When a billion users don't think as one audience

Speaker A: Being content led. I think all websites are content led in that sense. But being content led also means that you think content first. It's always journalism first. It shouldn't be that, like we used to have the saying long back in the newsroom that good journalism cannot die on the altar of good design. We can't be compromising because of technology. We can't be compromising because of product. Right. The journalism always has to shine through. It's not, not easy. Right? Because there are a lot of things that you have to do because you have to stay relevant. Let's look at the platform phase. I think we are at the other end of the platform phase now. Maybe AI ends up becoming a new platform phase altogether, but we are at the end of that. We all cater to, okay, what do you need to do for the Facebook market? What do you need to do for the Google market? Even in that phase, we were always like, we will not compromise on the content. Maybe we will push the envelope a little bit on what we can do, but we will not end up doing it. Uh, and that, I think in hindsight, has worked for us because while others were chasing traffic, we ended up getting the readers.

Speaker B: Welcome to In Other Words, the podcast from Frase where we speak with leaders shaping how global businesses grow, scale and operate. Today's guest is Nanda Gopal Rajan, CEO of Indian Express Digital. Over the past decade, Nanda Gopal has helped transform a 30 person digital team into a business of more than 550 people, reaching over 100 million monthly visitors. And along the way, he's launched four regional language editions, expanded video into a major content operation, and now leads one of India's most respected digital news organization. India presents challenges that few markets can actually match. More than a billion Internet users consume content across dozens of major languages, making it one of the most demanding environments for any content business. And in this conversation, we'll explore what building trust at scale teaches us about leadership and AI and multilingual publishing and the future of digital content. Nanda Kapal, it's great to have you on the show.

Speaker A: Thank you. It's my pleasure, Dizi.

Speaker B: Brilliant. Well, look, let's get to the first question. And you joined the Indian express Digital Team 2013 when it was around 30 people, pretty much in a basement. And today you're now running this 550 person operation as the CEO. Uh, so for our listeners who may not know your background, how did you get from a kind of newspaper launch team to one of the leading Indian digital media businesses so personally it was

Speaker A: my second Standard Express. I had spent six years earlier in a very traditional newsroom environment where I was in charge of bringing out multiple editions. And I had gone to another organization where I was also editing a, uh, tech magazine which overnight became digital. And I was sort of pushed to becoming a digital person. But coming back it was purely in a digital role. And this was when Anant Goenka, who's our executive director, had come back from the US and was thinking of the next decade. How do you prepare Indian Express for the next decade? Indian Express is now almost 100-year-old organization. So we had a very legacy newsroom. How do you bring that up to speed? And he wanted to invest in digital and he had a lot of great ideas. So that's when I came back. And then we were a very small team. But that was our biggest advantage though. We were sort of an extension of the legacy newsroom. We worked like a startup. So we did a lot of things before others. And one of the first things Adam did was we were maybe among the first big publishers to move to WordPress VIP, which at that time was a leap of faith because everybody was doing homegrown CMSs and we decided to go completely radical. WordPress, it wasn't a place you would find a large news organization in, right. It was more of a, uh, okay, you run Your blog on WordPress, it can be a large blog kind of thing. So that was a leap of faith. We went WordPress VIP immediately got to know that that was a superpower we had because from a point where the website would sort of break down every time we hit a traffic threshold to becoming so scalable, completely elastic when it came to traffic going up and down, which is how India works, right? Especially then in the days when Google was just driving traffic up your alley. That was a phase. And that being a startup, uh, thinking, completely creative, what do we do next? Which audience do we look for next? That kind of a thing. That's also how we thought that Indian Express journalism, which is unique, which now has becoming stronger by the day because of what we do, how do we take it into more languages? Right. India, all said and done. English, it's one of the largest English speaking populations in the world, but it's still a fraction of the country. Right? So that's where we started expanding into languages where we did not have a foothold. It was an, uh, uphill task because all of these markets, publishing is not new in India. It's 200 years old at least. And you have these Legacy players who completely command the markets, going into those markets, doing something new, capturing the eyeballs and attention and then showing that, okay, we have a lot of journalism which is otherwise not available in your market. I think that was the idea. I think all of that is sort of coming to fruition now. And we are seeing, you know, we are now reaping the dividends of having done that. That's the backstory.

