India's news houses are in crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic, the lockdown, the dwindling circulation of print newspapers, and the loss of advertising revenue have all created a perfect storm for an already ailing news industry in India.

With press freedom rankings continuing to be abysmal and business-as-usual no longer working, what would it take to launch a truly mobile-first, online-only news enterprise that can be financially independent and do good journalism?

Prem Panicker joins host Pavan Srinath on Episode 138 of The Pragati Podcast to share what it takes to do this in 2020. Starting in 1995-96, Prem had helped build Rediff.com into an online news website at a time when only a few hundreds of people in India had working computers connected to the internet.

Prem is a journalist and an editor, who has worked at several print and online news houses, including Rediff, India Abroad, and as the Managing Editor for India at Yahoo! Prem also founded www.peepli.org, for deep reporting on environmental, water, climate change and refugees' issues.

Prem is on twitter at @prempanicker and writes regularly at prempanicker.wordpress.com.

Also listen to journalist Krishna Prasad on the state of Indian news media today over at BIC Talks: www.tinyurl.com/bictalks-kp

If you have any questions or comments, write to us at [email protected], we would love to hear from you.

Follow The Pragati Podcast on Instagram: https://instagram.com/pragatipod
Follow Pragati on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thinkpragati
Follow Pragati on Facebook: https://facebook.com/thinkpragati

Subscribe & listen to The Pragati Podcast on iTunes, Saavn, Spotify, Castbox, Google Podcasts, AudioBoom, YouTube, or any other podcast app. We are there everywhere.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.