Covering the polls out of Columbia U

BY NAUSHEEN HUSAIN| IN Digital Media | 12/04/2014

In the game of data news in this election, the Indian media has stiff competition from a six-week old news publication founded by a group of Columbia University journalism students. 

Anand Katakam, a St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, alum raised in Bangalore, inspired by Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight news site (which, among other coverage, predicts elections using data), conceived the idea of the election-focused thefivefortyfive.com. This is a site that focuses on the 2014 Lok Sabha elections with stories that revolve around data – interactive stories that tell how many women have been in Parliament over the years (read here), and how many times Rahul Gandhi said “system,” “economy” and “I think” in his interview with Times Now’s Arnab Goswami (read here). 

The founders of the site, including Katakam as well as students Devjyot Ghoshal, Rishi Iyengar, Iva Dixit, Indrani Basu and Aparna Alluri, built the site and then recruited a handful of Indian journalism students at Columbia to write for the site. Their emphasis, Katakam said, has been on design.

“Our content is quite good,” he said. “But there are better journalists with better work. We’re still quite young. We’re still students.”

Still, on comparing The 545 with any traditional Indian news website -- the ones with better journalists and better work -- there are some things that are quite evident. Because there is no competition with Internet ads for screen space, long loading times and clutter is nowhere to be found on the site. White space is plenty, colour schemes are consistent and interactive stories are actually interactive. Him and Ghoshal, he said, are “design junkies” and have been taking a news design class at Columbia that helped them understand how to keep their site user-friendly.

“Actually, Quartz is the exact model we followed. We saw the merits of how well that worked for them,” said Katakam, referring to the young, business news publication from Atlantic Media. “We made a conscious choice with the design aspect to make sure the website is easy to navigate through. We wanted the content to stand out.” 

The “About Us” section of the site declares the same thing: “Think of it as a combination of BuzzFeed and Quartz — 300 to 400 word pieces with charts, graphics, visuals — to tell interesting stories tailored for online consumption.” True to their inspiration, they also have “Data Stories” and “Lists” sections, though their lists are less Buzzfeed lists and more news articles. Readers are given a variety of content – one story allows them to laugh at a satirical comic of Narendra Modi ignoring an interviewer, while on another page, readers can take a quick look at a map to see how many rallies each political party has held, and where. In one of the site’s most popular data story, readers can zoom in on a Google map to find out how many criminal cases their Member of Parliament has against him or her. The story has gotten almost 600 likes on Facebook so far. 

The site’s official launch was on February 10, only a few weeks after Katakam conceived the idea. He saw almost immediate success. At the six-week mark, he said, they had hit approximately 120,000 page views, almost 3,000 page views per day. Seventy per cent of the traffic comes directly from India, while 25 to 30 per cent comes from the US. A handful of readers are from the UK and the UAE. The site has been covered by the Wall Street Journal and the Times of India, and Katakam said he’s noticed Indian news picking up on the data on The 545 -- available at the bottom of any data story, for the purpose of transparency -- for their own stories. 

From the site stats, Katakam thinks it’s clear that there is a need for more “web-native” news sites – news publications that are founded on the Internet, rather than in print – that deal with data, to serve both the Indian and non-resident Indian (NRI) populations.

“The response to our stories on social media and through email has been almost completely by NRIs,” Katakam said. “They feel like they’re in touch with home.”

The team’s biggest challenge, he said, has been finding good data for election-related news stories.

“When I first came to New York, I found all this data from New York’s institutions; you can fiddle around a lot. I had a lot of fun with that in my fall semester,” said Katakam. “India's more of an analog place - they still have ledgers.”

The team has been able to find data, however, from non-governmental organisations and think tanks based in India, such as the Association for Democratic Reform, which has some data on both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha. While these organisations publish the data, Katakam said, they don’t have much analysis, and that’s where journalists can come in.

“I think India's behind by a good four or five years in terms of data,” Katakam said. “Whoever jumps on it right now is going to be ahead of the game in five years.”

But there aren’t many institutions jumping on it now. Web-native publications that also work with data are few in India. Katakam cited Scroll.in, Newslaundry and Quartz as doing good work in the field. Both The Huffington Post and Buzzfeed, New York-based web-native news publications, have announced plans to launch in India. The next election will see much more social media involvement and data use in news media, Katakam said.

“Whoever is in power next, I want to see what they do with social media. Because, I mean, the fact that your watchman will be on Facebook -- it'll be sort of interesting to see what they can do with that,” he said, also mentioning media coverage of Shashi Tharoor’s recent jump into Instagram, a popular online photo-sharing and social networking service. 

Katakam himself wants to be a part of that wave. Though he wants to intern for news publications in the US after graduation, he plans on returning to India and starting his own data site with a heavy dose of strong reporting. 

Nausheen Husain is a Masters student at the Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley, US. Follow her: @nausheenhusain.

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