Speaker B: It's a fascinating story. And like you say, with those incumbents in place, it's very much a sort of challenge of brand story, isn't it? Where you've had to challenge and innovate and think differently about the market. So you've also said before, the Indian Express must also always be content led. What does that sort of mean when you're also running a massive digital business

Speaker A: at scale, being content led? I think all websites are content led in that sense. But being content led also means that you in first. It's always journalism first. It shouldn't be that like we used to have the saying long back in the newsroom that good journalism cannot die on the altar of good design. We can't be compromising because of technology, we can't be compromising because of product. Right. The journalism always has to shine through. It's not easy, right? Because there are a lot of things that you have to do because you have to stay relevant. Let's look at the platform phase. I think we are at the other end of the platform phase now. Maybe AI ends up becoming a new platform phase altogether, but we are at the end of that. We all cater, uh, to, okay, what do you need to do for the Facebook market? What do you need to do for the Google market? Even in that phase we were always like, we will not compromise on the content. Maybe we will push the envelope a little bit on what we can do, but we will not end up doing, uh. And that I think in hindsight has worked for us because while others were chasing traffic, we ended up getting the readers. We were able to hold on to a lot of, uh, our readers because there is a trust that we build over time. We didn't do a lot of things which others were sort of compelled to do because they were catering to the platforms. So that's what I mean by content led is that it's always going to be as in journalism, led is a better way to put it. Because content can sort of be diluting in that sense as a phrase. But we'll always be journalism led. That's the product we sell. And that's what we want to upfront and make shine through.

Speaker B: It's like staying true to a core principle of the business is very, very good and useful. You talked about trust then, and you spent your whole career figuring out how to tell stories that those customers or those subscribers trust. What do you wish that more business leaders understood maybe from how a good editor thinks about content or trust?

Speaker A: And again, we are seeing radical change in user behavior right now. So for instance, and everybody's talking about AI slop. It might be the best thing to happen to legacy players. People come back and check whether, uh, let's say that Pope walking in that white puffer jacket, is that available with Indian Express or New York Times. If it's not, maybe I can't trust it. And again, you have to keep on building these layers of trust, which is to do with the time also, right? To give you a good example, like India has a very infamous, uh, television market. You know, it's a very infamous television market. We used to see about 10 years back, prime time for TV. We'd see some of our old stories get a lot of traction and we realized that one, the TV is not sticking to any news cycle. They're just doing the story they want to do. And then people are coming to check on Indian Express whether Indian Express has actually reported it and maybe we reported it three weeks back and TVs picking it up now for whatever agenda. So they are verifying, right? So that is the trust that we have built in people. We have seen this multiple times. For instance, last year there was a little bit of a, uh, few days of conflict between India and Pakistan, which was like, you know, we were on the edge. And that was the best time we had for subscriptions because we would start the day by saying, hey, anything that we do will be double checked and verified by an Indian Express reporter, otherwise we will not publish. And TV was going crazy and we got a 3x4x jump in our daily subscriptions and we hadn't paywalled any of this content in national interest. People were just coming and saying, hey, I want to subscribe to Indie Express because I trust what they're doing. So that is what we stand for, right? So that is the trust. But the trust also, it's not one monolith. You have to evolve to the requirement of the Times. And that's a user requirement. How do we take those two extra steps to get to the reader? I think that's more important.

Speaker B: Trust is built over time, isn't it? It's not Just uh, like you say, it's not one off, it's consistency and it's all of those things that you mentioned but over a consistent period of time.

Speaker A: And it's not just what you publish. Right. I strongly believe it's also what you don't publish. We don't think it is important enough to be covered. Is also a matter of trust. Has Express covered it?

Speaker B: No.

Speaker A: Maybe it's not worth my time. That's how I think a lot of our uh, readers look at it.

