NEW DELHI: Another one has bitten the digital bullet. This time it's former NDTV news anchor and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s media advisor Pankaj Pachauri who’s going digital with his first entrepreneurial and news venture called Go News. And, keeping in tune with times, the logo was unveiled in a short video on Twitter.
“Dear all, our news venture is getting ready for launch. We seek your support, blessing s and retweets!” Pachauri tweeted recently and it promptly got pinned and retweeted by media personalities and celebs. The tagline for the on-the-go news venture is `Credible, Co-creative, Concise.’
The news venture, which is claimed to be a not-for-profit endeavour, is targeting all those who want their news on the go and on their hand-held devices, mostly smart phones. The product will be available across a variety of mobile platforms, including the popular Android and iOS.
According to industry sources, though Go News is still a work in progress as hiring of staff continues and other fine-tuning happens, the message is quite clear: take the traditional TV newsroom and journalism online --- something that another digital entrepreneur Raghav Bahl described in a column for indiantelevision.com as “gods of the digital newsroom.”
Though there are several credible digital news ventures in India up and running, two of the recent high-profile ventures include Arnab Goswami’s yet-to-be-launched Republic TV (renamed from the original Republic after political grandstanding by a politician and which will have a digital avatar too apart from the traditional look of a TV news channel) and former NDTV news anchor Barkha Dutt’s tie-up with Bahl’s The Quint for online video and written coverage of the ongoing State elections.
Go News is being pegged as top class journalism available on hand-held devices in a country that soon may become the world’s largest mobile phone market. India may boast of over a billion mobile phone subscribers --- which need not necessarily mean that one billion people own phones --- but the Mint newspaper quoted a Pew Research Center survey released early 2016 as stating that only 17 per cent Indians owned smart phones and India stood among the lower half of surveyed countries in Internet usage between 2013 and 2015. Things may have changed for the better since such surveys, but availability of bandwidth and its quality remain amongst the top challenges for consumers here
