 First I want to thank Hasid for even being here because he's a very broken man after Liverpool's recent results So the fact he could make it in here in one piece is amazing So Hasid works for this small little media hokey pokey little startup with a three-letter acronym Which isn't funded by public donations or broadcasting fees or anything of the kind That's how he'd like to believe so has it been at the BBC for a while nine years 11 11 Two of them. They didn't know he was around so 11 years and in a variety of roles and He has suffered for his art. He's had hostage training. He's Done performance art. He's had all kinds of training of how to work in hostile environments some of which he showed us and Just before I let him get on with it. I Just wanted to say if you want a bunch of entertaining minutes You should mention citizen journalism Advocacy and objectivity in the same sentence because has it is one of the dying breed of people who believes journalists Should and our objective so it's led to many wonderful hours at Berkman where people have debated the objectivity of journalists So with that I'm going to let Hasid start Thank you, Mel and just thank you everyone for coming especially my Neiman fellows and everyone else here. Um, I Should come back next week as well because Malavika herself is going to talk about Another really important India related subject. She's talking about the UID project and the massive privacy concerns That are to do with that so, yeah, I've been at the BBC for about a decade now and I came here originally to Look into how the growth of the internet in India will have an impact on lots of aspects of society Which is obviously too big a subject to even really contemplate in a year I'm a journalist so very quickly focused on news and what that growth means for How news is presented how it's consumed the business models around it So if I hadn't been at Harvard this year, I've been lucky enough to be at Harvard this year I would have been in India probably would have been in India right now Looking at this Okay I cannot believe no American politician has tried Modi has been making campaign appearances via hologram That's right. Modi has gone two-pack at Coachella It's how you convince That is how you convince undecided voters. So who are you gonna vote for Modi? Why because he appeared to me as a hologram and told me he'd give me a toilet I'm not gonna get into politics here Because it's too dangerous, but and For those who don't know that's Narendra Modi. He is the right-wing Prime Ministerial candidate doing pretty pretty well in polls. We're not sure what's gonna happen But he is kind of one of the two main guys in this election The bit they want to focus on as that clip alluded to is the role of sort of technology in this election But also now in India as a whole in Politics in political campaigning certainly mr. Modi and his team are very very active on social media and have been for a while They use all the networks and as a consequence they have their fair fair share of trolls and they also post selfies they This has been described as India's first digital election and It's worth sort of examining examining that claim Me certainly compared to 2009 it is because back then there was none of this at all. No politicians were tweeting There was no online campaigning. There was none of that at all partly because It was a new platform. These are new platforms in India But also because India even less so than today was not a country which had the internet in any great numbers But nowadays you've got a hundred million Facebook users 30 million people on Twitter 50 million people using WhatsApp and it's growing incredibly fast and I'm going to talk a bit more about that later and Overall around about 200 million internet users. So there is an internet in India There is a digital audience in India and no politician will be stupid enough to ignore Those kind of numbers even though the context of the 1.2 billion. It isn't a huge number and it's still pretty much the elite It's still a lot of votes So on one hand you could you could argue that India is digitizing and people are moving online And the internet is growing and its influence on the country is spreading But here are some other figures and this is the thing that I came to Harvard with this skepticism and pessimism about India's Prospects and based on things that I'd seen myself things that I know and some very basic numbers which I'm going to show you so a Billion people don't have internet access 300 million people don't even have electricity and We heard from that clip six hundred million people don't have a toilet at home And there are 300 illiterate people 300 million illiterate people in India So you look at that and you think how is it possible for everyone to be hooked up to the internet when those basic development? Indices haven't been fixed and are being Fixed pretty slowly in some cases in some parts of the country And that was my initial pessimism I thought that it's just not possible for India to be thought of as a country Which is digitizing or that digital revolution taking place. I mean in Britain or in America or anywhere else We we we moved online if I can use that phrase Pretty seamlessly we all had phones. We all have electricity. We all have TVs. We all have those basic things There's not a big jump for all of us to make the same technology leaps But in India at the same time as people not having toilets. There are millions and millions of phones Here's an example This is a $45 smartphone. It's probably not even the cheapest one on the market, but it's got a touchscreen. It's got decent functionality It's runs on a on a I think an old version of an Android platform and it works basically it works as a smartphone It's not exactly this but it's it's a pretty good approximation