Speaker B: I think there's a lot of lessons in how content teams publish or how businesses publish in that uh, is that uh, you know, is it worth it and is it good and is it consistent and for the long, long run. Interesting. So onto my next question, I had for you, Nanda Kapal. We've got India has like, is it 22 different official languages? And then I was reading there's over a thousand distinct mother tongues. And then we said at the beginning, didn't we, about a billion Internet users. And you alluded to it. I think with most of the growth coming from people who prefer content in their regional language and it strikes me that it's arguably the most complex content market on earth. Readers across India don't just speak different languages, they have different cultural contexts and expectations. Do you find that people wanted different stories or simply different ways of telling them? Perhaps, or it's intriguing to me with all those different things at play.

Speaker A: If you consider India as one homogeneous unit, you're going to fail, uh, whatever, be your product. I've been a tech journalist for 20 years. If you launch a tech product thinking, okay, I'm going to hit this large Indian market, it's not going to work. You need to again look at the sensibilities, sensitivities of each market. What's the language you speak to them there? That's very important. So my personal experience, okay, uh, the first regional language that I launched was in my mother tongue. Okay. I was feeling very proud that okay, I'm giving back to my mother tongue and it was reasonably successful. The next language I did was Tamil, which is next door to my state. Very similar culturally though the language is different and even the language has commonalities. I thought a lot of my learning there could be used in Tamil. It didn't work at all because again Tamil is much more older as a culture is a little bit inward looking and these are things that I learned over the years. Then my third language, it actually resonated more with my first language, Malayalam. It's Very tough to think of India as one homogeneous unit and tackle it. Requirements are different, Storytelling is different. My language, Malayalam, has a publishing history of about 400 years. It started off around the same time as the rest of the world because if you know about Kerala, it's a very cosmopolitan culture and with a lot of European influence. It's also a very saturated market. So you had to look at things very differently compared to the other markets. So what technology works as, in which platform works in each market is also different. Requirements of the readers are different in each market. So you have to think about it, uh, very, very differently. I'm sitting in this suburban city of Delhi called Noida. I think we have a Noida bias where we sit, we start looking at the world from our perspective. It's like the US doing internal competition and calling it the World Series, right? We think that's the world. It doesn't work that way. So we have a strong bias. We need to. For instance, English reading is mostly in the south of India and to the east of India. Because of many reasons, we don't cover those areas that well enough in English. Right. We end up covering a lot of the Hindi heartland, which the platforms, for instance, optimize for Hindi. They don't let English content be accessed very easily in those markets. So there is this skew, this bias that comes in knowingly or unknowingly, which is very difficult to plug in a market like India. And I think that is where technology can really help. It still hasn't. I haven't seen anybody crack this personalization or localization really well in a market like India. That's where you really need to think about tapping it. And the other thing that, especially with Indian Express, we have a huge diaspora audience, international audience. I wouldn't say purely diaspora. I think global audiences also look at Indian Express as an entry point into India. Now, what they need is very different from what the internal audiences need. Even if they are Indians, let's say in the US or the uk, they don't want to read the same stories that New Delhi is reading. Their context is very different. So it's very, very complex. Now, on top of that is the complexity of monetization. Very simply put, let's say the CPM rates of English is a dollar. All the regional languages are at a fraction, which doesn't really make much sense to me because some of these, again, the English reading audience is not a different audience from the regional markets. Right. Most of us are multilingual. If I'm reading a Malayalam I'm also reading in English, so I'm the same audience. But if I'm, if I am targeted on a Malayalam page, I'm targeted at 25 cents instead of a dollar in English, which doesn't make much sense to me because it should be more audience led than the language led. That's very confusing. But this also makes the scale that we play in at India like, you know, so I am scared usually, and I've chosen that word very carefully. Scared. Talking to, let's say, uh, SAS players in the US or other parts of the world because they look at our numbers and they come up with astronomical figures. We don't make that kind of money from the kind of audiences we have. The scale of audiences are huge, but we don't make that kind of money. Uh, you know, let's say an American publisher with 10% of our audience would be making 10 times more money than us.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's. Again, that is a regional. Not bias, but it's a regional factor, isn't it, that you should consider when you're thinking about going into a market. You need to understand the monetization in that market and perhaps whether it makes sense. I do think technology, as you kind of said technology, promises to kind of make all of that easier as we go forward. I think speaking from a, a language technology bias, perhaps myself, but I do think that that thing's becoming much easier than it has been in the past to do. And I think you answered what my next question was going to be, which is what surprised you about those regional editions as they went live? I guess some of that surprise is that your bias that perhaps this will be easy because of what I know about that other language was kind of wrong. You can't. I guess what surprised you is that you can't assume that, you know, until you actually go in and really do some research or really think about the audience. Let's sort of shift it a little from. News is a fast moving beast, isn't it, when a story breaks. It's funny because my background, I started off in news. I worked for Dow Jones News when I my first job out of uni. So anyway, I won't bore you with that. And it's, it's a long time ago as well, so. But I remember that, you know, when a story breaks, it needs to get out there quickly. And we were often competing with other providers to break that news item first. And when you talk about all the different languages, you want to get that out, uh, what, so it breaks Quickly you need to get it into four or five or six or seven different languages all at once. What does that look like behind the scenes for you?

