Outlook’s vanishing edge: How a bold magazine lost its bite

“Should he be smiling?” 

“Anti Rao: Muslims want a new leader to head Congress”

“Did he take the money? Yes, says a majority in an opinion poll”

These are headlines from Outlook magazine’s cover page, addressing former Prime Minister PV Narsimha Rao. By February 1996, less than six months after its launch, the weekly current affairs and news magazine Outlook had published at least three cover stories critical of the most powerful man in the country. 

In contrast, the last time PM Narendra Modi made it to the cover of Outlook was in February 2024. The cover was a montage of five cutouts of Modi in different avatars with the headline "Omnipresent, Omniscient”. To be fair, it isn’t just the PM who didn’t get the spotlight of an Outlook cover. No other India political leader has been the singular focus of the Outlook cover in over a year, barring Jawaharlal Nehru and Dr. BR Ambedkar. 

This year, Outlook will complete three decades in the industry. When it launched, the magazine’s arrival was a storm. For 18 years, the descriptor above the magazine’s masthead read “The Weekly News magazine” and largely lived up to this simple but demanding description. (Since February 10, 2014, Outlook has had a tagline instead: “Read. Think. Understand.”) Thirty years since its launch, the magazine doesn’t make any noise anymore, judging from testimonies of former as well as current reporters and editors. 

The first issue of Outlook hit the newsstands in October 1995 with the cover story “First ever opinion poll in Kashmir”. It explored what the people of the Valley wanted. Copies of the launch issue were burnt, and officials from the Prime Minister’s office called up the founding editor-in-chief, Vinod Mehta, rebuking him for publishing the cover story, which proclaimed “77 percent say no solution within Indian Constitution”.

The magazine’s last three issues included a special edition for Women’s Day – with a cover story profiling women in male-dominated fields, a cover story on “religious tourism” in the country, and another on the new world order. 

Before these, the issue titled ‘The Grid’ explored the “concept of binaries” and was “a resistance to the binaries that make us less human and more programmed creatures who must function as told in order to belong”. Before that, Outlook did a Valentine’s special on “love and loneliness” and the first issue for 2025 was an “ode to Hallyu, the Korean wave, sweeping far and deep in India”.

Newslaundry spoke to over 30 journalists associated with Outlook – including some who were part of its founding team and others who worked with the magazine until recently – to piece together the story of the magazine’s “transformation”. 

The Vinod Mehta era

Having launched three newspapers – The Independent, The Sunday Observer and the Delhi edition of The Pioneer – and been shown the door at each one of them, Vinod Mehta may have had a reputation for brilliance, but his career was not known for being stable. He called himself the “the mother of all rolling stones” for losing three editorships within three years.

Almost every previous stint had ended after a run-in with the proprietors of the publication, after publishing stories of which they didn’t approve. At one outlet, he lasted less than a month. 

Then came Outlook. He went on to helm the magazine for over 15 years, establishing it as worthy competition to India Today, which dominated the English magazine landscape at the time.  

However, Mehta wasn’t the first choice for the job. The proprietors of the magazine had first approached Chandan Mitra, who would go on to become The Pioneer’s longest-serving editor. “Mitra declined the offer, for reasons best known to him. Then came in Vinod Mehta, who was out of a job, as he often would be,” said a member of Outlook’s founding team, requesting anonymity.

Mehta quickly assembled a small team of reporters and editors, many of whom had worked with him at The Pioneer, like Padmanand Jha and Ajith Pillai. Some, like photojournalist Prashant Panjiar, came from India Today.

“The idea of working with a new magazine was very exciting. Outlook took off very much like a start-up…anyone could speak out of turn anytime. The junior most sub-editor or reporter could join in the inner discussions of the senior most editors,” said Panjiar, who was one of Outlook’s first four associate editors.

Outlook’s weekly editorial meetings brimmed with energy, recalled Pillai. “We were all very young but seasoned, and eager to prove to the world that had written us off before we even started,” he said. Pillai stayed with Outlook till 2012. 

