April-May 2019

FICCI-INDIAN LANGUAGE INTERNET ALLIANCE NEWSLETTER

An Alliance to foster the growth of the Indian Languages’ Technology
Industry to enable access to ICT infrastructure in all Indian languages.

Welcome to the 5th edition of FICCI – Indian Languages Internet Alliance

(FICCI-ILIA) Newsletter.

You will find all the exciting news, views and events from the Indic
language ecosystem captured in this space!

HIGHLIGHTS

FICCI-ILIA is

271
FICCI-ILIA partnered
with JNU for their
annual three-day
conference SOIL-TECH
that was held from
February 15-17, 2019.
members strong now!
FICCI-ILIA organized its
regional language seminar -
Marathi Conclave in Pune on
May 6, 2019 in association
with Rajya Marathi Vikas
Sanstha, GoM.
FICCI partnered with
CDAC for their annual
Tech Conclave which
was held on 4th-6th June,
2019 at Pune and FICCI-
ILIA participated as an
exhibitor at the annual
Conclave
FICCI in
association with
Ministry of Electronics
and IT, Government of India,
organized a one-day Frontier
Technologies Conclave 2019
with the theme
“A.I. Readiness of India and
Way Forward”
on May 1, 2019

FICCI-Indian Language Internet Alliance Newsletter


INDUSTRY ADDRESS
by Mrs. Sarika Gulyani
Director and Head-ICT, Digital Economy &
FICCI-ILIA Division
English has long been the lingua franca of
this country for the purpose of business
and administrative communications. But,
gradually we have started to see the rise
of indigenous languages to reach the
rural masses. And, interestingly, several
homegrown start-ups have made it their
mission to tackle the development problems
through technology and usage of Indian
languages.
India is waking upto “the next phase of
digital revolution” in the country and,
Indian languages have become the prima
donna of this grand opera of India Inc. The
hegemony of English is fast depleting on
the digital platforms. The Government of
India’s demonetization drive in 2016 coupled
with the e-commerce wave, and growing
smartphone penetration with cheaper
internet data prices has led to a phenomenal
increase in consumption of digital services
in Indian languages especially in Tier II & III
cities.
The growth story of the Fintech sector in
India is one of the best examples. Most public
sector and private banks have incorporated
language localization solutions to reach out
to maximum number of customers. Banking
will never be the same again in rural India
with this big wave of digitization and has led
to pushing the boundaries of innovations
by the fintech companies to reach out to
millions of rural Indians. There are several
start-ups who are doing an incredible job
of serving customers in the language of
their choice. Offering online services in
different regional languages helps break the
language barrier, getting new customers to
experience the digital platform.
An Indian start-up is working to ensure that
various public and private welfare schemes
can be accessed by those who are entitled
and need it the most – often the poor,
illiterate or semi-literate, rural citizens. They
have created an app which has a rich and
accessible database of thousands of public
and private welfare schemes in the country
– all in regional languages.
Similarly, a vernacular hyper local
community news platform allows
public to share hyperlocal news, issues
and experiences. It is addressing the
development gaps by focusing on
publishing exclusive local updates which
often do not make it to national and
regional media in Indian languages.
Technological innovations like above will
continue to make significant changes
in the lives of a billion. And these
entrepreneurs, have found their calling by
infusing technology into addressing crucial
developmental problems of this country.
In order to make this movement a success,
there is need of funding, industry friendly
policy ecosystem along with better industry
connects and partnerships.
FICCI-Indian Language Internet Alliance Newsletter
Indian entrepreneurs are busy writing the
Code for the Next Billion internet users.
And we believe that with a smartphone and
power of the internet coupled with Indic
Language technology, India would be able
to leapfrog several decades of development
gaps and soon match the ‘first billion.

