 First keynote speaker of the day, Mr. Sukumar Ranganathan is the editor-in-chief of Hindustan Times. He was previously editor of Mint, of which he was one of the founding editors in the year 2006 and which he edited between 2008 and 2017. He has previously worked in editorial leadership roles at the Hindu business line and business today. Sukumar, who has degrees in chemical engineering, math and business administration is interested in mathematics, science and technology, the history of business, new media and data-based political journalism. He reads and collects comic books and is an amateur bird. He will be speaking on the topic future of journalism. Please put your hands together for Mr. Sukumar Ranganathan, editor-in-chief Hindustan Times as I request him to join us here on stage. These days I make notes. There was a time when I could remember everything, but after the age of 40 that started dipping, that skill started dipping. I've been a journalist for a long time and one of the things I'm really good at is making myself unpopular in ways big and small. So I'm going to start off by making myself unpopular in a small way. In 2015, Microsoft did a survey on attention spans, which is the source of the information that was shared with you at the first session, where one of the researchers pulled a statistic off the web with no scientific basis that said human beings have lower attention spans than jellyfish and goldfish. It is completely wrong. So as a journalist, it is my duty to inform you of the facts, whether you believe it or not is up to you. The other day I went for an event where there were a lot of colleagues, lots of people who'd worked in newsrooms I'd worked in, and one of them looked at me and said, do you realize that you're now one of the gray eminences of journalism? And I'm not gray, I'm not an eminence, and I know exactly how all of us used to treat gray eminences, right? I was once invited by a bunch of them to talk to them on how journalism works, and this was after we launched Mint, and Mint was this revolutionary new product, right? I mean, some of the people from those early years, I see Durga here, and it was, Mint was very different. So I think all these old people, and they were really old, and they were gray eminences of journalism, called me, asked me to speak to them about journalism, and I started off, I was younger and very cocky back then. So I started off by saying that I would not hire any of them in my newsroom, because the skills they possessed were not the skills that a newsroom like Mint needed. And I'd like to think that the skills I possess are probably not the skills that digital newsrooms need, right? Although, of course, looking at digital newsrooms in their present form, I wonder whether I want to be part of it at all. So I'm going to speak to you about the future of journalism, and I want to thank Anurag, I want to thank DNPA for actually calling a journalist to speak about the future of journalism, because usually you get a lot of other people coming and speaking to you about the future of journalism. You have politicians speaking to you about the future of journalism. You have business guys speaking to you about the future of journalism. You can't hear me? I'm usually very loud. Yeah? Okay. So thank you for inviting me. I'm going to really try and speak about the future of journalism, which means you can agree with me or you can disagree with me. And I'm going to put forth nine perspectives or nine areas that I've spent a little time, actually a lot of time thinking about what works, what doesn't work and things like that. And I'm going to start from the beginning. I'm going to start from ownership. I think journalism needs a new ownership model. The current ownership model is broken. It's not going to work. It might have worked in the past, and for many of us for whom it is still working, I think it's largely momentum that is keeping us going. We really need a new ownership model. Now what is this new ownership model? I have no clue. Could it be the trusteeship model of funding that let's say some of the universities like Ashoka now have where you have a bunch of disaggregated owners with neither, you know, owners in a rough sense of a word or leaders who can't really influence decision on their own. But I have no idea what it's going to be, but you need a new model of ownership. You need new management and leadership in newsrooms, especially on the business side. I know that news has been commoditized, but a newsroom is not a liquid detergent, even though there is a lot of slime in some newsrooms. But it is not soap, and it cannot be managed like soap. You have to manage a newsroom like a newsroom, because that's how you build brands and the future of journalism is linked to that. The third thing is the business model. What is the business model for new journalism? How is it going to work? Will an advertising related model work? I don't know, given the fact that, you know, digital revenue isn't really as lucrative as existing streams of revenue for large newsrooms. And I say this purely from the perspective of being able to sustain newsroom costs that are required to produce high quality journalism. Right? I mean, you might be able to survive in a niche, you might be able to produce very tabloidish kind of stuff, but high quality journalism costs. And will advertising alone work for it? I don't know. Will subscription work for it? Perhaps hasn't really worked in any significant way for anyone in India. And before, you know, some of the smart people in this