Loud and clear

Young people don’t get heard in the traditional media, says Shiv B Dravid, so he founded the Net-based Viewspaper. He tells Rrishi Raote about its growth and prospects.

Shiv Bhaskar Dravid has a bee in his bonnet about TV news. When he was in college, in 2004, the Delhi government ordered buses to be retrofitted to run on CNG. It was an anti-pollution measure, but had the effect of taking buses off the roads. Dravid, who had to ride three different buses between home and college every day, was one of many stranded Delhiites. News channels, he says, hardly reflected his misery. The discussion “was at 20,000 feet, not at grassroots level”. It all came to a head for him, he says, during a screening of NDTV’s Big Fight discussion programme on the CNG changeover: “I just screamed out at the [talking head], you haven’t travelled in a bus in 25 years! You travel in your car!”

There followed an epiphany. Young people like him, he says he realised, could not hope to be heard in public even on matters that affected them directly. “In Budget analysis,” he says, “there is no young person; on education, no youth; even on women’s security, no girl is asked. Instead they have a college principal talking on TV, and she doesn’t travel in a bus.”

Now Dravid is 25. Since 2007 he has built an institution to fill that gap. It is the Viewspaper (theviewspaper.net), and its tagline is “The Voice of the Youth”. This is a grand slogan, but CEO Dravid and his team — 15 volunteer editors and three full-timers who work out of a bedroom in his parents’ house in Gurgaon — function and strategise as if it were true. The Viewspaper is exactly what it sounds like: a website where young people (age 17-35) can write and submit opinion essays on everything from Baba Ramdev’s eviction to favourite holiday destinations. Dravid and his staff sift, edit, publish, and try to encourage the best contributors.

“We have 5,000-plus contributors,” Dravid says, “7,500 pieces of content published, of 21,000 received; that’s about 10-15 pieces a day; 75 active columnists; 150,000 people a month visiting our site; 149,000 Facebook friends. Our target is 1 million readers a month.”

At the time of writing, there are three leads on Viewspaper’s front page. “Paper Flower Plant”, by Deepashri Varadarajan, is part-nostalgia and part-Wikipedia about bougainvillea. “The Last Goodbye”, by Ankit Srivastava, is a wistful essay about leaving college. “The Indian Womans [sic] failure to assert herself”, by Siddharth Deshmukh, muses on women in business and politics. None is “hard” news. But there have been news-related features in the past. On the controversy over mining in the Niyamgiri Hills, members of an Orissa NGO posted a petition to the President on the Viewspaper in 2007.

Below the leads are seven section leads, including on crimes against Dalit women, the Lokpal trouble, the Ramdev eviction, and hopes from Mamata Banerjee’s CM-ship. Further down the page are 12 categories from Arts to Travel. Last of all are seven “verticals”, including Ads, Gadgets, Careers, Health, Pets. These will soon be spun off into as many as 50 new websites (“Youth on Ads”, “Youth on Careers”...), to capitalise on the “youth views” space. An online school of journalism is planned. And since speed is crucial, Viewspaper is focusing on “instant views” — which means cultivating writers who can write thoughtfully at short notice.

But quality is a problem. Most essays are full of small language errors; most, even by the columnists — the top category of contributors — are not well thought-through. “I have no qualms in accepting the fact that there’s a huge amount of improvement we could do,” says Dravid, whose copyeditors, who send feedback to the contributors, are themselves young.

At “Rs 15-20 lakh” annual revenue from advertising, the Viewspaper broke even eight months ago. It is, as Dravid says, a “bare bones” operation. He himself takes no salary. He is proud that he has never taken venture capital and can set his own goals without diluting his equity. Like other founders of “social” e-businesses, he has a touch of messianic zeal — which means that he is sure of his ultimate victory.