FICCI-Indian Language Internet Alliance Newsletter

 PAST EVENTS
“SOIL-TECH – Towards Digital India”,
15th-17th February 2019, JNU
Indian language technology stands at a
critical juncture today. On one hand, India
continues to add more Indic speaking users
who are making the internet a dynamic
space; on the other hand, the lack of
technology and related resources, is stalling
the growth in the competitive digital age.
In order to understand the changing
dynamics of this complex and ever-
changing industry, FICCI-ILIA partnered
with School of Sanskrit and Indic Studies,
JNU to co-organize a three-day conference
“SOIL-Tech – Towards Digital India” on
15th-17th February 2019 at CONVENTION
CENTER, JNU, New Delhi. The objective
was to bring together the brightest
minds in natural language processing,
researchers, academicians, business, media
and publishing to join the conversation.
From panel discussions, plenary sessions to
discussions on white papers, the three days
were filled with insightful conversations
about the forces shaping India’s language
technology industry.
FICCI-Indian Language Internet Alliance Newsletter
CDAC Tech Conclave,
April 4-5, 2019, Pune
On April 4 and 5, 2019, Centre for
Development of Advanced Computing
(C-DAC), Pune organized a two-day
technology conclave at C-DAC Innovation
Park, Panchavati, Pashan, Pune. FICCI was
the “Chamber Partners” and FICCI-ILIA was
an exhibitor at the two-day Tech Conclave.
FICCI also organized a session on Day 1 of
the Conclave. The session was addressed
by Mr Deepak Maheshwari, Director -
Government Affairs, India, ASEAN & China,
Symantec Corporation.
A demonstration of technologies and
applications was showcased at the
Exhibition during the Conclave. Many
eminent experts of international
repute, from Ministry of Electronics and
Information Technology, Niti Ayog, Centre
for Development of Advanced Computing,
Defence Research and Development
Organisation, Indian Institute of Science,
Indian Institute of Technology, All India
Institutes of Medical Sciences, research
labs and industry like, Intel, Nvidia, Atos,
Mellanox, NetApp and DataDirect Networks,
participated and deliberated on the focused
research areas and provided deep insights
as subject matter experts.
FICCI-Indian Language Internet Alliance Newsletter
FICCI Frontier Technologies Conclave:
“A.I. Readiness of India and Way Forward”,
May 1, 2019, Delhi
In this digital era of emerging technologies
like Blockchain, Big Data and Analytics,
Internet of Things, 3-D printing and most
importantly Artificial Intelligence (A.I) have
shown tremendous potential as catalysts
for next phase of digital transformation. It
is estimated that A.I will contribute up to
$15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030.
It will not only help businesses to reach
their customers efficiently but will also help
governments to serve their citizens more
effectively. However, India is only in the
early phases of testing and implementation.
The imperative question is How much India
is A.I. ready? What are the challenges? and
What will be the way forward?
Keeping that in mind, FICCI in association
with Ministry of Electronics and IT,
Government of India organized “Frontier
Technologies Conclave: A.I. Readiness of
India and Way Forward” on 1st May 2019 at
FICCI, Federation House, New Delhi.
The conference was inaugurated by
Shri S.N. Tripathi, IAS, Director, Indian
Institute of Public Administration; Shri
M.S. Rao IAS, President & Chief Executive
Officer,National eGovernance Division,
Ministry of Electronics and IT, Government
of India; Shri Gopalakrishnan S, IAS, Joint
Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and IT,
Government of India; Dr. U.B. Desai, Director,
IIT Hyderabad; Dr. Lovneesh Chanana, Vice
President - Digital Government (Asia Pacific
and Japan), SAP; Mr. Virat Bhatia, Chairman,
ICT and Digital Economy Committee, FICCI;
and Mr. Parminder Kakria, Co-Chair, ICT and
Digital Economy Committee, FICCI.
FICCI-Indian Language Internet Alliance Newsletter
FICCI-ILIA Marathi Conclave,
May 6, 2019, Pune
With India’s diverse demographic
dispersion, it’s only natural that English
may prove to be a language barrier when
it comes to Internet usage in the long run.
We have over 22 official languages and
over 6000 dialects. There were 234 million
Indian-language internet users in 2016 while
only 175 million English users’ language and
this is going to swell to about 550 million
Indic internet users within the next 3 years.
Understanding the huge opportunity this
presents to the Indian economy, FICCI-
Indian Language Internet Alliance in
association with CDAC, had organized the
“Marathi Conclave-2019” on 6th May 2019
at JW Marriot Hotel, Pune. The objective of
the conclave was to engage with thought-
leaders and industry experts working in the
various areas of Indic language technology
ecosystem to analyse the reasons for
monetization gaps in Marathi content on
the digital space. This would ensure the
sustainable growth of the ecosystem,
with greater collaborations amongst all
stakeholders.
The conference was inaugurated by Mr. M.D.
Kulkarni, Senior Director (Corporate R&D)
& HoD GIST, Country Manager - W3C India
Office, CDAC, Mr. Anand Katikar, Head,
Rajya Marathi Vikas Sansthan, Government
of Maharashtra, Mr. Sandeep Nulkar,
Founder, Chairman and Managing Director,
BITS Pvt Ltd, Dr. Ajay Data, Co-Chair ICT
and Digital Economy Committee, FICCI and
Mr. Parminder Singh Kakria, Co-Chair, ICT
and Digital Economy Committee, FICCI.
A panel session was also organized
on “Issues and challenges by content
publishers in adopting and generating
Indic Languages content on the web” with
an aim to discuss the various technological
challenges including availability of fonts
in Marathi language, unavailability of
basic editing tools and limited accuracy
of machine translation. he resistance of
publishers to digitize Marathi content,
along with monetization and discoverability
issues plaguing the Indic content ecosystem
were also discussed. The conference
ended with a fireside chat with Mr. Yusuf
Hakim, Founder & CEO, Bohriali.com in
conversation with Mr. Sandeep Nulkar,
Founder, Chairman and Managing Director,
BITS Pvt Ltd on “Indic Languages bringing
India’s Next e-Commerce Boom”. The
conference helped to identify the key
challenges plaguing the development of
Marathi language on digital front, and many
viable solutions were discussed during the
conclave.
FICCI-Indian Language Internet Alliance Newsletter
SHOWCASE NEWS
*FICCI-ILIA has aggregated this news from third party websites

