During Christmas holidays last year, Devjyot Ghoshal and Anand Katakam were the only two students of Columbia School of Journalism, New York, who didn’t come back home to India. While their peers were busy celebrating, the two were trying to wrap their heads around an idea that was bound to revolutionise the way a common man looked at the upcoming Indian elections — “The 545” solution.
“The practice of getting information about elections in India is very traditional; people depend on newspapers. Whereas in the US, you hardly sees anyone reading them; everybody follows the updates online. Digital journalism is very advanced and we (India) have a lot of catching up to do,” says Anand.
Devjyot Ghoshal.
Studying in New York, the team felt that they weren’t in the loop with the Indian elections set to take place in a couple of months.
“We were missing out on it because we are in New York. And the realisation thus brought forth ‘The 545’ — that’s the number of seats in the Lok Sabha,” says Aparna Alluri, one of the team members who is also from Hyderabad.
“Anand and Devjyot sent out emails to Indian students in Columbia. There were 10 and for the first meeting in January, seven showed up,” she adds.
The 545 is a combination of BuzzFeed and Quartz — 300 to 400 word pieces with charts, graphics, visuals — telling interesting stories tailored for online consumption.
“Since there are six of us — Devjyot Ghoshal, Anand Katakam, Iva Dixit, Indrani Basu, Rishi Iyengar and I — work gets divided equally and it’s not that hectic despite our conflicting schedules. We have Iva as the editor, Dev and Anand do the back-end work, I contribute articles and so on,” says Anand.
The team tries to meet once a week and sends out emails on the ideas to be worked upon at the start of the week. “We come out with an article every two days. It’s of course only about elections and the factors contributing to it. So when the bifurcation of AP was announced, I wrote about The (Interactive) Telangana Timeline, and 11 Things You Need to Know. Though the site hit 500 likes on Facebook, in just about 36 hours, the challenge afterwards was to keep generating good quality content,” adds Aparna.
Apart from working with national newspapers, Aparna has also worked with The Guardian and The Economist in Delhi. “The six of us come from different parts of the country and that was helpful in lending a local sense to our articles as each of us closely follows things related to our states. We also have the advantage because of the time difference. In India, majority of the people like to read the news in the morning, which is night time for us. We work at night, around 10.30 pm, so that when the article is uploaded it can be viewed by the people in India by morning. In fact, we even invite people to freelance and write to us sharing their thoughts on how the elections impact them and whatever it is that they do.”
The elections will be done by May and so will their term at Columbia School of Journalism. How will the team manage to keep the site functional after they go different ways? “First of all, we never thought that the site would be such a huge thing. Moreover, it’s only for elections. But we haven’t had any discussion on what happens after the elections or when we graduate in May,” says Aparna.
