Kolkata: Gandhi always carried a pen and paper.
Much like people today reach for their phones whenever they find a spare moment, Mahatma Gandhi wrote whenever he found the time, former Prasar Bharati Chairman and former Union Culture Secretary Jawhar Sircar recalled at the inaugural eNewsroom Conclave in Kolkata on Saturday.
Gandhi’s relationship with journalism went far beyond writing whenever he could. Sircar pointed out that Gandhi’s body of work was so vast it took roughly four years just to digitise it.
“Gandhi edited and published Indian Opinion, Young India, Navjivan and Harijan. His newspapers were not merely vehicles for political communication. He used them to engage with ordinary citizens, discuss social reform and raise questions of truth, responsibility and public service,” Sircar said.
More than a century later, those questions framed the discussions at the National Library’s Bhasha Bhavan Hall, where journalists, academics, educators, and public figures gathered around the theme: “Gandhi the Journalist: Why India Needs His Media Vision Today.”
The discussion moved from Gandhi’s print runs to modern algorithms, the decentralisation of newsrooms, the concentration of corporate media ownership, and the tension between chasing virality and doing public-interest reporting.
At its core was a question Gandhi grappled with throughout his life: What does journalism owe to society?
Gandhi had newspapers. Today, we have algorithms.
For Pratik Sinha, co-founder of Alt News, the shift between Gandhi’s era and today’s digital ecosystem is not just about changing technology—it is about who controls distribution.
“When the freedom movement was at its peak, most freedom fighters like Mahatma Gandhi, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bhagat Singh had their own newspapers, which had people to deliver the news to their readers,” Sinha said.
Today, digital newsrooms depend almost entirely on third-party platforms to reach readers, leaving them vulnerable to arbitrary decisions made by tech conglomerates.
“The biggest challenge that digital news producers face is how the algorithm is controlled by big tech giants like Zuckerberg and Elon Musk through their social media platforms,” he said. “This makes it difficult for digital news producers to reach the audience.”
Sinha noted that journalism has undeniably decentralised. Two reporters at Jantar Mantar with a smartphone and a lapel mic can now report live from the ground without any legacy infrastructure behind them.
Yet the same tech that democratised content creation has centralized distribution. A reporter can hit publish instantly, but algorithms decide if anyone actually sees it.
Sinha urged independent outlets to build common ground and push back against the growing concentration of media ownership among a handful of billionaires.
Senior journalist and author Rasheed Kidwai addressed the problem from another angle: measuring journalism by metrics rather than societal impact.
“In this age, it’s important for news to be meaningful rather than going viral,” Kidwai said. “The essence of journalism is to raise issues, highlight problems so that a change is witnessed within society. And that is the teaching of Mahatma Gandhi.”
Kidwai added that substantive reporting still exists within legacy media, citing The Indian Express journalist Ritika Chopra’s investigations into electoral roll revisions that raised questions over millions of missing voters.
His point was straightforward: reporting should be judged by the change it sparks, not the traffic it gathers.
When the mainstream looks away
Senior journalist Arfa Khanum Sherwani, joining online, highlighted how independent outlets step in when corporate newsrooms look the other way.
“Despite all the challenges faced by journalists in alternative media, one cannot deny the need for such media platforms today,” she said.
“If we hadn’t been raising issues that were long forgotten by the legacy media, then the Jantar Mantar protests and the public movements we witness today wouldn’t have happened,” she said, noting that independent platforms have been central to keeping critical citizen concerns alive in public debate.
Sherwani drew a direct parallel with Gandhi’s methods: asking uncomfortable questions of authority, recording ground realities, and giving space to voices that mainstream platforms routinely ignore.
Why does journalism exist, and whom should it serve?
For Shahnawaz Akhtar, Managing Editor of eNewsroom, this was the central question behind organising the Conclave.
“Gandhi Ji was not merely someone who wrote in newspapers. He thought deeply about why journalism existed and whom it should serve,” Akhtar said.
The purpose, he noted, was to bring that question back into newsrooms today “not out of nostalgia, but as an urgent practical concern.”
Professor Mohammed Reyaz brought up a lesser-known chapter of history, reminding the gathering that Gandhi started as a freelance journalist and even reported as a war correspondent long before he became a mass political leader.
Reyaz pointed out that reporting and publishing were not byproducts of Gandhi’s political life—they were the foundational tools through which he learned to listen, verify, and communicate with the public.
Who will pay for independent journalism?
Beyond editorial ethics, educationist and Umeed Global School founder Wali Rahmani raised the economic question facing non-corporate media: how does independent journalism stay alive without public backing?
“Every freedom fighter had their own editorials, and that was because they believed that if no one will publish the truth, then we will. And that is what eNewsroom and its team are doing,” Rahmani said.
“Honest, fearless journalism needs support to survive. Sadly, today we want honest and genuine news, but we are not willing to support such institutions.”
Rahmani stressed that goodwill alone will not pay salaries or cover ground expenses: “They don’t just need our moral support to survive and sustain. They need us to come forward and support them financially.”
Wing Commander (Retd) Md Shamim Akhtar spoke on the practical value of credible local journalism, recalling how eNewsroom investigated and reported his personal experience during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal.
Pointing to how small newsrooms step up to amplify citizens’ grievances when administrative systems falter, he pledged his personal support to eNewsroom and urged readers to back grassroots reporting financially.
Honouring ground reportage
The conclave also presented awards to journalists working in the public interest:
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The N D Sharma Memorial Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to veteran journalists Abdul Aziz and Kamal Nayan Chaparia for their decades of commitment to public-interest reporting.
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The Biswajit Roy Memorial Emerging Journalist Award was conferred on Rokibuz Zaman for his ground reporting across Assam, the Northeast, and West Bengal on citizenship, displacement, identity, and the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls.
Both awards were instituted in memory of N D Sharma and Biswajit Roy, two journalists associated with eNewsroom’s journey.
The event concluded with the formal release of Arab-Jews Relations and Tagore, a book by the late senior journalist Biswajit Roy that examines Rabindranath Tagore’s writings on Jewish-Arab questions, alongside the launch of the latest issue of the trimester magazine Pairokar.