Reliance Industries acquires a RailYatri app available in

majority stake in Indic language 8 Indian languages now
business Reverie (Medianama, (APN News, April 26)
April 22)

India has 22 main languages and we have

In what is an important development various publications across 39 languages
for Indian language enabling of India’s spoken in our country. Railyatri as a
Internet, Reliance Industries has acquired brand is meant for BHARAT users which
a majority stake in Reverie Language comprise of 75% + audience who prefer
Technologies: RIL, India’s largest business their native language as the primary mode
conglomerate, has acquired an undisclosed of communication or browsing. We were
majority stake for Rs 190 crores (around already available in Hindi language and are
$27.3 million a current conversion rates), now adding eight new regional languages
and will invest Rs 77 crores (almost $10 to make it easy for BHARAT users.
million) by March 2021. The investment
has been made via Reliance Industrial
Investments & Holdings (RIIHL), a wholly-
owned subsidiary of Reliance Industries.
Reverie will work towards the integration
of its Indic language localization services
with RIL’s digital consumer platforms. It
will continue to operate independently and
serve its existing clients.

FICCI-Indian Language Internet Alliance Newsletter

Smart-speakers must get the Most Of India Prefers Using
local tongue (The Hindu Business Hindi For Search, Says Google
Line, April 21) ( Inc42, May 9)

A new report from Google titled “Year in

Search: Insights for Brands Report” released
on Thursday says, 70% of all smartphones-
related searches in India come from Bharat.
Hindi queries related to laptops and PCs
have doubled while there has been a 2.3X
increase in Hindi queries about smartphones
and mobile phones. Also, queries in regional
Analysts believe that if the smart speaker languages are growing faster than English
market in India has to grow beyond the in e-commerce categories like clothing,
initial uptake, then players like Amazon beauty, and personal care.
and Google will have to look at tier-II/III
cities. For that voice recognition in regional
languages will be a basic requirement
in addition to local content. Voice as an
Startups that are betting
input will potentially revolutionise the way
we interact with devices. For the online on augmented reality and
literate, the voice will be an add on… the vernacular voice recognition
most natural way to interact. However, the (Livemint, April 14)
real potential will be seen when people who
are not yet online due to literacy or are just
plain apprehensive of using technology
starting to use voice as their medium of
online communication.

