Editorji
Editorji is an Indian digital news platform built around a simple proposition: instead of asking viewers to sit through a fixed television bulletin or scroll an endless social media feed, it assembles a short, personalised video newscast for each user. Operated by Editorji Technologies and based in New Delhi, the platform was launched in 2018 by veteran journalist Vikram Chandra, the former chief executive of the NDTV Group. It combines human editorial curation with artificial intelligence and machine learning that learn a viewer's interests and build a playlist of news videos around them. Its tagline, reported at the time of the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group's investment, captures the idea in four words: news that fits you. In a directory of Indian news agencies and media services, Editorji belongs to the generation of mobile-first ventures that tried to rebuild the news bulletin for the smartphone era, drawing on the conventions of television news while borrowing the personalisation logic of music streaming services.
Founding and the founder's background
Editorji was set up in October 2018, after Chandra had spent more than two decades at NDTV. His reputation as a journalist was built reporting on the Kashmir conflict, beginning with the television news magazine Newstrack in 1991 before he moved to NDTV in May 1994. At NDTV he anchored prime-time programmes including the 9 O'Clock News and The Big Fight, co-hosted Gadget Guru, and was instrumental in setting up NDTV.com in 2000. He became chief executive of NDTV Networks in 2007 and chief executive of the NDTV Group in 2011, a role he held until stepping down in 2016. That background matters to understanding Editorji: its founder was not a technology entrepreneur entering news from outside, but a television news executive who had run both a newsroom-facing and a digital operation, and who launched the platform explicitly as an attempt to fix what he saw as the problems of video news — its fixed running orders, its lack of personal relevance, and the competition for attention from social media feeds troubled by misinformation and ideological echo chambers.
How the personalised newscast works
The core product is a one-tap personalised newscast. Editorji's algorithm assembles a linear stream of video stories for each viewer, taking into account parameters such as location, preferred news categories and preferred style of news, alongside interests recorded when a user joins and consumption patterns observed afterwards. The experience is deliberately interactive rather than passive. Viewers can skip a story they do not want to see with a swipe, delete stories from their newscast, change the order in which stories play, add stories of their own choosing, or build a fresh newscast from scratch. In a feature that gave the platform its name — a play on the idea of the viewer becoming the editor — users could also record their own opinions and add them to a newscast that could then be shared with others. Chandra compared the ambition to what Spotify had done for music: a personalised, continuously refreshed playlist, except built from news video rather than songs.
Content, formats and languages
At launch, Editorji was already publishing more than 100 video stories a day across politics, international news, local stories, sports, business, lifestyle, technology and entertainment. The service delivered news in video, audio and text formats, recognising that the same story might be watched on a phone, listened to on the move, or read. It launched in English and Hindi, with multilingual expansion a stated ambition from the beginning; after the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group took its majority stake in 2020, its chairman said he was keen to turn Editorji into a multilingual product, starting with Bengali, a plan that reflected industry data showing online video growth coming increasingly from regional-language markets. Alongside its short-form personalised bulletins, the platform has carried flagship programming of its own, including The India Story, a weekly show hosted by Chandra offering in-depth analysis of major Indian newsmakers, and it has covered set-piece events such as the 2021 Assembly elections and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Content partners and the aggregation model
Editorji was started as a video news aggregator that relied on a mix of human and algorithmic curation, a model it continued to follow. Rather than producing every story itself, it launched with content partners including the news agency ANI, the fact-checking outlet BOOM Live, The News Minute, Jan Ki Baat, Northeast Mojo and The Sentinel. Chandra noted that partnerships with third parties reduced content costs considerably, while the platform also ran original content at times. This hybrid structure is central to how Editorji should be understood: it is simultaneously a publisher, with its own editorial voice and flagship shows, and a distribution and curation layer sitting on top of other newsrooms' video output. For partner publishers, inclusion offered a route to mobile video audiences without building a personalised app of their own; for Editorji, partnerships supplied the volume — over a hundred stories a day across many genres — that a personalisation engine needs in order to have something meaningful to personalise.
