India Today Group Chairman and Editor-in-Chief Aroon Purie delivered a keynote address on the resilience and reinvention of the print and news industry at FICCI Frames 2025. From credibility to convergence, his speech explored how journalism is adapting and thriving in a digital-first era.
Here’s his full speech:
Good morning,
It’s a privilege to be here at FICCI Frames, among the most influential minds and creators shaping India’s vast media and entertainment landscape.
At the end of this year, I will have been in the media business for 50 years.
And if there is one lesson I have learned over the past five decades, it is this: disruption never ends. In fact, disruption is the only constant.
I began with a print magazine called India Today, which at its peak had a readership of 5 million. We now have four 24-hour news channels and 60 robust digital, mobile and social media entities.
Today, the India Today Group’s combined media reach spans 750 million viewers, readers, followers, fans and subscribers. And India’s first AI news anchor called ‘SANA’ who is growing in capability day by day.
As you can see, each disruption created a new opportunity.
In my years, I have seen disruption come in waves, each one more powerful than the last.
Each wave has intensified the competition for two things: the audience’s attention and the advertiser’s rupee.
But beneath all the technological disruption lies a deeper structural problem in the business model of news.
But before I get into that, let me start with the miracles of the media world which exist in India and India alone.
In terms of sheer volume, we are the undisputed global king of news media. I don’t think any country has over One Lakh forty thousand registered publications. Forget the world, just the city of Delhi wakes up to dozens of English newspapers daily and just as many regional newspapers. I am sure no city in the world has that in today’s digital world.
According to TRAI, we have 900 permitted satellite TV channels, out of which there are more than 375 that are twenty-four hour news channels and more in the pipeline. Again, this is nowhere in the world.
This is a gigantic industry, but have you stopped to think who really pays for it.
The major newspapers have relied on what I call “raddi economics”. That is why the price of your paper is so low that at the end of the week you get more for it than you actually paid for it. So, not only is it free, but you make a profit! Also, once a newspaper enters your home, you are unlikely to discontinue it even if you stop consuming it.
This must be the only product in the world where the consumer stops consuming it, but the supply continues.
The same practice went into broadcasting. When cable channels were launched, the distribution system was linear, which meant the cable operators did not have the capacity to carry the huge number of available channels.
The result was that broadcasters had to pay cable operators carriage fees for their channels to be made available to consumers.
Even after digitisation, which was intended to solve the carriage issue, the practice of carriage continues because there is no “must carry rule”.
As a result, the problems of broadcasters didn’t get resolved but only got compounded.
The TRAI regulations controlling the price of channels are another hindrance to allowing market forces to play.
It is beyond my understanding why the government treats the supply of cable TV as an essential commodity whose price they must control, like wheat or rice.
In reality, the regulations are strangling the broadcasting industry, which provides employment to 1.7 million people. A number that could have been much more if market forces were allowed to come into play.
If the truth be told, with apologies to the previous speaker, the government has made a mess of the broadcasting industry due to lack of foresight and regressive policies.
I believe the role of the government is to ensure a fair, level playing field. Not to regulate, but to facilitate.
Going back to the business of news. The bottom line is that news is, by and large, cheap or free for the consumer, and the publisher or broadcaster gets little from what the consumer pays.
So, who really pays for this gigantic news industry with 375 news channels and more in the pipeline? They form the single largest segment of all channels, around 40%.
The paymaster is the advertiser.
When journalism’s survival depends almost entirely on advertising from corporations and governments, its independence is under constant threat of compromise.
We have all seen it. The hand that gives can also take away. To be clear, I am not painting the entire industry with one brush.
The advertising-funded model has, against all odds, produced some of the finest journalism in our history.
The Bofors scandal, the 2G spectrum scam, the Commonwealth Games expose, the Corona pandemic, Manipur, Ukraine war and many more—these were brought to light by journalists working within this very system.
But we must be honest. The space for dissent is shrinking, not because of jackbooted censors, but because of balance sheets and ad-sales targets.
And today, this problem has taken on another form. I call it the advent of the ‘Billionaire News Channels’.
We are now seeing the entry of large industrial houses into the news business, for whom news is not a business at all. It is a tool for influence and access.
They have deep pockets. And they are destroying the economic models of news channels, which will be detrimental not just to profitability but also to good journalism.
After all, the currency of news channels is credibility. And their entrance makes the public believe that every channel is a mouthpiece for a vested interest.
You should also note that today, 99% of news channels lose money. As you can see, the business model is already cracking. But this must be the only business where the industry loses money. However, there is still a queue for people who want to get into it.
Then came the next wave of disruption: Digital.
Digital news was our chance to fix the model. To build a direct relationship with the reader. But we repeated the same mistake, only this time, on a global scale. We gave our product away for free, chasing scale and eyeballs.
We chased them because the new gatekeepers demanded it. Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter became the world’s new editors-in-chief.
They produce no journalism, but they control its distribution and monetisation.
Frankly, I find it maddening that they are not, in law, treated as publishers but only as platforms. If I publish someone else’s defamatory statement, I am liable for defamation. But not the platforms.
In fact, in terms of ad revenue, they are the real media companies — with over 70% of total media revenue.
They are eating the breakfast, lunch, and dinner of the media companies, leaving only crumbs for publishers and broadcasters. Digital advertising is now 55% of total ad revenue, far surpassing TV and print.
And their master is the algorithm. The algorithm doesn’t reward depth, accuracy, or nuance. It rewards outrage, speed, and virality.
It has transformed our information ecosystem into a battleground for attention, contaminating public discourse in the process.
Newsrooms that once invested in reporters now have to invest in SEO specialists. The editorial meeting is as much about what’s trending as it is about what’s important.
The old master was the advertiser. The new master is the algorithm.
And now, we face the next great wave of disruption: Artificial Intelligence.
AI is being positioned as the new arbiter of truth. It can summarise five articles into one paragraph. It can give you an answer directly, so you never have to click.
And what happens to the original news organisations—the ones who pay reporters and fight court cases to bring you the news—when our content is scraped, synthesised, and regurgitated without credit or revenue?
This is an existential threat to the very creation of credible information.
So where does that leave us, the people in this room?
It leaves us with a profound challenge. The old models are broken. The new gatekeepers are ruthlessly efficient. And the very value of professionally generated content is under threat.
I don’t have all the answers. But I do know this: we, as an industry, must stop apologising for the value of what we create. We must innovate, not just in our content, but in our business models.
We must persuade our audience that credible, well-researched news is a public good, and like any public good, it has a price. It cannot be free.
A subscription is not just a transaction; it’s a vote for the kind of media you want to exist.
For 50 years, I have lived through failures, false starts, and occasional successes.
Let me leave you with this.
Disruption is not the enemy, it’s the new normal. The real question is, do we have the courage, imagination, innovation, resilience and integrity to seize it?
The challenge today is not just to survive the next wave of disruption, but to build a future where our journalism is not just viable, but valuable.
Ultimately, we are storytellers. And humanity survives on the stories we tell each other.
We should not be intimidated by new technologies but use them to tell stories in a more memorable and truthful way. In an era of post-truth, telling the truth matters even more.
The future of truth in India, and indeed the health of our democracy, depends on it.
Thank you.
– Ends