Speaker A: Again, this complexity that we discussed earlier, that makes it a little bit easy, right? Let's say there are very few stories that need to be told nationally in India. I don't know if I'm um, making sense because we might think it's a big deal sitting in Delhi if nobody's interested down south or in the east. So there are very few stories that have to be told nationally. So we think, for instance, breaking news is one of the last frontiers left in this entire AI uh, hitting publishers kind of space. We are investing in that. So let's say we are looking at 10 big breaking stories in a day. Only let's say four of them are relevant to maybe each of our languages. So we don't have to. But the smart thing is in figuring out, okay, what's relevant where, that's not an easy thing, right? So because you might think with your bias that it's not relevant. So news is evolving in that sense. So that entire process now we are, we are looking at saying, hey, I'm investing in my journalism. My journalism is top notch, it's credible, right? How do I take it to different languages? And by languages we now have this new definition. Like we just launched, uh, Indian Express Hindi as a video first product. So we already had a legacy Hindi newspaper called Jansatta. Uh, but we've launched Indian Express Hindi. The way the editor of Indian Express Hindi Saurabh, who's a big star, is that we are taking it into the two most popular languages in India, which is Hindi and video. So video is this language that is again, it's cutting across maybe the accessibility issues that India has had, right? And video. Now because of everybody has a smartphone in India, right? Literally it's easy to consume. Anybody can consume it passively if they need. So. So that text bias is also going away, especially for a legacy organization like us. So we now think about, okay, stories breaking. What's our journalism? Which language does it go into? What formats or modes, mediums do we get into with these stories? Now I am one step ahead thinking that maybe it's not necessary to do some stories in text anymore. You can say for instance, just, just a, uh, this is not a strategy, but just that text is maybe not the best way to put across an opinion. An opinion is maybe best communicated in audio. Some of our great stories have much more impact in video than in a 2000 word article, we need to think about what's the best way to tell this story. The journalism is what we protect fiercely, as in whatever mode we do it in, our journalism is top quality.

Speaker B: Yeah, I love that idea. And it's kind of segue into what we call our, um, mid show moment where we ask the same sort of question. So. And it'll be interesting to hear what you say, given that you're very close to lots of different languages. But what's the best language fail that you've ever come across?

Speaker A: See, 10 years back, right when we were launching the languages, there was this ability to use Google Translate, at least to make translation a little bit easier. I'm a multilingual person. I can understand six languages. I can read and write in three. It's easier to write a language ground up than translate. We realized that with technology, it translates, it doesn't get the context of the sentence right. AI, ah, is way better at it than like the technology used to be 10 years back. But we have seen a lot of language fails where people creating a bypass would try and use Google Translate. We would have readers pinpoint sections in a video saying, hey, this doesn't sound right. You have used Google Translate. So I think understanding language in its context, uh, is very important. So it's not about how do you translate the sentence into a new language, it's about how can this concept be communicated in this target language. Right. Which, which will be very different from how it's written in English or Hindi or any language. So I think we have had a lot of fails, but getting called out for using Google Translate is I think the biggest fail.