And we're expecting 200 million more of these to be sold in India this year So it doesn't seem as though The lack of basic amenities is a barrier to people buying phones and connecting and getting online you know, I was in India in January and I Hadn't really looked at it like this for you know for a long time I've obviously been to India loads of times and I've done lots of work there But on this trip. I was specifically looking at what people are doing in terms of connecting to the internet and what devices people have and I may be slow to this because I've not been living there for a while But you know people like your drivers your elevator operators, you know even cleaners having smartphones So they really are I mean they're replacing these things I've got an example of the kind of phone that people have had You know forever in India and these things are not I mean mine's the mind's broken as well These things aren't gonna last forever. This is like the most basic Nokia you can find and it costs when I bought this in 2009 It costs about $30 even back then when that $45 can get you that thing So look at this so Exhibit a but These smartphone buyers aren't necessarily connecting to the internet because what this phone can do it can take nice pictures You can play music you can watch videos and do all sorts of things you don't necessarily need to connect to the internet but the people who make the handsets the people who run the mobile networks and the Internet companies themselves, you know really wants that audience. They really want people to to Go to the internet and consume content create content do the things that we all do and drive. That's that part of the economy So what kind of content and what kind of platforms work in this market? Here's one. This is the thing which is developed in Cambridge. This is a very simple mobile money app And it's really useful in place like India because when you're making small cash transactions What you used to have to do or you still do in most cases is Instead of traveling a long distance to hand over a small amount of money, which is not, you know Very economical you instead pay you instead use a middleman Who takes a cut and that person delivers that cash payment and takes a cut and you know It's obviously not a safe way of doing things because apart from the expense of the commission You know often the money's stolen and you know never gets to where it's supposed to go So with things like this you can make small cash payments and do it safely and securely you can do all those things Cut again, but it's genuinely genuinely useful product This is a company which is based actually here in Cambridge which came out of MIT The other thing is that we know works online and it's as big in India as it is anywhere else is is Entertainment I'm just gonna play you a clip of a something which is massive on YouTube The non-Indians in the room won't really understand this but I'll explain later You know First of all you cannot speak for so long on my show and that too in Hindi For our English you are I'll translate what he said He said that the Indian storytelling in cinema is pathetic He used a lot of curse words to describe Indian filmmakers and then he claimed that at a party He got drunk and then had a fight with Ram Gopal Burma and shortly after that made out with That got three and a half million views on YouTube and for those don't know that is a takeoff of a very famous A very successful Indian news anchor on up Goswami who has exactly that confrontational style and He's probably the biggest thing on sort of English language News television in India So the point is that there's some really good Original viral digital content out there in India Here's another example. This is Again for those who don't know This guy is probably India's biggest film star and his thing is I mean not only is he huge and famous and all that stuff But he's sort of India's Chuck Norris in the sense that many many internet memes have been devoted to this man so he joined Twitter yesterday and already has like 300,000 followers and then of course then the Twitter based memes start so you don't Join Twitter you sign up to follow Rajnikanth You forget your password no matter you asked Rajnikanth, and that's kind of the you know very Chuck Norrisie very Bruce Nairie That's from a site called faking news.com which is kind of an Indian version of the onion There's loads of others. There's the hoot, which is a media sort of focus site another video site called AIB Look it up if you want to I'm not gonna tell you what it stands for or certainly what it translates to Scoop whoop, which is kind of like BuzzFeed's story pick, which is a bit like upworthy and the point is that To produce six really successful content in India you really have to understand the Indian audience because in India's internet users now more than ever with People of lower income speaking many different languages beyond English moving online. It's a really really complex group India probably in this respect is the most diverse country in the world and the question of who this new user is is the central point of everything if you're a Platform designer or a content creator and it's really complex and really challenging and to work out what content and what platforms work for these people who? share very few common languages vastly different income levels you've got caste you've got race you've got Really religion the whole thing contained in one country and then loads of them as well It's a big challenge Here at Harvard. I've been sort of looking at User-centered design and the basic idea is this is from a business school class But there's similar sort of projects at the engineering school and the grad school of design and the idea is and it really applies in for media makers is You know really understanding