WORLD NEWS MEDIA DIRECTORY
Explore this media outlet and visit its official website.
Firstpost is one of India's oldest and most widely read digital-native news websites, the online news and views portal of the Network18 Group. Launched on 9 May 2011 from Mumbai as 'India's first exclusive digital newsroom', Firstpost was conceived as a truly digital product — built on blogging, quick posts, curation, opinion and debate rather than as a newspaper's website. It covers politics, world news, business, economy, technology, sports, entertainment and lifestyle through a mix of breaking news, analysis, long-form features and video. Part of the Network18 Group, which is owned by Reliance Industries, Firstpost sits at the centre of one of India's largest media conglomerates, alongside television channels such as CNN-News18 and News18 India and publications including Moneycontrol. Over its decade and a half, it has pioneered digital formats in Indian news, weathered editorial controversies, briefly experimented with print, and launched Vantage, its flagship prime-time video show hosted by Palki Sharma Upadhyay.
Firstpost was launched on 9 May 2011 by Network18, then led on the digital side by Web18 and its CEO Lakshmi Narasimhan, who described the product as 'a happy confluence' of the group's commitments to news and the internet. The launch was accompanied by a 360-degree marketing campaign across the country, signalling Network18's ambition to own the digital news space. The founding concept was distinctive for its time: a digital newsroom powered by writer-editors across India and the world, built on 'the fundamentals of blogging and the quick post, user interaction, discussion and debate', aiming to be 'the first stop in a person's web journey'.
The early sections reflected this digital-first design: Current Affairs, Politics, World, Business, Investing, Economy, Ideas, Living, Bollywood and Sports — a mix of hard news and opinionated commentary. The site grew rapidly in its first years, recording steep month-on-month growth in unique visitors and page views on both desktop and mobile, with readers spending an average of over six minutes per desktop visit. By its seventh anniversary in 2018, the company was describing Firstpost as India's leading digital news platform, crediting 'original, clutter-breaking content and innovative formats' for keeping audiences engaged year after year.
Firstpost is part of the Network18 Group, the media conglomerate originally founded by Raghav Bahl in 1993. Network18's ownership changed decisively in the 2010s: in January 2012 it received a major investment from Reliance Industries through a rights issue, and by 2014 control had passed to Reliance and its chairman Mukesh Ambani. Today Network18 is one of India's largest news networks, spanning television (CNN-News18, News18 India and a bouquet of regional channels), digital (Firstpost, Moneycontrol, News18.com) and magazines.
This ownership places Firstpost inside India's most concentrated media power structure, alongside the country's largest private conglomerate. The relationship has been both an asset — giving the portal resources, video infrastructure and cross-promotion across the group's channels — and a subject of scrutiny, as critics have questioned the editorial independence of Reliance-owned newsrooms. Firstpost's editorial leadership has consistently maintained that the newsroom operates independently, but the ownership question has shadowed the brand throughout the Reliance era, as it has all of Network18's news properties.
In May 2013, Firstpost was at the centre of one of the defining media controversies of the decade when Network18 merged its news operations with the Indian edition of Forbes India — and dismissed the magazine's four top editorial heads, including editor-in-chief Indrajit Gupta. The sackings triggered a media furore, with journalists and commentators debating the treatment of editorial leadership in corporate-owned newsrooms and the terms on which business journalism could survive inside a conglomerate. The episode became a case study in the tensions between editorial independence and corporate consolidation in Indian media.
Weeks later, on 31 May 2013, Firstpost acquired the satirical website FakingNews.com for an undisclosed amount, adding humour and satire to its content mix. The acquisition reflected the portal's digital-native instincts — its willingness to experiment with formats, from satire to live blogging, that legacy newsrooms considered peripheral. Together, the Forbes merger and the Faking News acquisition marked 2013 as the year Firstpost grew from a startup portal into a significant newsroom with national ambitions.
Firstpost's editorial record has not been without controversy. In 2015, The Caravan magazine reported on censorship within Firstpost over criticism of political leaders, including then finance minister Arun Jaitley — a report that fed into broader anxieties about editorial freedom inside Reliance-owned media. The portal has also, on occasion, published stories that were subsequently challenged by fact-checkers, a hazard of high-volume digital publishing that has drawn criticism from media watchdogs.
Like all large Indian newsrooms operating in a polarised environment, Firstpost has faced accusations of bias from across the political spectrum — criticised by some readers for its opinion pages and by others for its news coverage. Its response, in practice, has been to maintain a broad church: the site publishes columnists and contributors with sharply divergent views, and its news reporting adheres to conventional standards of attribution and balance. The controversies have nonetheless left their mark on the brand's reputation, making editorial independence a recurring theme in coverage of the outlet itself.
Firstpost's most distinctive contribution to Indian journalism has been formal innovation. During the May 2016 election-results coverage, it pioneered a four-hour live 'Digicast' — an amalgamation of broadcast television, web streaming and Facebook Live — a format that blended the authority of television with the interactivity of social platforms. The experiment made Firstpost the only Indian publication to be featured in Facebook's global case study as one of the most innovative users of the FB Live feature, nationally and internationally.