Speaker B: Yeah, you don't want to do that. Uh, okay, so We've talked about AI and you've been writing about technology for 25 years or more and you're now responsible for deciding where AI fits in the newsroom. Where has it proved most useful or surprised you in what you're doing?

Speaker A: So we don't use a lot of AI right now because again, I personally believe there isn't a first mover advantage here. It's maybe better m to just live, stay back and see, let others make the failures and then we come in when we think the point is right. So for us it's worked very well. So we have one product that's live, which has been live for a few years now, which is called Express Shots. Right. So it just reads through every story before we publish. The editor working on the story would get a pop up saying, hey, we have generated a summary. We Want you to clear it. Okay. So it's always human in the loop. The editor is responsible. If something goes wrong, you can't blame AI, Right. The editor reads through the and pushes it out. So it just gives a quick entry point to our journalism. Right. So people can just scan through multiple cards of summaries and then tap into whichever story they want to deep dive into. Which has been a pretty successful product for us. Um, everybody does it now, so there is nothing unique about it anymore. But we have stayed away from mass adoption. That said, personally, I think where it's very good at is translating data into language. Now where does it work? In a newsroom? So journalists are generally very averse to data. They don't want to accept the fact that that great story you've done has some data points which could tell you the story behind the story on how users are encountering your story. So we have always struggled with how do you communicate the data point to journalists? How do they accept the best points out of the data? That's been very tough. I think AI does a superb job of looking at large sets of data, user data or story level data, and translating it in a language that is actionable at a journalist level. And this is something that we now use quite a bit. And I think a lot of the journalists also do it themselves. They look at their data and uh, say, now tell me what should I do? And again, you don't have to accept anything. It's basically okay. There will be some suggestions. Okay. When you publish, let's say at this time in the evening, it works very well otherwise, usually you're uh, very late. So how do you bring your. And again, it's in your language, it's in English, it's not in mathematics. That will spook you. Right. It's not in numbers. So that is one very good use that we have. We are working on some personalization models, but we haven't really cracked anything at scale so far.

Speaker B: Cool. So sounds like you're exploring it, you're using it, but has it changed how what you value most in journalists and editors?

Speaker A: Absolutely. Absolutely right. I think so. Like, you know, two, three years back, I used to tell our teams that we now have to be better than AI at everything we do. So a lot of what we do very easily, which is to quickly report a story or just convert data into a story. All of that can be done, maybe better by AI. Uh, what is our edge? What we really need to focus on is the storytelling is bringing in the human angle, the human aspect into the story, connecting it to a human audience, which I think AI will struggle with at least for in the foreseeable future. Right. So storytelling is something that withstood the tests of time. We used to have storytelling 10,000 years back. I think storytelling is going to maybe last another 10,000 years. It's going to outlast AI, but we have to find that power, as in, we have to inculcate that power of storytelling and bring it into everything that we do, because that is what connects to the human. Machines might not get it.

Speaker B: For leaders that are bringing AI into their content or their operations, what mistakes do you think that a newsroom would never make that you would encourage them to kind of avoid?

Speaker A: I thought a lot of the early adoption of AI was tech led or business led than newsroom led. Like, nobody asked newsrooms, hey, what's this problem this wonderful new technology can do for you or solve for you? Nobody asked those questions. Uh, businesses decided that, hey, we need to scale up on content. And I think that's the worst thing that happened to newsrooms. The biggest problems newsrooms struggle with, especially digital newsrooms struggle with, I think is that we have too much content and we don't have the right audience for it. So solving the problem doesn't mean you create more content. So I think AI tells you very clearly what you need to focus on and how you improve that human quotient in those stories so that your impact goes through the roof. Right. So I think scaling up content, using AI to do these very frivolous layers on top of content, which again, no user asked for, no journalist asked for. Some technologists somewhere thought this is the best use of AI. I think that didn't work very well with newsrooms.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: So, for instance, why does the New York Times do a, uh, bullet point summary on top of their articles? We also don't do the same. We want people to read the full article. We don't want people to read the summary. There's one wonderful, uh, phrase that I've heard recently create journalism that can't be summarized. I think that's what is key to surviving in the AI era.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, that's a great phrase, isn't it? It's a great phrase that can't be summarized. We talked about the population of India crossing 1 billion. And you talked a little bit about how the population consumes technology. But are there other lessons that global business leaders should try and learn about how audience consume information or content or whatever it is in India?