who your audience is really sort of walking through The basics of who it is you're creating content for that whole that whole top-down model that I've grown up with You know of someone like the BBC or like any newspaper Telling you what's what and the audience you either go with it or you don't you know It's not going to work in future and certainly not in India with the without variety of groups in the country So you really have to understand using principles like this Who your audience is and you know not just what their media consumption is or how they use their phones But how they live their lives and what they do every day and what are the points of which they're going to pick up a phone And then when they pick up a phone what are they going to do with it? You really have to tell a story about that user and understand the culture or probably more accurately the cultures You know do some really deep-level ethnography. I mean a friend of ours Trisha Wang who is a Birkman fellow has done Really brilliant work on this in China where she spent you know Months with with Chinese young Chinese internet users to understand Not just their behavior online, but just what they do what their lives are like and then from that you can extrapolate What kind of content? What kind of platforms might work for them? so in India there is a big appetite for news There is you newspaper sales almost uniquely in the world are going up TV stations, although they're not making any money, you know doing well ratings are doing well Sooner or later, especially given the fact that the population of India the About half the population of India is under the age of 25 and they're all buying smartphones. That's safe for argument's sake That news consumption is going to have to move online on digital at some point But there are massive challenges and I've kind of mentioned one already You know there are 20 odd official languages in India and then many more dialects within that So even if you are from a Hindi speaking part of the country Your Hindi may not be the same as somebody else's 50 miles down the road and That's the problem for for a content creator because or a platform designer because if you're trying to scale a service You've got to think about translation. You've got to think about cultural differences. You've got to think about all sorts of things Employ more staff to do it. No one speaks all 20 languages Literacy is also still a problem and You know 25% of people are not literate at all a Decent enough proportion of the remaining 75% are only functionally literate and then you've got the other issue of digital literacy people who May have a smartphone for the first time but have not had that progression from other devices from there from desktops to tablets and all the rest of it That's the problem that needs to be addressed as well I mentioned this earlier these phones are not iPhones that Android phone. I showed you probably can't even support the Facebook app Which is explains the immense popularity of chat apps, and I'll come back to that later as well, but These not iPhones these don't have Massive processing capabilities and the connections themselves can be erratic I mean even in the middle of Delhi often you can find your 3g signal drops out and turns to 2g and you have to kind of Manipulate it and it's getting better of course, but it happens even in the big cities The other really big thing is low attention span It doesn't mean that people are stupid, and they don't know what they're doing and they don't understand things it just means that There's some research that suggests that even So educated wealthy, you know engaged people only spent about maximum about 10% of their time on news apps on their smartphones It's been a lot more time on other things on social apps and all the rest of it but 10% of news and the lower you the lower you go down the income scale or The less well educated you are the lower that number becomes so you've got the competition for people's time Someone's got a smartphone. They're gonna want entertainment. They're gonna want mobile money Maybe a load of other things before they bother with news So again for a news person It's a big challenge to kind of capture that audience in the face of such competition from other types of services Other distractions that they've got so what does news look like in this environment and how might it be distributed? Given the fact that you can't expect people to go to your app And I mentioned this already a few times, but chat apps are huge in India and they're getting bigger and bigger And I'm quite pleased that my own guys that the BBC Have pioneered a really good news service on WhatsApp They they recognize quite early on and they've got we chat as well and actually in Nigeria for those who are interested They're launching a news service on blackberry messenger These that these these are not chat apps anymore really these are social networks But operating at a much lower level of bandwidth you can post photos you can post videos you can See your friends status updates. You can have groups. You can do all those things they're these are mini social networks and They just don't take up as much space on your phone as as a Facebook word or even a Twitter word And this graphic actually explains things even better What's up as nearly 50 million users in India and it's growing really fast if you look How people the primary form of communication with people's friends? Email is going down From quite a low base anyway SMS is going down phone calls going down, which is kind of fairly intuitive Social media is going up slightly but chat apps are not only growing the fastest But they are the primary form of communication now for you know between friends between acquaintances and for news Organizations and any kind of content creators. That's