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India Abroad, paper chronicling lives of Indian Americans, shuts down
The publication never really managed to expand its reach from print to online despite that being the obvious course of action pursued by all other news outfits. It remained a print-only weekly publication, with the print version also available to subscribers online.
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India Abroad, an iconic news publication that chronicled the advent and rise of Indian Americans, announced Friday it was closing down because of pre-existing troubles worsened by the flight of advertisers, who are the mainstay of any news outfit, in the face of the coronavirus outbreak.
“Compounding all of this,” publisher Suresh Venkatachari said in a farewell note referring to earlier problems, “was the advent of the ominous coronavirus pandemic and the devastating repercussion in its wake which led to several advertisers cancelling their advertisements and hence the looming outlook for future revenue generation looking even more bleak”.
The publication never really managed to expand its reach from print to online despite that being the obvious course of action pursued by all other news outfits. It remained a print-only weekly publication, with the print version also available to subscribers online.
Aziz Hanifa, the Sri Lankan-origin editor of the publication at the time of its closure, had not responded to a request for comments till the filing of this report.
“India Abroad has struggled for some time (I tried to get folks to buy it!),” said S Mitra Kalita, a one-time contributor to the publication and a part of the team that founded Mint, the business paper published by HT Media Ltd, parent company of Hindustan Times. “But this leaves a huge void in coverage of South Asia and its diaspora. So now what?”
India Abroad was a successful offshoot initially of rediff.com, one of the pioneering online-only Indian news websites. It changed ownership several times in a bid to stay afloat in the face of an increasingly challenging environment driven by online competition. But it had been struggling for a while now.