Mint presents the profile of two startups:

one using augmented reality (AR) and the
other using voice recognition to provide
solutions. Vokal India is a voice-based
vernacular knowledge sharing platform.
Started by Aprameya Radhakrishna and
Mayank Bidawatka, the startup is betting
big on the use of voice as a medium to ask
questions in regional languages.
FICCI-Indian Language Internet Alliance Newsletter
As E-commerce Bug Bites Indian languages online—the
Mid-Tier Towns, Demand For next stop for internet growth
Regional Language Customer ( The Week, May 8 )
Support Rises ( Inc 42, May 9 )

While English is commonly perceived as
the default language for commerce and
internet in India, according to a report by
Google and KPMG India published in April
2017, there were 234 Mn Indian-language
internet users in 2016 while only 175 Mn
English users, and the gap between the two
groups is expected to widen going forward.
E-commerce players say that content and
customer support in local language would
put a larger part of the population at ease
when shopping online.
Google swears by it, and now governments
at the Centre as well as states, besides
tech companies, are waking up to the next
big wave on the internet in the country—
the explosion in usage of vernacular
languages online. According to experts at
the conclave on this topic organised by
the Indian trade industry body FICCI along
with the Indian Language Internet Alliance
(ILIA), there were more than 200 million
Indian internet users who prefer to use (or
are using) vernacular languages online.
This is in comparison to 175 million English
language users online. With India’s diverse
demographic dispersion, the number of
vernacular language users is expected to
grow to 550 million Indic internet users
within the next 3 years.

FICCI-Indian Language Internet Alliance Newsletter

Amazon sets up vernacular Soon Website Domains To Be
support centre (The Times of Available In 9 Indian Languages
India, May 9) (Inc42, April 3)

As Amazon aims to on-board the next 100 According to Universal Acceptance

million users in India it’s ramping up its local-
language customer support infrastructure
here. Frontizo, a joint venture between
Amazon and Ashok Patni Group, is setting
up a new facility in Haryana, which will house
200-300 executives solely focusing on
providing text- and voice-based consumer
support in vernacular languages.
Steering Group (UASG), global internet
servers will start accepting the registration
of website names as well as dot extension,
in nine Indian languages by June 2019.
Currently, only Devanagari script (script of
Hindi language) and .bharat extension are
accepted in website names. The nine Indian
scripts that will be fed into the ICANN
(Internet Corporation for Assigned Names
and Numbers) root servers are Bengali,
Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada,
Malayalam, Odia, Tamil and Telugu.

FICCI-Indian Language Internet Alliance Newsletter

 UPCOMING EVENTS

Bhashantara 2019

Bhashantara is our annual flagship advocacy and awareness building platform.

The conference aims to bring

together all the industry
stakeholders both nationally
and internationally as well
as key players from the
government bodies to discuss
the way forward towards the
development of an internet that
is inclusive of all Indic language
speakers across the globe.

Tentative Date: July 2019

Venue: FICCI, Federation House, New Delhi

We will share the date and further details about the

conference soon. Stay tuned!

Organizations and individuals interested in sponsorship opportunities and becoming a

part of the speakers list, kindly contact us on ficci.ilia@ficci.com at the earliest.