The founding editorial team came up with three pre-launch trial issues before finalising the Kashmir opinion poll as its inaugural cover story. “There was unimaginable excitement amongst us doing that first story. The entire vocabulary at the time was extremely nationalistic by default towards Kashmir, so it was unimaginable what we did,” recalled Sunil Menon, who worked for Outlook from 1995 to 2021. 

The controversial first issue helped establish Outlook as a conversation starter, which in turn helped its commercial prospects. “Both Vinod’s team and the marketing team knew that to succeed Outlook had to become commercially viable. And for that, we knew we needed advertisements. So, even before the magazine was launched, we had advertisers lined up. When the magazine’s first issue came out, its copies were burnt by some group…so, that also helped us get attention,” said the founding team member quoted above. 

Despite securing advertisers, the magazine firmly placed its bets on the subscription model. “We got some radio sets from China and offered them as gifts with each subscription. Soon, our fax machines were buzzing with subscription requests,” recalled the founding member. The gambit paid off and within some years of its launch, Outlook’s circulation was just short of 2.5 lakh, he claimed. 

Alongside the subscription drive, Mehta and his editorial team were hard at work to make serious journalism seem accessible and popular. “Vinod had put together a fantastic team, and gave a lot of emphasis to a very strong and bold current affairs section of the magazine. Rather than being injurious to the business of running the magazine, he turned the chutzpah into its very selling point,” said Sunil Menon, when asked what kind of journalism Outlook had espoused under Mehta. 

Concurring with Menon, Pillai said that under Vinod Mehta, Outlook gave a lot of importance to reportage. “If he [Mehta] saw you in the office he would ask how many people you had met that day and how many you planned to [meet].”

Under Mehta’s editorship, Outlook investigated and uncovered some of contemporary India’s biggest scams and scandals. Here’s a sample:

- In June 1997, Aniruddha Bahal broke one of the nation’s biggest match-fixing scandals for Outlook. The cover story, titled “India’s worst kept secret”, had cricketer Manoj Prabhakar admitting he was offered Rs 25 lakh to throw a match against Pakistan in the 1994 Singer Cup. Several players, management members and journalists were implicated in Outlook’s ensuing investigation.

- The issue of September 6, 1999 revealed for the first time how during the Kargil war, intelligence reports were delivered to top decision-makers, but were not given the attention they deserved.

- In the March 5, 2001 issue, Pillai and Murali Krishnan wrote about the PMO allegedly taking decisions that benefited certain business houses, such as the Hindujas and Reliance Industries. Their follow-up story focused on PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s “three blind spots” – his foster son-in-law Ranjan Bhattacharya and bureaucrats Brajesh Mishra and NK Singh.

- A series of stories by Saikat Datta in 2006 exposed alleged wrongdoings in the Rs 18,798 crore Scorpene submarine deal. The stories focused on accusations of kickbacks between the Ministry of Defence and a French arms’ manufacturer. 

- In July 2009, Outlook uncovered a Rs 2,500-crore scam in which rice meant for the “needy” in African countries was allegedly siphoned to private players with the purported help of state-owned companies. 

Several of these exposes would rock the Indian Parliament. Some of them led to Outlook being slapped with defamation suits. But Vinod Mehta didn’t flinch. For example, the magazine published 17 stories around the Scorpene submarine deal, some of which were cover stories, despite serious backlash. 

“Because it involved arms dealing and a whole lot of other things, people were trying to shut us down. We were hit by a lot of cases,” recalled Datta, who joined Outlook as a reporter in 2004 and reported this story for the magazine. “Mr. Mehta put his hand around my shoulder and said, ‘You don't worry about the cases, let me worry about it. You handle the story, I'll handle the cases.’” 

For a junior reporter to have his editor’s support, particularly one of Mehta’s stature, was a massive stimulus. Datta said he didn’t need anything more. “If we go down my friend, we will go down together,” Mehta had said to him.

Datta’s experience wasn’t unique. Mehta seems to have stood by all his reporters and their stories. 