Speaker A: So I think the Indians have always been what we call very value conscious, right. They are always thinking, okay, what's in it for me? Right? I think in the context of news also, right. We often think that there is a lot of news people need to consume. But what we forget to add is to ask ourselves what's in it for them. So that relevance is what matters a lot for the Indian audiences. So if you are able to connect it to a user, they will immediately read it or they will consume it, whatever be the media. But I think a lot of news has over the years not really looked at what is that demand, you know, what is the requirement? What is the relevance that we are playing for. So I think witness India. It's almost proverb, you're saying within India that with a car the question always is how much is the mileage? Because that's the value we are always trying to look for. So I think that same layer of thinking or filter on whatever you do, whatever your product, I think that's very important. How do you communicate the value? And that doesn't mean Indians won't spend. That doesn't mean Indians won't buy a subscription or uh, buy an iPhone, for instance. People think iPhone is too expensive for India. But India is one of the biggest markets for the iPhone, because the people, if you look at the kind of people who can afford expensive product in India, that number will be bigger than most countries in the world. So there is always a market for things in India. But you have to find the value or you have to be able to communicate the value very clearly. And I think news has struggled on that for a long time. That has to change now.

Speaker B: And do you think that most organizations, that's where they're getting most of it wrong in communicating that value? Is that what you've seen if you look at other businesses? Interesting. Let's talk about you now a little bit more. And you've spent your career helping people, writing about and helping people understand technology. But how has becoming CEO changed the way you think about technology and innovation?

Speaker A: It's very interesting. So like I would ask a lot of the CEOs, tech CEOs, I would interview this question. Is there something that you as a, uh, tech lover want to do, which you as a CEO prevents you from doing? And I'm in that state now because again, there are a lot of new technologies out there. There are a lot of flashy things you can do. But one thing I learned is that you always have to ask yourself, what's the business use case here is There significant impact. Is it worth the time of the people who will work on the project? So I think that has started pulling back on the lot of things that I would have wanted to do because the technology is so fascinating, like especially AI, Right? Because again, you hear everybody asking about the ROI of AI. Ah, there isn't. So far we haven't found any. So then why deploy so deployed when. When you get to a point where you see the real roi, but you keep on exploring, right? You keep on exploring, you keep on experimenting. So this is where I am right now. So the innovation is in finding that one thing that's going to impact your business immediately and significantly.

Speaker B: And I think it's not easy, but once you start finding that, I mean in our experience, once you start unlocking some of the wow, we call them wow moments and each person, each individual or teams have those wow moments where they're like, oh, hang on, it suddenly transforms the way you think. We're having lots of those discussions at the moment. And once you've found those, then that is where you start seeing the real change happen within the business. But I do get your point. You have to sort of discover those or at least make time to discover those because many people are always busy. There's always a reason to not. I've got loads to do, I can't be doing all of that. So it's interesting to make the time, I guess.

Speaker A: So the other thing that is helping us here is to have a very clear North Star goal, A, uh, very verbose North Star goal to so to say that gives us a filter. Okay, does it fit to the North Star? It's maybe, it's maybe good, maybe gets you works from some angle or the other right now, but from a long term North Star perspective, it's not a fit. So let's not work on it, right? Let's stop doing things because it no longer fits with the new North Star that we have. And this is something that we are evolving into. This is new. This is like a few months into this North Star thinking that we have, but that's again gives you this direction, this guardrail within which you think, I think that's good.

