About the book
A work in progress on the political economy of digital journalism in India.
This site is the research engine for a book I am writing on the transformation of journalism in India through the digital era — and through the artificial intelligence era that is now reshaping it again.
The book draws on over 25 years of experience as a digital editor at some of India’s leading publications, including The Hindu, Hindustan Times, The New Indian Express, and the Economic and Political Weekly. It is not a memoir, nor a straightforward history. It is an attempt to build a framework for understanding what has happened to journalism in India since the arrival of the internet — and what may happen next as AI restructures the relationship between publishers, platforms, audiences, and truth.
The central argument
Indian digital journalism has been shaped by three successive waves of platform dependency: search engines, social media, and now AI. Each wave has transferred power away from publishers and towards platforms, while also creating new possibilities that some publishers have seized and others have missed. The book traces this pattern, examines why Indian newsrooms have responded as they have, and asks what a genuinely sustainable model for quality journalism in India might look like.
Running through the argument is a specific concern: the relationship between journalism, algorithmic amplification, and democracy. India provides a particularly rich and troubling case study — a country with an extraordinarily diverse news ecosystem that has nevertheless seen a significant narrowing of the range of voices that reach mass audiences, in large part because of how platforms prioritise and deprioritise content.
How this site relates to the book
The pillar pages and posts on this site map roughly onto the book’s chapter structure. Writing here is a way of thinking in public — working out arguments, testing evidence, and building the body of structured knowledge that the book will draw on. Readers are welcome to engage with this material; the conversations it generates inform the writing.
Search & discoverability
How journalism is found — and increasingly not found
AI & publishing
The disruption that is still arriving
Business of journalism
Revenue, survival, and what sustains quality
Subhash Rai is a senior digital editor and founder of Indian Online Journalism (2000). He has worked as Digital Editor at The Hindu, Hindustan Times, The New Indian Express, and the Economic and Political Weekly. He writes at subhashrai.com.