“Vinod trusted a reporter. When you said you have the papers, unlike other editors, who demanded to see the papers, Vinod never did,” said Anuradha Raman, who worked for Outlook from 2005 to 2015. “And he would just say ‘Can you give a photocopy of all the papers to my secretary? We have been sued.’ That’s it,” she told Newslaundry when asked how Mehta used to react to legal cases. 

Raman added that Renuka Chaudhary, a Congress leader who was the Minister of State for Women and Child Development between 2006-2009, “was one of those who would always threaten to sue me”. “She would call, screaming in the morning, and Vinod would come and just say to me ‘I hope all your papers are in order’,” she recalled.

Outlook was a “reporter-driven” magazine, said Bahal, who was part of Outlook’s founding team and worked with the magazine for four years. “Vinod rarely shot down a story unless it was just not working out. I have rarely worked at an organisation like this, which gave us the freedom to explore our stories,” he said.

Much of the freedom Mehta’s reporters enjoyed wasn’t only because Mehta understood the importance of the freedom of the press, but also because of the support he got from Outlook’s proprietor, Rajan Raheja. In Mehta’s own words Raheja was a “dream boss”. 

A Mumbai-based builder, Raheja and his family already had interests in diverse sectors such as cement and hospitality before he ventured into the media landscape with Outlook magazine.  

In May 2001, income tax officials raided several offices and properties of the Raheja group. No doubt coincidentally, this happened within two months of Outlook publishing a story on how the PMO was “compromised”. Outlook’s Mumbai office was also reportedly searched. 

In his memoir Lucknow Boy, Mehta wrote that immediately after the raids, he called up Raheja and asked if the proprietor wanted Mehta to resign. But Raheja stood by him.

Pillai, one of the two reporters behind the PMO stories, told Newslaundry that Mehta had anticipated some of the backlash. “Word went out to the PMO about the story [even before it was published]. Brijesh Mishra [from the PMO] called up Vinod, who pretended to not be around. The story appeared and created a storm. The Rahejas faced raids and cases, but they stood by the magazine,” he said. 

The incident cemented the already strong bond between Mehta and the owners. Consequently, if they’d occasionally request a story be held back, Mehta complied. However, by and large, Rajan Raheja stayed out of the editorial team’s business.

“There was zero interference from the owner. Rajan Raheja always stood behind the editorial team,” said Sandipan Deb, also part of the Outlook’s founding editorial team. Deb was the magazine’s managing editor when he left in 2005. “Until the time I was there, I never got any indication of interference from the proprietor.”

And then came the Radia tapes. 

The Radia tapes fallout

 In November 2010, Outlook published a series of leaked recordings between corporate lobbyist Niira Radia and several politicians, industrialists, government officials and senior journalists. Radia was being probed by the income tax department for alleged tax evasion and money laundering among other irregularities. Several journalists and publications reportedly knew about the Radia tapes, but Outlook was one of the first publications to report on them. 

The recorded conversations exposed corruption and potential abuses of power at the highest levels. Published just before the controversial 2G spectrum case came to light, the Radia tapes pointedly suggested certain media persons played a significant role in influencing the then United Progressive Alliance government’s decision to appoint A Raja as the telecom minister.  

“When I went back to the office armed with the information about the tapes…Mr Mehta made me join the meeting reserved for editors and department heads. At one point, he said that since we have the tapes now, we will always be known as another publication which did nothing about them if we didn’t carry the story,” said Saikat Datta, who broke the story for Outlook. “The idea that we should not be seen as people who also censored ourselves clinched [it]. And then there were editors like Ajaz Ashraf and a few others who said that there was no question of not publishing the tape.”

The Radia tapes exposé, which Mehta proudly called the “story of the decade”, led to an uproar in the country followed by resignations of ministers, parliament disruptions. But it came at a cost for the Outlook team. “All of us were almost ostracised by the journalistic community...Everybody used to think that we will expose everyone, but not fellow journalists,” said Datta.  

Raman added: “Vinod was isolated. And Outlook journalists paid a price for the [Radia tapes] story…You know how there’s a code of honour among thieves, and now that pact was broken.”