Speaker B: North Stars are always very, very useful because not only does it give you kind of a place you want to go, but like you say, it gives you something to screen against to say why you wouldn't be doing something or gives you focus and say we can't do that because it doesn't fit with that approach. So that's a discipline itself. What's one newsroom discipline that you think could be applied when companies adopt new technology?

Speaker A: That's a tough one because I think newsroom and discipline usually doesn't come in one sentence because newsrooms are supposed to have that ability to be very creative when needed, an ability to think, uh, of things differently. See, I've been doing this for 25 plus years now. A lot of news, it doesn't impact me because I've seen it over and over again. I don't have to read the story. I know the structure, I know what it's going to be like. But I think if you put it into a straitjacketed template, what happens is that people don't want the storytelling to evolve. A lot of this can be templatized. We were taught in journalism school how to write a templatized news report because that's how those news reports were being consumed. Written for hundreds of years. And that is exactly what people don't want to read anymore. So that discipline is to have this feedback loop of data, be data, ah, informed, maybe don't start pandering to the data, but to have this feedback loop that keeps on making you better at what you do. Again, this is because this just wasn't there. You know, in the print era, you actually don't have a feedback loop. What's your feedback loop? You would do a survey once in a year to figure out what a thousand people think about a newspaper which has a million subscribers. It doesn't work right. But in digital you get your immediate feedback. The mistake a lot of newsrooms have done is to do only those things that work, or to put it very bluntly, just write what people want to read. Um, it has to be a mix of what people want to read and what people should be reading. It has to be a healthy mix of the two. But to know what people are reading is very important. Otherwise you will just end up doing only what people should be reading and nobody's reading it.

Speaker B: That leads me to my next question quite nicely, actually. So what's next for Indian Express Digital and what are you most excited about?

Speaker A: I guess I think what's most exciting is to. As in, I think technology has hit a sweet spot right now, again, we are not using it to our advantage, but I think it's at the sweet spot. Right? It's also hitting a sweet spot when your resistance to doing something new is at its lowest. Anybody can do that, have launch a product that you just thought of while you were sitting in the loop. Anybody can do it. And ah, that technology is giving you that power, but it's also happening in a very challenging time. So the most exciting thing for me is to say that, hey, the great journalism we do now can transcend any of these resistances, right? Resistance of language, resistance of medium, resistance of geography, all of these. Right. We can do anything, literally. It's a superpower. But again, you have to be very careful what you do. And a lot of things wouldn't align to your brand. You know, you have the capability to do it, but why do it? But that's the most exciting thing. How that pans out, I don't know. But I am very excited by the fact that this ability is there with us now.

Speaker B: I think I very much agree and I think. Interesting. I summarize what you said in one area in that kind of Spider man esque of with great power comes great responsibility, doesn't it? So look. Well, we're getting to the last bit of the podcast now and we have this really quick fire session where we just ask you for one word answers or short answers aren't a few things. So when you hear the phrase language intelligence, what comes to mind for you?

Speaker A: Sensitivity.

Speaker B: Excellent. That's good. And one global news outlet you admire and why. And it can't be your own, uh,

Speaker A: New York Times because of being relevant to any moment they're in.

Speaker B: Brilliant. And one book that changed how you think about media and technology or leadership.

Speaker A: Merchants of Truth.

Speaker B: Merchants of Truth. Excellent. Thank you very much. That was an absolutely fascinating conversation and thanks for joining us.

Speaker A: It was my pleasure entirely. Thank you.

Speaker B: Nanda Kapal, thank you for a brilliant conversation. You gave us a very clear picture of how to build trust, serve lots of diverse audiences and scale a digital business in one of the world's most complicated markets. Um, in India and, and with that, that's it for In Other Words, a podcast from Frase. I've been your host, Jason Hemingway. And a big thank you to Nanda Gopal Rajan for joining us today. If this episode made you think about how your content strategy needs to evolve as your business expands into new languages and markets, we'd love to continue that conversation. So head to frase.com to find out more. For more conversations on leadership growth and what it takes to scale globally, subscribe to in other words on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening and I'll see you again next time.