Institute For The Future

Digital capitalization, India, Mumbai, Bansal, 12/17/2008

Rashmi at her home in Vashi, Mumbai, India

Family context

Rashmi Bansal (early 40s) is co-founder of JAM (stands for Just Another Magazine), a youth-oriented print and (recently) online publication. JAM was launched august 15, 1995 – day she refers to as “also the day the Internet was launched in India”.

We interviewed her at her home in Vashi. Rashmi lives with her husband, Yatin (43), daughter Nivedita (9), maid Lata (21), in a multi-storey apartment building; her parents occupy a similar unit a couple of floors below. They often meet the parents over meals.  Rashmi’s father used to be a scientist (TIFR astrophysicist); the other apartments in the building are also occupied by retired scientists. Yatin (the husband) is co-founder of the magazine and runs the business/ sales/marketing side of things. Rashmi is the creative lead.

Rashmi has recently become less involved with the day-to-day running of the magazine and has focused more on her writing.  Her latest book is called “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” – about the inspiring entrepreneurial lives of 25 students from India’s top management school (www.stayhungrybook.com).

Domain Context

Rashmi’s publishing business is gradually moving online; however, the print publication of JAM still makes more money than the online version.  She is in the interesting position of being a big part of old-school media (JAM is 13 years old) but because of the young audience, she does feel the need to move towards more trendy publishing channels. She feels very strongly that the magazine has established credibility and quality through the involvement of youth from the ground up and from day one.

The publishing business sits at the center of a broader range of “youth media” related activities, including surveying, an online social network called clubjam (clubjam.jammag.com) which is based on the Ning platform, youth panels for market research, etc.

Rashmi’s blog, youthcurrry.blogspot.com, is a reflection of her focus on youth- and education- related issues.  Rashmi has become something of a “youth expert”: she sometimes writes for international journals and links them on her blog. People have approached her through her blog with a view to leverage her understanding of Indian youth. However, the blog is not a big money-earner; she just “gets a small check from google adsense every three months”.

General insights

Rashmi’s work is quite mobile. In recent years, face-to-face meetings with her editorial staff (8-10 core people) are fewer (it is difficult to get everyone to the same place, even in central Bombay).  This has been replaced with lightweight communication tools like google chat, sms, phone. Her phone, a nokia n92 with gprs, has “replaced most of the other devices”. Even her laptop is used less frequently now. Email through gprs on the phone is the key enabler. Before she got this phone, she used to use a reliance data card to connect the laptop to the internet on the go (e.g. in her car – she had a driver); it “worked everywhere, even in places like badrinath” [badrinath is at 11,000 ft] where she was on a family holiday and trying to get her book published. She also works for a TV show, and using her phone can do things like quickly review and respond to scripts that her staff sends her. “Sending me stuff and me approving it” is the typical use scenario.

Even so, Rashmi is not a big techno-phile. She finds most technologies complex (“its an effort to get music onto my ipod”) and she feels that tech should be “simple enough that my daughter can get it in 3 min”.  Youtube is “daunting” and used only when people send her links. Getting online video to work without constant buffering in India is a big problem, even with broadband connections.

Her age is a factor in her use of social networks. Initially when she joined Ryze the first six months she made good connections with other media people, then there were too many youngsters on it and she didn’t have much in common with them.  She got in linkedin as well, and orkut when it took off just to have a finger on the pulse of what young people were talking about.  She doesn’t feel like “broadcasting my life to acquaintances on twitter”.

Even though SNS has not helped JAM generate advertising, she does feel like it has helped her establish a personal brand and online identity (distinct from JAM) as a youth expert.

As someone who is keen on directly involving her audience in her work, she is interested in the issues surrounding user-generated content. Advertising is a harder sell with that because companies are afraid of negative reviews and people are freer with their opinions online.  She feels that as more publishing moves online, the brand credibility and standard of writing the JAM has established will remain important. These two factors converge in a concern about controlling quality and censorship of UGC.

Further, the network of young folks she calls the JAM community / youth network are important in the context of UGC. [In Mumbai there was a big peak in citizen journalism interest following the terrorist attacks]. For her next tech purchase, she wants to get some flip video cams and send some people out in the field to capture interesting footage. JAM covers a lot of campus-based events. She cites an example of recent use as twittering from her mobile phone from a Lakme India Fashion Week event – she said it made her feel like a “Page 3 reporter”.

There is a definite murkiness about making money through an online business. The only ones she sees currently making money are transaction-based businesses. Online advertising and mobile content delivery models have not matured sufficiently. It has been hard to figure out ways of taking JAM content and monetizing it online or through mobile.

Other phone usage: Has a couple apps on her phone: bookmyshow (tickets) and ixigo (travel), twitter. She mentioned that in some places in India where there were signs “no photography allowed”, it was OK to take pictures using her phone. Takes lots of pictures  on her phone (esp of her daughter) but hasn’t yet gotten around to “putting then on a CD and selecting the ones you want printed”.

Trends

Print media moving online to keep up with audience consumption preferences

Higher interest in user-generated content and non-mainstream media as a way to circumvent traditional business constraints; cites an example of a blog post critical of IIPM (a management school of dubious standing) which wouldn’t have gotten published in newspapers because they supply too much advertising money.

Older demographic tends to get on to social networking sites because there is a bandwagon and people send them requests, links etc. But the expectations of youngsters from the online social space can be too much sometimes – cites the example of people she has never met asking for LinkedIn endorsements.

Advertising marketplace not yet mature enough to make pure online plays very viable – (this is mostly a disconnect between what content producers want and what advertisers want). Reaching a certain demographic online is increasingly possible (eg the youth panels for market research) but requires a established brand and infrastructure.

Email-on-phone key mobile work enabler; 3G is going to be an exciting development [3G auctions going on as we speak].

Social mobile apps like Twitter might see increased use – on the other hand, the popular transaction-based services like the travel site might find less traction on mobile devices because payment through a cell phone is hard.