The magazine had more to contend with than being shunned by the media fraternity. After being named in the Radia tapes’ story, the Tata Group withdrew ads from Outlook. Ratan Tata, who was leading the group at the time, also sued the magazine. 

Soon, Mehta stepped down as the editor-in-chief and was made the editorial chairman – a largely ceremonious position – of all Outlook publications. Mehta was replaced by Krishna Prasad. Prasad, one of Mehta’s many mentees, had been with him since Outlook was launched and was handpicked for the job by Mehta himself. 

However, despite all indications that Mehta had agreed to his removal from the top position, the founding editor-in-chief being pushed to the back burner didn’t sit well with several in his team. Many senior reporters and editors who had been with the magazine for a long time – including Ajaz Ashraf, Anjali Puri, Smita Gupta, Nandini Mishra, Saikat Datta and Ajith Pillai – resigned soon after Prasad took over.

Push for ads

The change in the editorship turned out to be a precursor to more changes at Outlook and Outlook Publishing India Private Ltd, the parent company which also publishes Outlook Hindi, Outlook Money, Outlook Travellers and Outlook Business. Rajan Raheja’s son Akshay had already been helping his father in looking after their businesses, and his influence on Outlook Publishing started to grow after Mehta left in February 2012. One of the changes was that the management started getting aggressive about getting ads. 

In 2021, Outlook Publishing’s hunger for ad revenue even led to them being slapped with a notice by the Press Council of India. PCI norms dictate print news outlets must carry the “heading ‘Advertisement/Advertorials’ in bold letters with the font size equal to sub headings appearing in the page” when publishing advertorials.

Taking suo-motu cognisance of two published interviews, which were “suggestive of alleged paid advertisements” but “presented as news”, PCI issued a showcause notice to Outlook Hindi in June 2021. The interviews in question were published as part of “Outlook Initiative”, an enterprise of Outlook Publishing’s brands team.

In recent issues, Outlook Hindi’s English counterpart Outlook (also referred to as Outlook India by many) has published several interviews and features as part ofOutlook Initiative. The design, font style, and presentation of several of these interviews and features resembles the magazine’s regular editorial content. Sample a few here:

Newslaundry could not spot the term “advertisements” or “advertorials” with this content. 

The brand team of Outlook Publishing India Pvt. Ltd also “curates” booklets, sometimes carried as supplements with regular editions of Outlook and Outlook Hindi. The cover pages of such booklets carry the Outlook masthead and feature several other design elements of the regular magazine’s cover.

For instance, Outlook published a 30-page booklet on the “New Era of Sainomics in Chhattisgarh” along with its January 1, 2025 issue. Apart from a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it disclaimer on its index page, the rest of the booklet had no such declarations and featured several favourable stories on Chhattisgarh CM Vishnu Deo Sahai with headlines like the following:

- “Vishnu Deo Proving to be the ‘Iron Man’ in fight against Naxals”

- “Winning The Hearts Wherever He Goes”

- “The Progress Of Each Individual Is The True Progress Of The State, That Is Now The Motto Of Chhattisgarh”

Also published on Outlook India’s website, most of these stories have been the byline of “Outlook Web Desk” and carry no disclaimers.

Outlook magazine’s March 5, 2024 issue had a similar booklet on the Tamil Nadu government and the state’s CM, MK Stalin. In the 45-page booklet, there were articles with headlines like, “Tamil Nadu: A model for balancing growth and welfare” and “Tamil Nadu tops in gross enrolment ratio: Unpacking the success story”.

Neelabh Mishra, a regular columnist at Outlook and editor-in-chief of Outlook Hindi between 2009 and 2015, stepped down because the management “pressured him to get ads,” according to his partner Kavita Srivastava. Outlook Hindi, launched as a Hindi news weekly in 2003, had Mishra at the helm since 2009. Mishra passed away in 2018. He was the editor-in-chief of National Herald at the time. 