a big opportunity right there And I think it's going to become a huge driver of traffic so I've been Going back to the beginning. I was here to look at this sort of basic idea of the internet growing and what it means for digital news in India and rather than I Tried really hard to find things to research companies To research working in precisely this area. I really couldn't find anything There is there isn't a lot that's visible. Certainly. There's probably some people working on it. There's not much that's visible people designing New services digital news services for that non-English speaking low literacy low attention span low bandwidth audience which is massive As a sort of business opportunity, but also as you know, if you believe in sort of journalism as a social good, it's It's also great opportunity there So I decided to kind of Play around with a few designs myself. I've no idea if this is any good because frankly I need to go to India and play around with it and do that ethnography do that testing do the prototyping You can't do it here but when and again the Indians in the room will understand this when we were growing up Especially those of us who grew up outside the outside India We learnt all about Indian mythology and culture and history through comic books They're massive and and all Indian children pretty much all the Indian children read them so I thought I would given those restrictions to think of news in comic book form and So I thought of this. This is just a really basic mock-up of what it might look like And the idea is to kind of present news and all essential information In sort of 8 to 10 frames, which is very easy on the basic device. It's shareable. It's hopefully engaging. It's it's Feeds that appetite for news. It doesn't require high levels of literacy. You can have optional audio for those who can't read at all and Furthermore, you can supply a template for users to supply their own contents as well You know, I've got this is just the most basic idea I've no idea if it's going to work and the only way to find out if it's going to work is if you know is to go to India and a load of a few Android phones with a basic prototype and take Data and talk to people and when I say take data bearing in mind the immense privacy concerns are doing that But also talk to people conduct intensive interviews the other thing is that You can only start in one part of India at a time You know, I'm going to pick Gajarat just because I speak the language and I understand the culture better and it's got slightly better infrastructure than most places, but You know, then only you can scale maybe to other parts of the country and think about how other parts of the country might might use a service like this so India's digital revolution is Taking place despite the sort of societal restrictions. I mentioned earlier on and despite my own Previous skepticism the challenges are really big, but the opportunity is too That's it Just mentioned that you are going to go to one of the places that has the best infrastructure essentially Yes, slightly better. Yeah, so I was just curious about that choice Well, it's less to do the infrastructure more to do the fact that I speak the language I think if you're going to try and operate in in any language is better to know it I know if you're making an assumption that going into a place with better infrastructure would be a better place to Should be clear. I mean it has got well their arguments over this but in certain in terms of Connectivity it is a bit better than most places So I'm Curious it sounds like you know this idea of knowing your user is certainly good to highlight And but it sounds like such a time of rapid change as far as who those users are just in a very, you know, not only You know, whether they have the device or access to the networks and or They you know are in this knowing about certain media or following certain media So it's like it sounds like a huge challenge very different from what editors in this country or other centers experience How do you manage that like fast moving change like maybe maybe you have a you know How do you manage the fact that even if you answer the question correctly today that it'll be probably a different very different answer in a Year or six months Jeff you just try and keep up. I mean, it's really hard You just make sure you're surrounded by smart people who are on the case But beyond that media is really I mean especially with journalists in the room We know that audience is a fickle, you know, it's not and you know, unless you I mean BBC is one thing because it's really old And we've got that established, but it's not by all by any means certain that we're going to retain but any that does even us and so You just you just try and you just try and keep up with with technological developments with changing user needs with Everything that's going on around you, but it's it's not easy I know you said you wouldn't talk about politics, but can I take back to the beginning and John all about promising everybody a toilet Or Miranda Miranda Modai promising everybody a title Is there a difference in the sort of digital literacy of the two campaigns of Congress and and the BJP? Yeah, the Congress candidate Doesn't tweet. He doesn't have a social media presence. No, he doesn't at all So that's the the biggest difference of all the the the the the BJP and the Maudi campaign have Embraced technology much much earlier on I mean for years not just for this for this election It's been going on for several years and the rivals have only just caught on in in Delhi sort of late last year an Anti-corruption for those don't know an anti-corruption party the Armadhani party Won won the election one were pretty much won the election and had a chief minister and They were born almost entirely through, you