FICCI-Indian Language Internet Alliance Newsletter

MEMBERS’ CORNER
Honourable Vice-President
releases datasets for Linguistic
Data Consortium for Indian
Languages on April 4, 2019
Hon’ble Vice President of India inaugurated
the data release for the Linguistic Data
Consortium for Indian Languages (LDC-
IL) on April 4 2019. A set of 31 largest ever
datasets in Indian languages, including
speech and raw text corpora, have been
released on the portal https://data.ldcil.org.
These datasets have been prepared over a
period of 10 years with meticulous work done
by respective language experts/linguists
across India and these prove the way for
greater strides towards the development of
language technologies in Indian languages.
The datasets are available for commercial
use as well and more details on the same
can be found on the portal.
IndianTTS latest updates
add more Indian languages
into speech engine and get
breakthrough on AI-enabled
speech recognition platform
After new release, the service is currently
available in Eleven languages: Hindi, English,
Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam,
Kannada, Gujarati, Punjabi, Oriya.
IndianTTS now has 11 voices in their product
set, apart from Hindi and English, with use-
cases in a call centre, publication, and ATM
domains. It also gets a breakthrough on AI-
enabled speech recognition platform. The
immediate aim is to fully support the next
eight most-spoken Indian languages in all
end to end voice products.
FICCI-Indian Language Internet Alliance Newsletter
Saarthi.ai launches a Native NLP
Based Conversational Stack
Current Conversational AI solutions for
virtual assistants don’t just require depth
in the different nuances of language
understanding, they are broken for Non-
English languages. The techniques of
Translation used to decipher Non-English
messages induces information loss and
misrepresentation (even from Google’s
and Microsoft’s solutions). This, at scale,
leads to failed transactions, customer
dissatisfaction, and reputational loss.
Saarthi.ai has built a Native NLP Stack
(VerCon), and Dialogue Manager
(Impresario) to deliver high-quality
interactions between humans and machines
in 22 languages - Indic and Foreign. We
use our technology to build Omni-channel
Smart Vernacular Assistants for all digital
channels and IVR. They help save operational
expenses, handle massive Volumes,
augment customer satisfaction, improve
loyalty and personalize experiences. We
extract as many as 20 different cognitive
signals from each message where the
industry average lies within 4-6 signals.
Examples of such signals are intent, entity,
tone, emotion, 5Ws and H, etc.
Besides, we are continuously adding a host
of features to our stack like context carry-
forward, emotion analysis, grammar and
spelling correction, sentence simplification,
entity recognition, semantic role labeling,
multi-task learning, text similarity, text
normalization, common-sense reasoning,
etc. in vernacular languages. This level of
understanding of natural language helps us
overcome the various facets and caveats
encountered when handling spoken
language.
Above all, this leads to the digital inclusion
of billions of people and is a small step
towards “accelerating humanity’s transition
to Ambient Intelligence”
Lawskills launches courses in
regional languages
LawSkills is a self-paced e-Learning
platform that aims to facilitate continuous
learning. It offers a wide array of courses
for students, lawyers, professionals and
teachers to hone their Legal and Business
Skills. This Manupatra Initiative has now
launched its learning courses in regional
languages: Kannada, Marathi, Tamil and
Bengali. LawSkills is the largest proprietary
e-learning platform in India today, with
over 100 courses available in 6 languages
[English, Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Kannada,
Bengali ] authored by professionals and
practitioners in respective fields. The
courses are designed in a modular form
which makes it easier and flexible to
consume. Moving on from the text the only
approach, these courses use a variety of
visual tools to give an enhanced learning
experience and higher retention. LawSkills
supports smooth experience across both
desktop and mobile making it accessibility
friendly.
FICCI-Indian Language Internet Alliance Newsletter
Contributor Story
TRANSFORMING NEWSROOM
Article by
Samrat Phadnis,
Editor, Sakal Media, Pune
samrat.phadnis@esakal.com
Introduction
The content consumption patterns have
been changing over the past decade due to
the emergence of digital media. The speed
of this change increased in the last couple of
years due to the 4G enabled smartphones.
The media organizations, especially the
print media, are looking for a response
to their content on digital platforms and
struggling with traditional print products.
Newsroom is the place of change media
organizations are looking for. At places
in India, the newsrooms are undergoing
restructuring. This article provides insights
on newsroom restructuring and answers
the key question: How to get a response to
the content?
Newsrooms of past & present
Newsroom of a news media house is
considered as a sacred place where
truth is unveiled. If you peeped into the
newsroom in the 1990s, you would have
seen restless people talking to each other,
papers scattered here and there, keyboards
making tic-tac, somebody immersed in
fountain pen ink, few scratching their
heads, mugs of coffee or tea and non-stop
humming of agency feed. Switch to the
2018 Newsroom. A dramatic change can
be seen; except one, a newsroom is still
the sacred place. Screens are everywhere
Shital Pawar, Executive Editor
(Corporate), Sakal Media
shital.pawar@esakal.com
with 24x7 news channels pouring loads of
information. In the TV newsrooms, noisy
journalists and anchors are shouting at the
guests which was beyond imagination in
the 1990s. The rarest breed of a journalist
can be seen immersed in the fountain pen
ink, in the print media newsroom. There is a
restlessness in the newsroom where one can
meet journalists worried about presenting
their content in the most meaningful way
before their audience in online and print.
The organizations having print, TV and
digital platforms are looking for integrated
newsrooms that can serve the needs of
each platform. At present, the newsrooms
within the organization are working in silos.