The portal was an early adopter of live blogging, data-driven election dashboards, interactive graphics and mobile-first design in Indian news. Its video operation grew steadily through the 2010s, producing explainers, interviews and documentaries optimised for social distribution. This culture of experimentation — treating the website as a laboratory rather than a digital replica of a newspaper — was the founding thesis of 2011, and it remains the clearest expression of what Firstpost set out to be.
In January 2019, Firstpost made an unexpected move for a digital-native brand: it launched a weekly English-language print edition. The print weekly was positioned as a curated, long-form companion to the website — an attempt to carry the Firstpost brand into the premium print-magazine space and to capture advertising budgets that still flowed to print. For a few months, Firstpost existed in both worlds: a high-velocity digital newsroom and a reflective weekly magazine.
The experiment was short-lived. The print edition ceased publication in June 2019, less than six months after launch, and Firstpost returned to being a purely digital operation. The retreat reflected the brutal economics of Indian print — rising newsprint costs, fragmented readership and the migration of both readers and advertisers to digital. The episode is now remembered as a footnote, but it illustrated the brand's willingness to test formats in both directions across the print-digital divide.
On 26 January 2023 — Republic Day — Firstpost launched Vantage, its flagship prime-time video show, hosted by managing editor Palki Sharma Upadhyay. Sharma, formerly the face of WION's prime-time programming, brought a large international following to the new show, which was positioned as a global-news programme with an Indian perspective, covering geopolitics, international affairs and big-picture analysis. Vantage represented Firstpost's most ambitious video bet: appointment viewing in the streaming era.
The show's launch signalled Network18's intent to build Firstpost into a video-first brand competing not just with Indian digital outlets but with international broadcasters' digital operations. Vantage's explainers and monologues travel widely on YouTube and social media, and Sharma's personal brand has become closely identified with Firstpost's video identity. The programme sits alongside the portal's daily video output — news bulletins, interviews and explainers — in a video operation that now rivals the text newsroom in prominence.
Firstpost's editorial scope is deliberately broad. Its politics desk covers Parliament, state elections, parties and governance; its world desk tracks geopolitics and international affairs; its business and economy sections report on markets, policy and corporate India in coordination with the group's financial portal Moneycontrol; and its technology coverage follows India's digital economy. Sports, entertainment and lifestyle sections — Bollywood, cricket, fashion, food, travel — give the site its mass-market reach.
The opinion section remains central to the brand's identity, publishing columnists, academics, former officials and public intellectuals across a wide ideological range. Long-form features, investigations and photo essays provide depth alongside the daily news flow, and the site's explainers translate complex developments — budgets, court judgments, geopolitical crises — for general readers. This combination of breadth and opinionated voice is what distinguishes Firstpost from both wire-service-style aggregators and narrow specialist publications.
Firstpost's newsroom has been led over the years by editors drawn from across Indian journalism. As of 2020, Jaideep Giridhar served as executive editor in Mumbai with Sanjay Singh as deputy executive editor, overseeing a newsroom of reporters, editors and video producers. The 2023 arrival of Palki Sharma Upadhyay as managing editor marked a new phase, elevating video and international coverage within the organisation's priorities.
The newsroom operates from Network18's Mumbai headquarters, drawing on the group's correspondents, studios and technical infrastructure across India. Its journalists file across text and video, reflecting the converged newsroom model the portal pioneered. Through leadership changes and ownership transitions, the newsroom's self-description has remained consistent: a digital-first operation where speed, analysis and experimentation matter more than the conventions of print or broadcast.
Firstpost's historical significance is that it proved the digital-native newsroom could work in India. When it launched in 2011, the Indian internet news market was dominated by the websites of newspapers and television channels; a standalone digital news brand, built from scratch for the web, was a genuine novelty. Firstpost demonstrated that such a brand could achieve national scale, attract premium audiences and innovate in formats — and in doing so it blazed a trail for the wave of digital startups that followed, from The Quint and Scroll to The Wire and The Print.
A decade and a half on, Firstpost remains among India's most-visited news websites, a legacy digital brand inside the country's largest media conglomerate. Its journey — from blogging-inspired startup to Reliance-owned multimedia newsroom, through mergers, a print detour and a video-led reinvention — mirrors the larger story of Indian digital media: rapid innovation, corporate consolidation, and the ongoing search for a sustainable relationship between journalism and the conglomerates that fund it.
See the official website for current coverage.
Online News
Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
English
Overview Citizen Matters is a Bengaluru-based nonprofit civic journalism platform that reports on Indian cities from the citizen's perspective. Launched in 2008, it covers urban governance, environment, public…
→Use Visit official website. The publisher controls access, subscriptions, schedules and availability.
No. A listing helps identify a source. It is not an endorsement or a guarantee of its reporting.