know internet campaigns against corruption, so It's something that politicians should do and it's there's a lot of criticism in India, I guess that The Congress hasn't embraced this No, because they're the Indian electorate is 800 million and Assuming that Say a quarter of them are connected to the internet. Oh, yes, I know there are impacts beyond that because what happens on the internet is then Publish in a newspaper or it goes on TV. I don't think it's a deciding factor. These are big factor. I wouldn't say it's deciding factor How Indian there's a lot of verticality in the business Digital media technology so the telecoms are invested in the content production and are also invested in the marketing and promotion of content So as soon as you buy a phone suddenly you'll as it's not only good for this last week You'll find all sorts of people marketing to you and there's a lot of data security, but there's also this kind of Direct line between companies new production companies and others who are producing content in the platforms That would come on what you receive it I'm wondering if you can comment about that in terms of how it affects political dynamics And also what does it mean for you if you're trying to compete in that? I'm not sure if I'm trying to compete for me This is still just research and just sort of playing around with some ideas It's not like this is a startup and I'm gonna go ahead and do it But but yeah, I mean it's a big problem big conglomerates who have fingers in many pies also own most media companies and It's a problem in terms of as Mal mentioned sort of journalistic objectivity. I mean a lot of Journalism we've got this phenomenon. I think we they've got this from the phenomenon in India Paid news in which you you can The the the allegation is that you can Get favorable coverage for yourself or unfavorable coverage for arrival through, you know various kinds of manipulation And it's made a lot easier if you own the company yourself So I mean some I can talk a bit more about this but media ownership in India is a massive problem and that lack of independence Has obvious consequences in terms of trustworthiness of material and quality of content as well David are there any lessons from like successes in terms of what? Other digital content producers are doing for example like Bollywood or entertainment people trying to sort of take advantage of the digital platform That you think are applicable to news No, not really. I mean news is hard because You know traditionally say the newspaper News was the bit that didn't that lost money. You know news has never really made any money and You know it's propped up by the sports pages or the horoscopes or the classifieds or whatever So not really. I mean unless you can make news really entertaining But unfortunately most of time it's not most of time it's functional It's a bit dull. It's important and worthy and all those things But it's not going to grab you like a music video would or anything else would the mix Sorry religion and gender all went to the mix what you presented today. I don't know about religion, but certainly Mobile phone distribution is unequal among genders Yeah Have you looked at Your mock-up here reminds me of the the italian. I think it's called fumaretti, which are photographs Of comic books and I know in the 50s they're very very Popular in Italy And I know that in the in the comic book culture here in the united states There's a lot of political comics It would be interesting to look at other cultures and how they use comic books Whether they use them for news and how that might translate to india Also last week vanu boze of vanu ink Spoke at mit and he's done work in napal with Accessible phone and internet networks and is now rolling out something for Africa Trying to do an independent Cell phone network for africa That can bring people online It might be interesting to to talk to someone like him Who is is dealing with the bottom billion or the bottom two billion trying to bring them online to also talk about information services Yeah, thank you Could I make suggestions just in terms of making news entertaining? There are obviously and seems to me indian stories that suit your storyboard idea very well and think about train crashes Uh, you know the number of train crashes that we hear about in india, you know And it's a very graphic grabby sort of a thing if you can if you can deal with that Have you thought through other scenarios in which this comic book is actually going to be a most effective way of communicating? I don't know if I made it clear. I mean I don't think I've got in this context. I've got a really broad conception of news um It doesn't have to be the latest political goings on in deli or whatever It doesn't have to be that I mean what we call news say in the uk In the prime minister sneezes this news, right and it doesn't have to be like that here I I I think of it more as essential information. So for example say you've got a um A local doctor who has a service that You know he or she wants to advertise to pregnant women and doesn't know how to get the message out there That's really useful, right and it's not it's not um, it's not it's not an advert. It's not commercial gain I put that in news. I so this platform platform like this can be used for much more than um news and current events It can be used just for all kinds of essential information where where Messages need to get out to as many people as possible And I definitely can stay up there longer too because my train crash is really good one day and then the next day It's pretty old hat, right exactly um, this is a rather interesting idea and You do you certainly do have a set of challenges ahead of you, but uh, I'm curious um As to who curates this news because you just said I mean the prime minister