Towards Integrated Newsroom
The integrated newsroom shall serve not to
the readers, viewers or digital users; but to
an audience. It means the content that is
being produced and delivered must serve
the online and mobile user, the viewer
on social media channels or TV channels
and the print reader. The audience is the
term emerged in the last decade which
didn’t exist in the newsrooms until 2010
especially for traditional newspapers. The
term ‘Audience’ emerged with Web 2.0
when website users started to interact with
the content through text, image, audio
and video. Podcasts and Vodcasts started
rolling from 2007 when journalists realized
FICCI-Indian Language Internet Alliance Newsletter
the potential of information they have in
their hands and in their minds. Information
started to appear on the computer screen
in the form of blog posts and social media
endeavours. At this juncture, it was also
realized that presenting the information
over the computer screen without emotion
in the presentation attracts smaller audienc
Media Consumption Patterns
The media consumption from print to
computer started to shift in 2005. It
continued to shift for a decade. With the
3G, then 4G mobile internet connectivity
and the rise of cheaper internet on mobile,
the media consumption shifted drastically.
A sudden change in the device is forcing
traditional newsrooms to rethink their
strategy to reach out to the audience.
Now, telling a story through print is no
longer sufficient. A story told in different
formats on different platforms utilizing the
potential of delivery platforms is necessary.
So, a journalist of traditional print media is
required to learn what social media is and
how to use mobile effectively to create and
distribute the content. At the same time,
journalists are required to unlearn many
things such as content generation methods,
delivery methods and especially time
sensibility. Traditional content generation
methods of meeting everyone in-person
becomes time-consuming when the story
is awaiting to get break on social media
first. Meeting new sources and building
relationships with them through Facebook,
Twitter, LinkedIn becomes as important as
meeting the source in person was in the
past. A small aperture on the mobile camera
becomes big enough to attract millions of
viewers on Facebook or YouTube through a
small raw video clip. Audience, especially on
mobile devices, requires speed of content
delivery than nicely edited, thoroughly
branded visual content. Talking to audience
and getting their feedback, views and new
angles becomes part of the assignment.
The importance of engagement with the
audience gives birth to crowd-sourcing the
content.
Deliver On Screen
These factors; especially developed in
the span of last 10 years have established
the need of integrated newsroom that
delivers content on different devices and
serves different audiences at a stretch.
The integrated newsroom shall be vibrant
as usual. They shall deliver the content
on different media platforms at a time
considering the strength of each of the
platforms. The traditional ‘desk’ structure
of the newsroom is getting dismantled as
it was primarily serving the print readers
and had ample time in hand to deliver the
content. The new structure that emerged in
the newsroom is built to serve the audience
and not the readers only. The audience is
anywhere, on mobile screen or laptop and
reaching out to them anytime becomes top
priority of the newsroom.
FICCI-Indian Language Internet Alliance Newsletter
A Case Study newsroom is to engage the audience that
is coming to your content through social
Sakal Media, an 88 year old media media. Social media platforms are also
organization headquartered in Pune, India largely consumed on mobile phones. The
experimented with the new age newsroom. notification becomes crucial here as well.
The group has the largest circulated Marathi The engagement is tangible as it comes
newspaper, Sakal (means morning) that is through likes, shares, comments, votes
known for credible and authentic content and views. The engagement gives the
for generations. The group built and content an opportunity to review its value.
established the website esakal.com with The engagement quotient also provides
a strong presence over social media and necessary inputs to the teams working on
launched a TV channel named Saam TV content to judge whether the audience
Marathi. From a traditional print publisher, is consuming the content or further
the group evolved into a multimedia group. rectification required.
However, the newsroom structure was
largely print-oriented. After the emergence
of Jio in late 2016, the landscape of Audience Engagement
Indian mobile internet service changed The newsroom now takes a look at the
completely. The internet consumption over response to its content, adds further details
mobile phone became cheaper. That allows in the content according to the response
people to consume more and more content and delivers the detailed story on digital
on their mobile handset. At Sakal, this platforms. Since the newsroom has updated
change in the consumption pattern was the audience about the story, the audience is
noticed and accordingly the new structure now hungry for further details. It gets what
was prepared to serve its existing as well as it wants. Now, the same story cannot go to
new audience. the newspaper as it is already consumed. So
the newsroom has a special team working
Notification Driven Newsroom on adding value to the content considering
special requirements of print readers.
Today, content is being consumed largely on
mobile handsets. The trigger of the content
consumption is notification. Mobile user
is well versed with the notification system
since the beginning of mobile phones.
From missed call to SMS, the mobile user
is aware that everything is being delivered
on notification. However, news media
organization had not developed specific
policy for the notifications that attract
traffic. In the newsroom shift, the desk that
delivers the content using notification as
a trigger has become the crucial one. It
selects the quality content, considering the
audience of the group in mind, and delivers
the notification first on mobile app/website’s
breaking news scroll. The notification is
just a trigger to pull the audience to your
content. So, the next step of the new