Mishra’s partner and activist Kavita Srivastava said Outlook’s management demanded that Mishra get ads for the publication from state governments. “It is easier for an editor of a magazine than the marketing team to get an appointment with a chief minister. Neelabh refused to get ads for the magazine saying that was not his job,” she said. “Junior Rajan [Akshay Rajan] wasn’t respectful of the editor’s role. Neelabh felt pressured to get ads. They soon got another editor [for Outlook Hindi], and then Neelabh resigned as one magazine could not have two editors running it.”

Newslaundry reached out to Outlook’s chief executive officer Indranil Roy for comment. He initially said he would respond to our queries over email, but subsequently didn’t respond. This story will be updated with his comments if he does reply. 

Chinks in Outlook’s armour?

In 2016, Krishna Prasad was reportedly asked to leave after under his editorship, Outlook published an exposé on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s alleged role in trafficking tribal girls in order to convert them to Hinduism. Titled “Operation Babylift”, the journalist behind the story, Neha Dixit, is still making rounds of the court after a criminal case was lodged against her, Prasad and Outlook’s CEO Indranil Roy. 

Prasad was succeeded by Rajesh Ramachandran, who was asked to leave within two years. Then came Ruben Banerjee. 

Banerjee was allegedly sacked in 2021 for running a cover story that was critical of the Modi government. The reason, according to him and those in the know, was that the cover went viral. The story critiqued PM Modi for being “missing” during the second wave of Covid–19. However, at the time CEO Indranil Roy had suggested that Banerjee’s dismissal had to do with disciplinary issues and a change in the publication’s target areas. “Outlook wanted an editor with a digital focus and someone who understands video reporting,” he had told Newslaundry.

Banerjee was replaced by Chinki Sinha, the first woman to head Outlook’s editorial team in 26 years .“Chinki has been working with BBC and understands the challenges of creating content on a digital platform,” Roy had said of Sinha at the time of her hiring.

Outlook is in a “new phase”, set to “disrupt the way news is reported and presented in India,” says the magazine’s ‘About Us’ section on its website. In 2022, Outlook announced that “in its new avatar”, it would offer “long-form, issue-based, credible journalism”. “We value our discerning readers and we know they want credible quality content,” it declared. 

Previously, the magazine’s website had described the publication as being “on the forefront of investigative reporting”. This “transformation” was led by Outlook editor Chinki Sinha, the magazine said.

Nearly 70 staff members from various departments have quit in the past three-and-a-half years. Some journalists told Newslaundry that they felt the magazine had changed its course from being a news magazine too drastically under Sinha.  

Those who spoke to Newslaundry said that while the management’s increasing interference into Outlook’s editorial had been an issue for the three editors who came before Sinha, the lines between management and editorial seemed to dissolve completely at Outlook as a part of the “transformation” Sinha oversaw. Several journalists said Outlook CEO Indranil Roy would often sit in on edit meetings and suggest stories and the direction they should take. 

“Sometimes it felt that Indranil was the actual editor and she [Sinha] was just the public face. Because it is he who runs the show,” said a senior journalist and former Outlook staffer, requesting anonymity. 

“From the outside it looks like that after Krishna Prasad, whoever became the editor had to operate under the condition that they cannot take on the government. Accept this condition and become the editor or forgo your chance,” said Ajaz Ashraf, when asked to describe Outlook’s editorial strategy in the present. 

While claiming to prioritise “issue-based, credible journalism”, the new Outlook under Sinha emphasised poetry, art and feelings over news, which has perplexed many. In its present avatar, the magazine is more feature-heavy and less interested in current affairs. For instance, Delhi’s assembly elections were almost absent from the magazine's recent issues, barring an essay by Professor Ajay Gudavarthy of Jawaharlal Nehru University in the February 10, 2025 issue.

While the magazine ran multiple ads from the Uttar Pradesh government on the Maha Kumbh, there were no ground stories on the event which saw, among other things, a stampede in which at least 79 people were killed. 

“ It’s kind of sad. Because Maha Kumbh is exactly the kind of a story a magazine would do,” said Anuradha Raman. “At least, I think if we had been there, we would all rush to bring out different kinds of stories.” 