in the uk sneezes and that's news Whereas an idiot's different. So who gets to curate this news and do people get to do that? Initially initially It would be um You'd need to have like an editor or something, you know, whether it's me or anybody else But ultimately and this is where it needs a lot more work, of course Ultimately, I I want to have a template where people can supply their own content and not only supply their own content but Have a means to whether it's up or down voting or You know, whatever the best mechanism is but also curate and And decide what goes where and what goes top and what what doesn't so but that's That's so much later on To bypass the um the written illiteracy problem with the smartphones so the future phones mostly text-based interaction But the smartphones you might have the opportunity to do entirely visually based applications and content sharing Is there any development in that space or working in that space that's there is there's a there's a scientist I've been talking to he's based in he's he's Danish and expecting the other day and he's done a lot of work on User interfaces for illiterate people His thing is about Apps agriculture and cop prices and those sort of apps and how people can can convey that information and and supply information Without needing words, you know easily identifiable symbols and what works and what doesn't there's a lot of work that's gone in that area as well There are there are pilot schemes nothing massive at the moment though They're just they're still trying to work out what works and I agree upon some kind I don't know if that can even happen but agree upon some kind of common standard that would be ideal But it's india and that tends never to work So then the chat app applications you were talking about aren't Um tapping into that audience of illiterate people No, they are they are because you can have chat and you can have chat through what people send pictures And things like pictures themselves and things. I mean, it's not the richest Most complete experience. There's no reason why they can't use them when they do that use is like so you Touched upon understanding your audience and my varied ways. I'm curious to know what Who exactly is the audience for this because kids grow up reading comics and this seems like a good You know a good Channel for them, but they're not necessarily going to be thinking about the election or what have you so Are you seeing this as something you want to target just to Kids or to people who are illiterate and much older, but still want to understand these issues Are you focusing on one group or I mean I need to go to india And play around with this. I mean this this has been conceived in cambridge. I mean really it's you know, it's I can't claim that I know what the user wants sitting here I've got I've got a better intuition than most perhaps because I've worked there a lot and I kind of get the Get the culture a bit better, but really this needs testing out there and I don't think it's just kids who read comics. I mean think of graphic novels. That's not kids. So You know that that audience is potentially there, but I need to go there and find out Yeah Yeah, um For people who can't read at all um I would have an optional audio soundtrack and also the you know using the microphone if you're creating content you can use as well Yeah TVs are pretty much universal. Everyone's got if they haven't gotten in their own house. They've got access to one Smartphones, I think it's currently around 150 million um with another 200 or so million to be added this year, so Some cases. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah Do you talk a little bit more about the the use of um bbc and other institutional media using these chat apps? How are they using them? Are they using mainly just to push short versions of their stories out? Or are they trying to actually start a dialogue or are they trying to get survey or how exactly are they using the chat apps? There's two there's two. I mean, I've not been personally involved in this, but there are two strands to this one is that um Back in back in the old days We had we the bbc broadcast in india on shortwave radio and that was mainly a low income rural audience um at some point sort of later on we Targeted much wealthier english-speaking elites for one to a better phrase um This is our kind of an attempt to reclaim that old lower income audience I think for now it's a broadcast medium I think that they're trying to work out how to Allow people to submit content as well But then how would curation work? How would the logistics in the bbc office in london sort of work who would need to like deal with all that stuff? That's yet to be worked out If you could talk a little bit about censorship The way that it affects mainstream news outlets and the extent to which this might get around some of the issues around censorship in india and blocking certain kinds of content I've not really thought a huge amount about it. I mean like Certainly my work in india has never been subject to that because you know, I I guess if you work for a big foreign Uh broadcaster you don't need to worry so much about it um But if this okay, this is just you know if this was to become an indian based indian owned indian run service Then it would be subject to the problems everybody else faces I don't know the answer to that. I mean One way is to avoid Indian investment and have it all sort of paid for from outside Then you're out of that sort of system a little bit, but Censorship in india is not It's not as bad as it is as it is elsewhere. Certainly neighboring countries And for foreign broadcasters like the one I work for it's not an issue at all Did you want to add any further thoughts before we crap up or? No, no, I've kind of uh spoken for long enough. I think