Ownership and investment
Editorji's early investors were two established media and telecom names: HT Media, publisher of the Hindustan Times and Mint, invested Rs 10 crore in 2018, and Bharti Airtel invested Rs 20 crore the same year, taking stakes reported as close to 5 per cent and 8 per cent respectively. In July 2020, the Kolkata-based RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group (RPSG) acquired a 51 per cent majority stake in Editorji Technologies through a combination of primary and secondary transactions, for an undisclosed sum; the company was valued at an estimated $10 million at the time. RPSG described the deal as its first foray into digital news, although the group already owned Open magazine and had publishing interests including Fortune India, as well as the music label Saregama. Chandra continued as managing director and continued to run the service after the acquisition, and HT Media and Airtel remained investors. At the time of the deal the company had a workforce of around 55 people, and Chandra said the primary infusion would give it a runway of up to two years and support plans including an AI-driven product for advertisers.
Distribution and platforms
Editorji was designed to reach viewers wherever they already watched video, not only inside its own app. The Android app passed a million installations, and by January 2020 the application had close to two million downloads across iOS and Android. Its curated news playlists were available to Airtel mobile subscribers, a direct benefit of Airtel's early investment, and the platform built distribution through partnered platforms including Airtel Thanks and Xstream, Panasonic's Arbo Hub, Amazon's Fire TV Stick, Alexa and Glance. The app's design work, carried out with the studio Itu Chaudhuri Designs, aimed for a consistent, intuitive experience across the mobile app, the website, the Fire TV app and a progressive web application. This spread of endpoints — phone, television, voice assistant and lock-screen platform — reflects the founding insight that a personalised newscast competes not with a single rival channel but with every other use of a viewer's screen time.
Business model
Editorji's service to viewers was free. Reporting around its early years described revenue coming from advertising, paid content partnerships and events, and the company did not offer paid subscriptions in that period, although a paid version was discussed as a future possibility. The RPSG investment was explicitly linked to advertiser-facing ambitions: Chandra said the infusion would help facilitate an AI-driven product for advertisers, using the same understanding of viewer interests that powered the consumer newscast. That logic is common to personalised media platforms — the data that makes a bulletin feel relevant to a viewer is also what makes its advertising inventory more precisely targetable — and it helps explain why a large industrial group with media interests saw strategic value in a relatively small news start-up whose main asset was its back-end technology and curation model.
Place in the Indian news ecosystem
Editorji occupies a distinctive place in India's news ecosystem because it sits between three worlds that are often treated separately: television news, from which its founder and much of its grammar came; digital aggregation, from which its partner-based content model came; and platform personalisation, from which its algorithm came. Its pitch at launch was that viewers needed an alternative both to TV news and to social media — professionally produced journalism, but ordered by relevance to the individual rather than by a channel's fixed priorities. The involvement of HT Media and Airtel as early backers, and of RPSG as majority owner from 2020, also made it an example of how established Indian media and business houses experimented with digital news: rather than building a personalised video product in-house, they bought into a founder-led venture that had already built the technology. Editorji's story is therefore as much about the economics of Indian digital news — high content costs, dependence on distribution partnerships, and the search for scale — as it is about any single app.
How to access and use Editorji
Viewers access Editorji through its website and its mobile applications, and through the partner platforms on which its playlists are distributed, including Airtel's services and smart television and voice platforms. The practical experience begins with indicating interests, after which the service assembles a personalised newscast that can be watched as a continuous stream. Users who want a more active role can swipe past stories, reorder or delete items, add stories, build a newscast from scratch and record their own opinion pieces to share. For media researchers and directory users, the essential facts are these: Editorji is a New Delhi-based, AI-assisted, multilingual video news platform founded in 2018 by Vikram Chandra, majority-owned by the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group since July 2020, with HT Media and Bharti Airtel as continuing investors, distributing a mix of partner and original short-form news video built around personalisation rather than a fixed bulletin.