She added: “Many of the journalists who worked for Outlook for years can no longer connect with it.”

According to a former editor, the magazine’s foray into art, literature and feature stories is so that they don’t have to take any “political panga (trouble).” 

“If you are writing on Shakespeare, Modi will not be unhappy with you. If they are, say, doing a story on bulldozers, they will do it in a more theoretical, academic way rather than put Adityanath on the cover. It will be more of an academic exercise on demolitions and how only the poor are affected,” said the editor on condition of anonymity. 

Sinha describes herself as a "curator of absences” and as someone who is “interested in exploring culture, society, and fringe communities like sex workers, street children, and other outcasts.” Recent issues have included a poem by Sinha on “heartbreak vs situationships”; a whimsical debate comparing Mumbai and Delhi; and even stories credited to reporters “as imagined by” themselves.

“Poetry can be a form of resistance, but poetry is not journalism,” said a senior journalist who had worked as a reporter with Outlook. 

A former political Outlook journalist told Newslaundry that after Sinha joined the magazine, it took the “easy path” by publishing issues “with the cover story being an explainer of sorts”. “There are no reports in the magazine anymore, only pieces,” said the former staffer requesting anonymity. “Even gender, which she [Sinha] supposedly gives so much focus to, has no investigative journalism.”

At a virtual event held in 2022, Sinha had attributed the mass resignations that followed her arrival at Outlook to a deep-rooted resistance to the notion of a female authority figure. “If you’re a woman, it’s problematic enough – but if you’re single, it’s worse,” she had said. 

Be that as it may, different people who have worked with Sinha in Outlook in the past or are still at the magazine shared with Newslaundry examples of her alleged objectionable behaviour.  

Sinha had allegedly told a Muslim reporter to “come out of the persecution complex” in her newsroom. Newslaundry learnt that in an editorial meeting, Sinha told the correspondent, Asad Ashraf, that he had a “ghettoised mindset” and needed “to stop pitching Muslim stories”. Asad allegedly walked out of the meeting. Those who were working in Outlook at the time allege he was asked to resign two days later by the CEO.

When contacted, Asad refused to comment on the matter.

“I had high hopes of seeing the journalism that I used to associate Outlook with in action. But I was left completely disappointed,” a former Outlook staffer told us, speaking about the state of affairs at the magazine.

Chinki Sinha did not respond to Newslaundry’s messages and mails. This story will be updated if she does.

‘This URL does not exist’

With all roads in journalism leading to the internet, an additional anxiety is the magazine’s poorly maintained digital archives. It’s another tangible way that Outlook’s legacy is now at risk, Ajith Pillai told Newslaundry. 

Echoing Pillai’s concern, senior journalist Saba Naqvi, who worked at the magazine for 15 years as a political correspondent, said, “News magazines depend on archives. And these are the stories that really shaped the magazines, so it is a shame that they [Outlook’s management] have not invested in storing their archives.” Naqvi recounted coming across a 2008 story she had written about Manmohan Singh’s birth village in Pakistan – but it was dated 2022. (This is a problem that many news websites have since their web desks often republish old articles if they’re deemed to have potential to go viral because the subject or someone featured in the article is trending.)

More concerning than incorrect dates is that several old issues that seem to be online are actually only partially archived. Many of the old covers on Outlook’s website are online without the accompanying story. The infamous coverage of the Radia tapes are also no longer available on the website. The Radia tapes webpage on Outlook’s website just shows a long-list of the leaked conversations, but the hyperlink opens to a message that reads, “This URL does not exist.”

For those who remember the old Outlook that Mehta founded, that message feels applicable to more than just those URLs.  

Newslaundry’s mail to Indranil Roy and Chinki Sinha comprises a detailed questionnaire on Outlook policy on maintaining archives, publishing advertorials, getting government ads, Ruben Banerjee’s ouster, the circumstances that led to the Muslim correspondent’s resignation, and the magazine’s focus on features rather than news, among other issues. This story will be updated if we receive a response.

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