A rural digital media start-up banks on feminist business model

The success of their newspaper 'Khabar Lahariya' has inspired the team to break into new media.

The team of women journalists who turned the badlands of Bundelkhand into a hub of rural journalism with the launch of an eight-page newspaper Khabar Lahariya 15 years ago has now completed a six-month pilot-run of Chambal Media, a rural digital media start-up that banks on a “feminist business model” for its success.

“It was started in response to the increasing penetration of the Internet and smartphones in rural Uttar Pradesh, and the lack of good quality, independent digital media available for rural audiences,” said Shalini Joshi, co-founder and CEO.

Chambal Media has partnership with

Khabar Lahariya to distribute and market its digital content.

“This is a huge opportunity for a rural media company, as well as to expand the brand

Khabar Lahariya , which has been working to bring women into media for 15 years,” Ms. Joshi said.

Disha Mullick and Kavita are the other two co-founders of the company that will follow in the footsteps of the eight-page weekly whose core principle is “apni Khabar, apni bhasha mein” (your news in your native language).

Since the inception of the newspaper project in 2002, the production and marketing of

Khabar Lahariya has been dependent on a cohort of female journalists who are mostly recruited from the rural communities where the newspaper is produced and circulated.

“Chambal Media aims to enable a local authentic voice of journalism to reach the largest possible audience. We will continue to distribute news generated by women, and especially from marginalised communities like Dalits, Muslims and adivasis,” Ms. Mullick said.

“Chambal’s organisation structure too will continue to have a unique, rural-urban staff profile of predominantly women,” she added.

Feisty team “We see a feminist business model as one where profitability can be achieved while holding close the values of independent, progressive rural news; and by a team and organisational culture that is democratic, transparent and inclusive of women from diverse socio-economic backgrounds,” Ms. Joshi explained.

Inspired by the iconic Vice Media, the digital content of Chambal Media has already created ripples in some rural quarters of Bundelkhand.

For example, a video feature story about Narad — a young boy from Tindwari in Banda district who made a helicopter from a motorcycle engine, and was arrested by the local police — was watched by over 13,000 viewers on Facebook, in a district with 16,000 people accessing Facebook on 3G internet.

“This is just one of a successful six-month pilot run of video news content, podcasts and memes which has taken Khabar Lahariya’s local outreach to 50,000 viewers a week,” Ms. Mullick said.

“Our digital outreach in six months has overtaken the audience we are able to reach through print, especially a young audience. And to this audience, we are able to provide stories that other local media is unable to,” Ms. Kavita added. In three years, Chambal Media hopes to expand to 80 districts across the Hindi belt.