The Wire has completed three years and what a journey it has been. Launched in May 2015 without the financial backing of investors but with a total commitment to the idea of good journalism, we have risen to become one of the most credible news platforms in India. In these fraught times, when truth and fakery are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish, The Wire is where the discerning reader comes to know the unvarnished truth of what is really going on in India and the world.
In these three years, The Wire has not only broken major stories – in the last year alone we had blockbuster pieces on the business affairs of Jay Amit Shah and Piyush Goyal, the ICICI insurance scam, the role of the sand mining mafia in Tamil Nadu, the conflicts of interest involved in the functioning of the government-based private think-tank, India Foundation – but has also fulfilled the promise it made of establishing a new compact with the reader, by giving voice to the issues and concerns of the marginalised, and by its in-depth coverage of areas others ignore. Like our science section. And human rights and labour.
Apart from English, The Wire is now published in Hindi and Urdu, languages which give us a wide reach. We have nearly three lakh Twitter followers, one of the highest for a standalone digital news platform in India. The viewership of our videos has also grown dramatically. We now have more than half a million YouTube subscribers; through Facebook and WhatsApp, our multimedia content literally reaches millions of people.
All this wouldn’t have been possible without your generous support. As a not-for-profit, we rely entirely on donations for the work we do. Happily, our readers and supporters like you have come forward and kept us going. Every donation, big or small, regular or one-off, is welcome. Even as we thank you for all that you have contributed so far, we hope your generosity will continue as The Wire goes on to meet bigger challenges in the years to come.
One measure of our journalistic impact is that The Wire is facing 11 frivolous but time- and money-consuming defamation/censorship suits stemming from stories we have broken. These cases – by Jay Amit Shah, the Adani group, the BJP MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar, and the latest, by a former high court judge indicted by the CBI for involvement in the medical college bribery scandal – seek a total of Rs 440 crore in “damages”, but their real aim is to stop the journalism we do. Of course, we have no intention of giving in to this pressure and will fight every inch of the way for the freedom of the press, a freedom the Supreme Court told us it fully supports when our petition seeking quashing of the criminal defamation case filed by Jay Amit Shah last came up before them.
A key challenge that a reader-funded news platform like ours faces is ensuring the predictability of donations. We have costs that need to be covered every month – for salaries, news gathering and overhead. There is a donate button below. Be generous. What we offer you in return is nothing other than an assurance that every rupee you give will go towards the kind of independent, fearless public interest journalism that India desperately needs.
Sidharth Bhatia
Siddharth Varadarajan
M.K. Venu
Founding Editors, The Wire