Parul
You recently spoke about your citizen journalism news platform at a SME Conclave. How is a social news platform relevant to business owners?
A citizen journalism platform need not necessarily be a social news platform. It can be a business news platform too if business owners decide to share their story. My pitch is simple – we have a platform for you to share your news. I believe SMEs find very little outlet of their stories in traditional media. India is seeing a surge in the number of startups getting launched every year. There is very little coverage of these companies because they have very little PR and Marketing budget. We are welcoming these founders to write their stories on merinews.
How does that help these companies?
It helps them to get noticed – get noticed when someone is searching for their company in respect to products, job or investment. That invokes a lot of confidence in the person’s mind. Otherwise most of the time searching by the name of these companies only throw up their directory listings or company website.
Furthermore, stories published on merinews can be noticed by traditional media houses, journalists or shared on social media. Today a lot of journalists look at merinews as a source of news.
But not every founder has the time or ability to frame a story…
That is where our editorial desk comes into play. If you share your story ideas, we can help you frame it.
We have also started doing workshops to help entrepreneurs learn how to tell their stories in proper format of news.
We are also trying to build our platform in a way where founders can answer a few set questions and the edit team will be able to formulate a story out of it.
How do you see citizen journalism evolving in India?
I think we are still at a very nascent stage of community content sharing. I think the model will do good at a hyper local level where various communities share their stories, events, problems, successes with neighbors.
