Siddharth Varadarajan, the former editor of The Hindu, reckons that political reporting in India has become largely about ‘who said what’. But there is loads that needs to be reported on. “Can we create a platform that can shine a light on the political economy – environment, policy formation, health, culture?” he asks.

The Wire, which Varadarajan launched along with M.K. Venu (formerly with The Financial Express) and Sidharth Bhatia (ex DNA) in May this year tries to do that.

The platform is about “high-quality journalism and a focus on issues that nobody does – arts and culture, diplomacy, foreign policy, the political economy,” Varadarajan says.

The Quint, a mobile first website, launched in March this year. 80 people of the total staff of 135 are journalists.

The idea “is to have a content-driven platform that redefines the news hierarchy based on audience response,” says Ritu Kapur, who set up the website along with husband Raghav Bahl, the founder of Network18.

The Wire, The Quint, Scroll.in, Quartz, Newslaundry, Daily O, Catch News are among the dozen-odd experiments happening in online news in India these days.

All these ‘original content’ websites depend on small armies of journalists who generate 60%-80% of the long-form articles, videos and short takes they carry. The rest comes from bloggers or is aggregated content.

Most get anywhere between one to three million unique visitors a month. That is not much compared to the 16.67 million readers that the physical version of India’s top selling daily, Dainik Jagran (Hindi), gets, or the 60 million unique visitors that NDTV.com, an English-language news website, claims.

But they are finding an audience. More than half the people who come to these websites are coming from mobile phones and through social media. And they are overwhelmingly young.

That is surprising. The data from the Indian Readership Survey suggests that young Indians don’t want to read newspapers.

But it would seem that the same reader enjoys reading a well-written, long piece on, say, growing intolerance in India, or watching a video on a serious political or economic issue.

One of the most shared articles on The Wire was a 2,300-word piece on U.S. shenanigans on trade negotiations, based on WikiLeaks documents. On Huffington Post India, the most shared article was a blog arguing that contemporary feminism is not adequately accounting for motherhood.

“Saying something quickly and visually travels well, or a long-form 1,000-5,000-word piece. Our global stories do as well as the Indian stories,” says Jay Lauf, president and publisher of Quartz.

“We are aggregating the thinking readers of India,” says Samir Patil, Scroll Media’s founder and chief executive.

Varadarajan thinks it is something beyond that. “A typical news day is 12-15 hours in which you look at the TV, newspaper. A website brings variety that fractures the news day,” he says.

It is a gap that The Times of India, Hindu, NDTV.com or Jagran.com,among others, have filled very well for very long.

But the US$690-million digital ad market is still dominated by Google and the US$4.2-billion newspaper business is, largely, thriving.

So what has changed now? Why are more and more original content websites finding favour?

“The internet has ‘happened’ in India in the last three years. Facebook has gone from 10 to 100 million users. There are at least 125 million internet users. The e-commerce boom has created an ecosystem of advertisers who are looking for leads from an online audience,” says Patil.

NOT JUST ABOUT CONTENT The Quint and its ilk represent an experiment in journalism that is welcome in any free media market. But also one in business that could help point the way for the troubled news industry in India.

Television news has lost credibility and revenues as dodgy investors, militant advertisers, paid news, lack of training and indifferent media owners have led to an unrelenting downward spiral.

On the profitable newspaper side, the refusal of media owners to accept a new readership survey, the scourge of paid news and private treaties have led to another form of erosion.

“We are attempting a different business model around generating content that is independent of conventional media investors and the baggage that comes with it,” says Varadarajan.

He, along with other co-founders, funded The Wire with US$3,100 each from their personal money, to start with. Recently it became part of The Foundation for Independent Journalism, a section 8 (not-for-profit) company. It is awaiting a grant from the Independent and Public Spirited Media Trust that a bunch of other prominent Indians, including Wipro’s Azim Premji, set up earlier this year. The trust’s aim is to fund independent media ventures.

Scroll, a for-profit venture, on the other hand, is funded by Omdiyar Network, which describes itself as a ‘philanthropic investment firm’.

The Quint is funded by Kapur and Bahl from US$113 million or so they made from the sale of Network18 last year. Kapur says they don’t need to raise money and the website should break even in 36 months.

The way these websites are funded, the owners and the ownership structure is relevant to how these brands could shape up.

Most of the better media brands globally – The Guardian, BBC, The Economist, Al Jazeera – have a ownership structure that usually protects editorial from the pressures on the business side and fosters investment in good quality journalism.

SEARCHING FOR GOOD CONTENT The algorithmic nature of search engines has led to the ghettoisation of online audiences. So if you are interested in golf and economics, that is probably all you will see.

That explains to some extent the extreme polarisation of online debates. This poses two challenges – social and economic.

“Many people see the digital world as a democratic world. But democracy functions when there is collective action and therefore we need to have a collective news consumption on some things at least,” thinks Tim Luckhurst, head of the Centre for Journalism at the University of Kent.

The search-engine driven world takes that away. Maybe social media, which brings a lot of the traffic for these new age websites, could change that, say analysts.

The second challenge is low ad rates and how they could fund high-quality journalism. Most websites are trying to find ways around it.

Huffington Post gave away the India inventory to GroupM for a year. Quartz uses a lot of ‘branded content’ or native advertising. It claims to get US$69 per thousand readers, over two times more than The Economist.com claims to get. The best rate video websites get in India is about US$4-US$7.

The third challenge is the incumbents.

All of them – NDTV.com, Times of India, Dainik Jagran or BBC, among many others – have news gathering capabilities that none of the start-ups will be able to match for years. And all of them have profitable offline operations to fund online.

Most spawn of the internet have simply decimated revenues for news media without adding quality. If the rise of these new news platforms leads to better quality journalism and debates in this chaotic democracy, it is more than welcome.

This article first appeared in ContentAsia Issue 6, 2015, published in December 2015.