting once but failed miserably. So kudos to Kartik as well!

Request you to invite more guests to the panel as it brings freshness and diversity. If you conducted a poll for this, my vote would go for P. Sainath followed by Hartosh. Would also be great to hear from a foreign journalist – may be someone from Pakistan or Bangladesh.

My question on future of journalism:

I am really appreciative of journalists who go out there to investigate and know their beat. Mr. Sainath comes to mind. In your team, Manisha is one such person. And this kind of journalism IMO will always be relevant, at least until the robots take over.

My grouse is with ‘opinions’ journalism. I would like to know what the Newslaundry panel thinks on this. To me, there is a class of people, best typified by someone like Shekhar Gupta, who try to authoritatively hold forth on any issue under the sun.

Such journalists were relevant before the advent of internet and social media because there was information asymmetry between readers and journalists. So people were alright in accepting elite consensus as ‘truth’ (whatever bunch of elites they chose to put their faith in – left, right, centre)

However, this is not the case anymore. An example that comes to my mind is when Pritish Nandy wrote an article attributing Twitter’s fall in stock price to the abuse on the platform. This may very well be one of many valid causes but he did not provide any data to substantiate this claim. Neither did he mention other product issues that could be equally or more important causes. 

I cherry-picked this example because I have worked in the technology industry and know that it is not so easy to pin-point problems. Without any data about usage, Pritish Nandy’s article was at best an act of Kremlinology.

My point is, anyone who uses Twitter or has read NY Times, Tech Crunch etc would know whatever Nandy knows. The opinion he/she forms may be equally right or wrong as Nandy. However, Nandy’s article, by virtue of his past reputation, is given an exalted position in the distribution chain by a large newspaper. IMO this is a huge flaw with the daily newspaper editorial model. You’ll publish bullshit if there’s not enough news on a day and sometimes even if there is. That’s no better than low entertainment.

So my simple two-part question is: 

1. What does the panel think of ‘opinions’ journalism ?
2. If you do agree with my thesis (and I know Anand does), what would be a way forward ?

A case for NL science journalism:

A lot of your subscribers are from STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) background. This makes me believe that you have a great opportunity to completely dominate the niche and fledgling area of science journalism in India. Some things working in your favour:

1. You have a scientist in your core team
2. You have a large subscriber base of researchers who may want to help out
3. South Delhi area has a cluster of high-quality research institutions – IIT, JNU, AIIMS etc. Surely there will be people willing to contribute. This could solve a lot of logistical issues as well.

Developing a scientific temperament is the need of the hour in our country. We desperately need science communicators in the mould of Neil DeGrass Tyson, Brian Cox, or Jim Al-Khalili.

By scientific temperament, I do not mean opening up sundry engineering colleges or liking the ‘I fucking love science’ Facebook page. Rather I mean the ability to form hypothesis and test them empirically. And most importantly, the courage to admit it when you are wrong and change your minds. This is something that is completely lacking in Indians in most fields of work. Journalism will be a great beneficiary of this.

I dig your new website design. And although, it still doesn’t feel completely modern, I have confidence that you’ll get there in the next few iterations.

One request I have is that you experiment a bit with the font in your articles to test for readability. A lot of articles feel like giant blocks of text right now. Check the New York Times website once.

And please, more data visualisations!

I wish all of you the best for the future. I’ll continue to follow your progress and will keep sending my 2 paise worth of wisdom on Twitter.

Thanks a lot!
Pratyush 

PS – Note that I do not intend to malign either Shekhar Gupta or Pritish Nandy personally. They may be great people for all I know.