What are the challenges and opportunities of building credible journalism away from the centre? How do organisations navigate limited resources and local pressures to shape national conversations from regional vantage points? And what are the highs and the lows of steering newsrooms across India’s diverse landscapes?

These were the themes of the session ‘Highs and lows: The pressures of running a news organisation away from Delhi’ at The Media Rumble 2025, which took place in Bengaluru on October 3 and 4. The discussion, moderated by Sudipto Mondal, featured NRC South Asia correspondent Lisa Dupuy, The Ken’s cofounder and editor Seema Singh, The Hindu Group CEO Navaneeth LV, and IIMBx Digital Learning Foundation CEO Sitaraman Shankar.

Asked about the need for a southern paper to feature Delhi coverage, Shankar said, “When the bigger story is very often happening thousands of kilometres away, you can’t close your eyes to that.”

Talking about how readers in other South Asian countries look at India, Lisa cited the example of Nepal, where “it’s not a great time to be a mainstream Indian journalist”.

Asked about the right of the reader and how it features in a newsroom, Navaneeth said, “In our case, we believe the best pieces of journalism we do in the newspaper every day, which we think people should consume and have an opinion about every day…our editorials are outside the paywall, they are not treated as premium content.”

“You said you have readers who like you, love you, and adore you. We have one more category, which is readers who hate us,” said Seema.

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