News media companies are experimenting with storytelling strategies across platforms to engage audiences. NDTV, Amar Ujala Digital, The Daily Star, and InShorts shared their strategies during the INMA South Asia News Media Summit on Friday.

NDTV

Social media has become one of the top ways a company can leverage their reach and grow an audience. Millennials are a huge part of social media, and to be successful, news publishers should understand the consumption patterns of millennials to be successful on social media.

“Social media is the next destination where Millennials are consuming their news,” said Sohini Guharoy, head of audience engagement and social strategy at NDTV, an English news channel based in India.

In fact, GEN Z and Millennials are heading to social media mostly to follow celebrities, meme accounts, people who have similar hobbies and interests as themselves, and many other brand and influencer pages before following news companies.

“We are competing with all of them to grab their attention, so we as news publishers are putting ourselves across all platforms,” said Guharoy.

Amar Ujala Digital

Jaideep Karnik, content head and editor at Amar Ujala Digital, shared how they had used the mobile platform to launch a campaign designed to show respect and gratitude toward the country’s mother tongue: “We asked people to send in a video, and we received more than 20,000.”

This year, they’ll do the campaign again but have introduced a short film option as well.

The Daily Star

Mahfuz Anam, editor and publisher at The Daily Star, said mobile has changed the way it uses multimedia. They have taken stories from print versions that have been popular and turned them into multimedia presentations. The stories that work best, he said, are those that have a sense of pride.

“There are lots of stories in the print that are already there. The trick is to look at the print stories that can do well in other formats that we can use,” he said.

InShorts

And Deepit Purkayasth, co-founder and chief strategy officer of InShorts, said mobile has been ideal for being able to provide more information on specific topics. They created a series called Insight that provides a more in-depth look into topics.

“Most people don’t know the nuances of a topic, but don’t have a way to learn about it,” he said. So InShorts provides a “quick magazine-like experience to give them an in-depth look at a topic.”

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