This interview has been edited for clarity.
Yeah, it was a little bit accidental. I grew up in India, studied Economics, so I went to business school. I got an MBA and was selling dairy products. I did that for about a year and a half and really didn't think that’s what I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing. I also was probably somewhat influenced by my upbringing and DNA, because my father was editor of a paper and my mother was an English professor. So I just applied to a couple of newspapers in India. I was told that if you go to journalism school then we might consider you. Then I just applied and joined the Times of India School of Journalism. And then spent the next 20 years or so in journalism.
You know when you've done it for like almost three decades as I have, and you've seen a lot of changes, it really varies. And if you ask me, obviously you know 10 to 15 years ago, I would've said I enjoy reporting a lot more than I enjoy writing. To me writing was always the act of getting my reporting out of the way, so I could do more reporting.
I was an okay writer but not like somebody who fell in love with his own words, if you will. But, in the last decade, I really spent a lot of time at the intersection of journalism and tech, and product and strategy and, you know, slowly but surely kind of moved over to the business side of journalism.
The challenges have all been around the business side of journalism. So the things I've done, whether it's starting at a newspaper in India or whether it's picking up hard digital transformation of newsrooms, that has become much more interesting. I also feel like it's potentially more rewarding simply because if I do something right on this end of the spectrum, it'll help sustain journalism. If you were to ask about a specific thing that I did that's been the most exciting, it's really launching MINT in India and spending three years there. That was a startup, and I created it all on my own, visualizing it and launching it, and the fact that 10 years later it's the No 2 business publication gives me a lot of joy and satisfaction.
I don't think MINT's success will ever be measured in terms of becoming No. 1. I would like to think, and it's easy for me to say because of the Code of Conduct and the ethics and the foundation, it still remains perhaps the most ethical newsroom in India, in terms of its practices. And I think that I'm glad to see that continue, and I'm sad to see that it's,an unfortunately minority position in India.
I think there's a lot of doubts about ethics and corruption in India. So MINT stands out a bit. And in that sense, I hope that continues. I founded MINT with a very simple, perhaps egotistical, notion, which is that a billion people deserved a business newspaper that did not talk down to its audiences and that explained things, and which made life simpler. And I think all of those have by in large remained as hallmarks of MINT. So I hope that continues as well. I think India has a lot of other bigger journalism issues and challenges right now. So my concerns are more macro than about MINT's own future.
If I look back or if I look at it now I'm not worried about the state of journalism itself. I think there are a lot more talented, better equipped and multimedia journalists who have come behind me.
In all of the doom and gloom about the state of journalism, what's perhaps not necessarily appreciated is the fact that we have never had more audiences for journalism or at least mainstream journalism in the history of media.
There have never been more people consuming journalism than there were yesterday, and they would be more consuming it tomorrow simply because of technology. The ability for journalism to continue to reach larger and larger audiences has never been better. So that's a very positive phenomena. Pick any brand, which, let's say, was a newspaper. It has a larger audience today than it ever had even in its heyday. So I think that part of the optimistic part is the sense that the output of journalism and newsrooms seems to be never in more demand than it is now. So, in that sense, that's the part that is the most exciting. Obviously there are lots of other challenges as well that the industry itself is confronting.
Well, I think if somebody said journalism is dying, I would definitely call that fake news because there's no empirical evidence of that at all. What is in trouble is the sustainability of individual journalism brands or organizations. I think the problem with that thinking tends to be that, we used to have a very steady state in the newspaper world. And I think we are all expecting a similar steady state in the digital world. I think the reality is that there is never going to be a steady state.
And, clearly there are significant challenges to funding journalism and significant challenges to the nature of funding and what that might mean for journalism. There are pockets, especially in the U.S., where there's not enough resources. One needs to have an informed community, especially for local journalism. So there are also challenges in many areas which continue to confound and puzzle people. What do we do to make it sustainable? That conversation never used to really happen outside of the industry. We're all kind of thinking about it, talking about it and, in some cases, funding it. So I see a fair amount of hope even within all this despair.
So it's a little too early for me to effectively answer how it has been. But for a long time, I've been concerned about the fact that we are sending out a lot of trained journalists out into the world to commit acts of journalism, without really exposing them to the business models and the implications of that, and the challenges that business models are facing. And so part of my hope is that in addressing that at the very beginning of the pipeline, which is a journalism school, hopefully they'll be more journalists with a better understanding of the business they're about to get into. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't pay attention to the notions of church and state and all of that, but over time for various reasons, church and state became church versus state. And I don't think that we need to have that kind of mentality. Part of my mission and my hope is to just have journalists be informed about the state of their business and how they can actually help with that, while continuing to stay true to journalistic values and ethics and all of that.
Well, look, I mean for a long time that the profession disproportionately affected white males and they rose through the ranks and become decision-makers. And a lot of diversity initiatives that were launched were all somewhat suspended or ended when the industry got into trouble. Those were the easiest things to pull back. As a result, we've had a decade or two of not enough growth and not enough opportunities for diversity in the newsroom. But the good news is in the last couple of years — between #MeToo and a bunch of other things — there's renewed attention to the lack of diversity. The only challenge would be having missed out on that decade or two of creating that pipeline. You have this problem of a lack of diversity at the middle and upper management levels because the pipeline is what it was. And so I think this problem is not necessarily going to go away for a while, but I think there are more efforts to at least acknowledge that this is a problem.
And more than anything else our industry spent a lot of energy in the last year or two thinking about trust issues. And I think one of the fundamental reasons we've lost trust is because the newsroom does not reflect the audiences we are trying to reach.
So diversity is, to me, both a problem in terms of values and all of that, but it's a fundamental business problem. If you don't solve for it, then we won't have a healthy business of media because there's no trust. If the trust doesn't come because there is not a lot of diversity, then it becomes a problem for the sustainability of the business model.
If we're trying to reach a lot of young people who are no longer consuming mainstream media, then who is writing and what topics they are writing about and how they are writing about it are important. If it does not reflect them, they will not engage with it.
Media companies are looking for reader revenue and trying to get money from individual readers, so offering journalism that seems like it's speaking to them becomes much more critical than if you're dependent advertising.
The shift to reader revenue models and digital journalism increases the need for diversity inside news organizations.
About 60-70% of our audience is now consuming most media through mobile devices that fit in the palm of your hand. That has both journalistic implications and business implications. How quickly that has happened and how likely it'll be more than 70% of our audiences has not been a surprise, but has been a deep and good learning curve in terms of the implications. Second, I'm not a big believer in how platforms like Twitter and Snapchat have reduced attention spans. I think they may have reduced attention spans but the reach and the ability to engage more audiences who are no longer in your geography outweighs any concern you may have about short attention spans. My own example is I have never read more magazine articles in my life than I do now with Twitter. Because of Twitter and people who shared, I probably read articles from anywhere between 20 to 30 different magazines that I wouldn't have bought and consumed. So using my own example of the level of serendipity in my life, in terms of reading, has gone up so much and a lot of that credit goes to Twitter. Facebook and Twitter have actually expanded consumption rather than contracted it.
Yeah, I mean the fact that everybody is talking about it and the fact that that there are more companies willing to step forward and establish a baseline, and by default then kind of allowing us to go back to them a year later and see what has changed. I think that's really engaging with this topic, which wasn't really the focus for the last decade and a half, and I think is a very healthy sign.
And, again, this should keep reader revenue, and the recognition that would force us to have to think about diversity, not as a charitable thing but as a business problem is also a good thing. I'm optimistic, but there's a long way to go. Oftentimes it feels like we've made some progress and then we kind of fall back. But, at the same time, it seems like there's momentum.