room want to disagree with this, I want you to think about scale before you speak, because it has not worked at scale for anyone in this country. I'm a little disappointed that the INV secretary is not here because the next point is meant solely for him. I used to be a telecom reporter early in my life and I love this concept called the USO Fund. Maybe we need a USO fund for journalism, right? Funded by people like my friend Durga out there, right? I mean, any big tech company that wants to operate in this country should contribute to the USO fund, which can then be split among newsrooms on the basis of their circulation, right, Punit? But we really need, I know that it's not very different than what countries like Australia have done, right? I mean, they didn't call it a USO fund, but and the reason for having it in telecom was very simple. It was believed that the telecom companies would focus exclusively on profitable urban customers and subscribers and not really go out and build networks and rural areas where they were most needed. So the USO fund went there and was used. Fourth thing, newsrooms and journalism of the future need a strong code of ethics, right? You cannot function without a code of ethics and this has to cover every aspect. For anyone who wants to look at a good code of ethics, please look at the mint code of ethics. I hope it's still available on the website. It should be. It's 32 pages. A bunch of us spent a long time writing and rewriting it and it is a code that we upgraded at several points in time. For instance, when it was first written in late 2006 when social media didn't exist. So in 2009, we added a chapter on social media. Over a period of time, we've added a lot of things to it. I mean, I'm of course speaking from the time when I was there in the newsroom. So I don't know how current it is, but you should look at the mint code of ethics. Any newsroom of the future has to have its priorities right, which means it needs to decide what it needs to do. Does it need to worry about targeting the least common denominator with clickbait? I don't know, right? I mean, I was asked to speak about journalism of the future and in my book, that's not journalism. It might work as an audience generation mechanism and I'm not even sure how sustainable that audience is going to be. But the unfortunate aspect of current journalism, especially current digital journalism is that audience generation often gets mistaken for journalism and it's not. At least in my book, it's not. The easiest way to argue about this is to say, I have the microphone and you don't. Journalism of the future will require journalists, including old people like me, to learn new skills. Some of these, of course, are old skills. Journalists of the future will have to be fast, not AJ Liebling fast, but reasonably fast. And the unfortunate aspect of today's newsrooms, print and digital, is that very few people know who AJ Liebling is. They will need to focus on data and how to deal with data. Some of the journalists will have to understand visualization and coding, but they will need new skills. And of course, they will need fact-checking skills, not alternate fact-checking skills. But fact-checking skills, because it's journalism of the future will require specialization. There is going to be really no room for people who are generalists and journalism of the future simply because I think one of the things the internet has done most successfully is it's made creation and delivery very easy. And it's made discovery easier still. So for instance, when telecom auctions happen in India, the best analysis of it is not to be found in any newsroom. I used to have a colleague called Mobist Philippos when I was in Mint who was the best telecom analyst and even his analysis would pale in comparison to that by a gentleman who worked for Qualcomm. I don't know whether he still works there, but who used to post his analysis on LinkedIn and then on Twitter and you could discover it very easily. And it was brilliant stuff. So if you want, that's really who you're competing with. You're not competing with your competitor in economic times. You're competing with someone who lives and breathes this business. So that specialization is something you need to acquire. And I remember when we were setting up Mint, one of the things we said was, we don't want to be all things to all people, but what we write on, we will be the most authoritative source on that. So that specialization is really going to define journalism of the future. Journalism of the future has to be technology agnostic. It will have to adapt to whatever platforms come about. The big mistake that we are making is we believe the platform is journalism. It's not your journalism remains at the accord. The platform will keep changing last point and I'm going to stop with this. It's a short speech. I don't give long speeches. Journalism of the future will have to be done out of newsrooms that believe in fairness with all creators, internal creators as well as external creators, your journalists, your coders, your visualizers, your data providers, and your external ones, which are your freelancers, you can't have that. I mean, you can't, I mean, it's not a sweatshop, right? Journalism of the future has to move away from that model, which can be seen even today in some newsrooms. I mean, things have changed a lot over the last 20 years, but there are some aspects of it have not changed. So that's all I have to say. I hope I've given you lots of things to think about. Thank you very much.