What is the Indian reader willing to pay for, and what do they expect for free?

This panel moves past the familiar lament and into the mechanics of the business. They explore what it actually takes to run a news organisation outside the influence of advertisers, owners, and the state. Subscription models, donor funding, collaborative structures, and open access: each approach comes with its own compromises, its own pressures, and its own relationship with the reader.

The conversation will examine how different kinds of journalism, from daily news to long-form investigation and data-driven research, demand different economic answers. Can advertising coexist with independence? And how are newsrooms absorbing the growing financial and legal burden of independent reporting?

Independent journalism in India is alive. What it costs to keep it that way is another matter entirely.

In this episode of BIC Talks, Dhanya Rajendran, Sunil Rajshekhar, Samar Halarnka, Rashmi Koti and Vikhar Ahmed Sayeed. This is an excerpt from a conversation that took place in the BIC premises in Jan 2026.

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