FICCI-Indian Language Internet Alliance Newsletter

Print: Value Addition
Value addition becomes most crucial
part for the newspaper. While the endless
notifications are triggering audience to
consume digital media content, the value
added content delivered at the homes of
readers is the trigger to maintain and add
newspaper readership. Value addition to
the content does not mean reworking on
every single story that is being produced.
It means selecting the content that suits
the readership profile of the newspaper,
providing them a 360 degree view of the
story through text, images and graphs and
more futuristic approach.
Added Value Pays
The value added content opens revenue
opportunities to the media organization.
The relevant content that is exclusive,
researched, telling future trends and have
utility in it is most sought after online. The
value added content developed primarily
for the print creates an opportunity for the
organization to go for paywall or digital
subscription. Before jumping into paywall,
audience segmentation is necessary to
understand who your audience is to serve
them better. It also requires data of users,
their content consumption patterns and
their interests.
New News Cycle
The new news cycle emerged in the
smartphone era starts from the notification
and is endless. Notification develops into
digital story that gets engagement on
social media through visuals, polls, share,
like, dislikes etc and lands in print with value
added in the content that again trigger
traditional engagement with the readers.
In a simple manner, new news cycle can be
described as:
Happening > Breaking News > Mobile
Platform > Social Media > Details > Digital
Media > Social Media Engagement > Print:
Value Addition + Readers Response > Print
> Digital Media [> Paid Subscription]
The newsroom restructured considering
this content consumption patterns can
survive in the age, where digital content is in
high demand. The restructured newsroom
only can fulfil the requirement of audience
and can serve quality content.

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