When a billion users don't think as one audience
September 3, 2026
AI slop might be the best thing to happen to legacy publishers. In this episode of In Other Words, host Jason Hemingway talks with Nandagopal Rajan, CEO of The Indian Express Digital, about building a trusted news business in the most demanding content market on earth. From a 30-person basement team to 550 people reaching 100 million monthly visitors, Nandagopal grew The Indian Express Digital by refusing to compromise journalism for platform traffic. With a billion internet users, 22 official languages, and monetization models that can value the same reader differently depending on the language they use, India challenges almost every assumption about how content businesses scale. For leaders operating across complex markets, it offers lessons few other markets can.
AI slop might be the best thing to happen to legacy publishers. In this episode of In Other Words, host Jason Hemingway talks with Nandagopal Rajan, CEO of The Indian Express Digital, about building a trusted news business in the most demanding content market on earth. Nandagopal has grown a 30-person basement team into a 550-person operation reaching over 100 million monthly visitors, launching four regional language editions along the way. The growth came from one stubborn commitment to putting journalism first, and it paid off when daily subscriptions jumped 3-4x during the India-Pakistan conflict, even though none of the coverage was paywalled. Readers weren't paying for access. They were paying for trust.
India tests every assumption about content strategy. With 22 official languages and a billion internet users, treating the country as one market guarantees failure, something Nandagopal learned firsthand when a playbook that worked in Malayalam failed entirely in neighboring Tamil. Add a monetization model that values the same reader at a quarter of the rate depending on which language they're reading in, and you have a market that humbles every scaling framework.
What You’ll Learn:
- What staying journalism-first looks like in India's extraordinarily complex content market
- Why chasing traffic cost many publishers their readers
- How trust became The Indian Express’s greatest competitive advantage
- Why the best AI strategy for newsrooms may be patience rather than speed
- The hard lessons of launching regional language editions
- Why video has become India’s unofficial second language
Nandagopal Rajan is the CEO of Digital at The Indian Express, leading one of India's most respected digital news organizations with over 550 employees and 100 million monthly visitors. With 25+ years of experience as a technology journalist and digital media executive, Nandagopal has transformed The Indian Express from a 30-person basement team into a multilingual publishing powerhouse serving over a billion internet users across India's most complex media landscape. Nandagopal is also the host of Our Own Devices, a weekly technology podcast where he brings a jargon-free lens to the trends shaping how people live, work, and engage with technology.
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Highlights and YouTube Chapters:
- 00:00 Introduction
- 02:04 From basement startup to 100 million monthly visitors
- 05:12 Good Journalism Can't Die on the Altar of Good Design
- 06:38 Why AI slop might be the best thing to happen to legacy publishers
- 07:03 Trust Is Also What You Don’t Publish
- 09:43 22 languages, a thousand mother tongues, one country
- 12:54 Why technology still hasn't cracked India's personalization problem
- 14:48 Hindi and Video: India’s Two Most Popular Languages
- 18:41 Getting Called Out for Google Translate
- 20:08 Where AI Actually Works in the Newsroom
- 23:05 Storytelling will outlast AI
- 24:17 The Worst Thing That Happened to Newsrooms with AI
- 25:42 The Indian Consumer's Value Filter
- 27:35 The question every tech-lover CEO eventually has to ask themselves
- 28:39 The North Star as a Filter
Episode Resources:
- Nandagopal Rajan, Chief Executive Officer (Digital) at The Indian Express
- The Indian Express Website
- Jason Hemingway, CMO at Phrase
- Phrase Website