Gaon Connection, India’s biggest rural media platform, has been selected as one of the recipients of the 2020 Google News Initiative (GNI) Innovation Challenge funding for the Asia Pacific region. Out of the 255 proposals received from the Asia Pacific region, 18 were chosen for the funding, including four from India.
The GNI Innovation Challenge funds projects that bring new ideas to help journalism thrive in the digital age. For the 2020 challenge, participants were asked for ideas to increase reader engagement, leading to greater loyalty and willingness to pay for content.
India’s first national rural insight app
Neelesh Misra, the founder of Gaon Connection, said: “Powered by our community journalists, we plan to create India’s first national rural insight platform — an app with deep audience engagement, especially to give a voice to diverse communities living in the rural pockets of the country that do not currently have any voice. These include women, minorities, tribal communities, and others.”
He added: “The app will enable accurate rural surveys every week, ensure citizens’ engagement as respondents and community journalists, and have them suggest/decide the issues on which opinion should be sought and amplified. The findings of the surveys would be embellished with powerful ground reporting on the same issues by the Gaon Connection editorial team across, video, podcast, and text formats on our digital platforms.”
The survey findings are going to be the backbone of these strong, data-driven stories that are going to help brands, corporates, common people, and policymakers understand, in a very scientific way, what rural India wants.
Gaon Connection plans to start with these thematic surveys soon in 300 districts where it presently has community journalists. The media organisation is in the process of increasing the strength of its community journalists and identifying companies that would help it publish the findings of the surveys on their app platform.
The voice of rural India
Misra said: “Two out of every three Indians live in rural India, but rural India is media-dark and India’s policymakers and citizens, in general, have no credible way of knowing what rural India wants. In the world’s biggest democracy, there is no way of knowing the will of two-thirds of its citizens and mainstream journalism is unable to serve this need. Through this innovative project, Gaon Connection aims to bridge this gap.”
In fact, nothing like this has been attempted before at this scale in the world in terms of rural insight. The Gallup Poll is the division of US-based Gallup that regularly conducts public opinion polls. Gallup Poll results, analysis, and videos are published daily in the form of data-driven news. The typical sample size for a Gallup poll is 1,000 national adults. With the number of community journalists that Gaon Connection has, it aims to have a sample size of 25,000 people for the surveys.
The project is also unique because it brings together technology and ground presence, statistics and field reportage, to create a heady mix — a conveyer belt of opinion that shall change the news narrative.
Audience engagement
Misra said: “For the audience, the biggest draw of Gaon Connection is that it raises issues no other media platform raises about rural India. The new rural insight platform will empower this multiple times. When the audience itself becomes part of the conversation — when it would be able to suggest issues that they think are critical and should be raised, and when they would be able to contribute to the platform as community journalists — it will propel audience engagement like nothing else.”
Gaon Connection volunteers shall also engage with NGOs, colleges, farmers’ clubs, women’s self-help groups etc in different states to familiarise them with the app and its power in creating a monolith of rural public opinion.
“People would see their video bytes, hear themselves, read their comments and conversations started by their comments. But it would not remain limited to chats and social media-like comments. What the audience wants from us — and which it would convey as an active participant in the surveys and the creation of the surveys — would manifest itself in the form of detailed reportage and coverage by Gaon Connection’s editorial team and further be amplified by other media platforms,” Misra added.
Gaon Connection is an independent rural insight and media platform. The company does not have any investors and it’s not dependent on advertisements. A project like this will help the company to generate revenue through surveys and churn out quality content for its readers in the form of data-driven stories from rural India.
