A pivot from broadcast news to founding a young, independent digital-first newsroom has given The Current founder Marium Chaudhry an inside look at how a ‘drastically different’ younger digital audience disseminates content – and the issues they vote on.
‘Rapid growth is great for talkability – but then you really need to keep innovating to retain that audience.’
Marium Chaudhry had been a senior executive producer for Pakistan’s biggest news network, Geo News, and had produced coverage for two national elections when she decided to shift focus, to making news equitable and accessible to the overlooked younger generations.
Chaudhry invested her life savings into founding The Current, a news-lifestyle platform aimed at Pakistan’s young adults that boasts a series of country firsts: first to fully engage with followers; first independent news platform funded by the Google News Innovation Challenge (2020); first to launch a membership training program for young professionals; first to collaborate with the Facebook Journalism Project.
With a founding team of about 12, The Current’s first year was one of accelerated growth that resulted in more than 500 000 followers on Facebook; 75 000 on Instagram and 170 000+ on YouTube.
Today, The Current has more than one million Facebook followers; 235 000 on Instagram and more than 400 000 subscribers on YouTube.
Chaudhry, a Fulbright-Hays Scholar who graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, shares the challenges of maintaining audience growth – and learning from looking at news through a Gen Z lens.
The Current had rapid early successes, on all platforms. Did this aid or challenge growth and sustainability, and what is your audience engagement like now?
I think our rapid success also required rapid change, which we were not always able to keep up with. Given we are a news startup in a country that is not start-up friendly, let alone news startup-friendly, the fact that we managed to stay afloat for five years is a major success.
We had a huge dip in the middle, where our growth remained stagnant for about two years – but that was likely because our content was the same. We have, this year, really revamped it which has boosted our growth and helped regain a lot of the virality we had lost earlier.
Our audience is very engaged, primarily on Instagram and Facebook, and is now hitting about 55-45 percent male to female, which I am very happy about.
So, it’s definitely a double-edged situation: rapid growth is great for talkability – but then you really need to keep innovating to retain that audience.
We didn’t see a fall in our audience, but we also didn’t see the growth we had had before – and we are hoping that since we have reworked our content and relaunched our website, we will see growth in the same way.
This time we will be smarter and try to keep it steady, changing, innovating to how our audience reacts and hopefully, that will be a steady train rather than a one-time jet.
You started The Current shortly after the 2018 national elections. After Pakistan’s 2024 elections, you reposted this tweet (below): what was it like, closing the gap between intent and action?
I actually don’t know how to put into words how I felt. I was incredibly frustrated since the internet and mobile internet had been limited by the government and was either not working or barely working.
So while I had worked through two elections on an incredible high of having all resources at my disposal to create, with my startup I had a few lego pieces, some that were taken away, and I had to do the best I could.
We still did some stellar work, but I can’t look back at it without some bitterness because of the limitations imposed on us by the government.
I remember asking the Information Minister at the time how voters could go to abstruse polling stations if they didn’t have Google Maps. He replied: ‘Print a map at home and take it with you – that’s what we did in the old days’.
That’s what it truly felt like: an incredible pushback from powers-that-be to limit our growth.
What lessons now, on covering elections for Gen Z, especially given the US scenario?
What I learnt from The Current’s transmission was DRASTICALLY different from what I had experienced while working in TV.
The Current’s team is very young – between 20-34 – and we had hired local journalism students who intern as part of our training programme Aap ki Awaz (‘Your Voice’ in Urdu).
‘The way the content was shaped; the way they saw content, and how they deemed it important or not – and moreover, the issues they voted on, was drastically different.’
I don’t think you can now work in broadcast news and understand how this next generation is voting, if you don’t have an understanding of what is happening in the digital sphere.
This current election was rife with allegations of rigging, especially with a key political figure, Imran Khan, in jail – but how his young supporters found ways to get out the vote for him, was truly mind boggling.
In an earlier WAN-IFRA interview, you said: ‘You have to adapt to your audience – they will not adapt to you’. What adaptations, have you had to make in your build and sustenance – and is this onoging?
The biggest adaptation has been hiring a young team. I know it doesn’t sound like much but it’s a very, very tough thing to do, since the way that Gen Z works is so very different from the way that we have been trained.
The way they view and disseminate content is also drastically different from the way that older people engage with content.
So, this is very important: to have a young team to appeal to a young audience.
We have relaunched a customised website, and included technical elements that will appeal to a younger audience, but we have not engaged with AI as much as we would’ve hoped.
But I know for sure that if we do not change our content, which we now have, or adapt to the way things change, we would very quickly, very decisively become irrelevant. So, we are lucky that we have been able to stay afloat and are now able to experiment with formats, AI and what appeals to our younger audience.
Could you share ‘5 Lessons in 5 years of building a 21st century, Gen Z-first newsroom’ with us?
1 Hire Gen-Z if you want to appeal to Gen-Z.
2 Trust your Gen-Z employees, especially when it’s something you really don’t understand. They know and you won’t get it, even if you pretend you do.
3 From the very beginning, create a practical business plan with different revenue streams. News doesn’t make big money for a very, very long time.
4 You might think you understand how the audience is behaving – but your data will always reflect something else. Do not underestimate the power of knowing how your user is using.
5 You don’t need to be a one-stop news shop. One unique selling point is enough to attract your audience, if you do it well.
Also See: A year ago, I started The Current, my own media company in Pakistan. This is what I’ve learned
This story was first published by the World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA).
Lucinda Jordaan is a WAN-IFRA correspondent in Africa.
Join the World Association of News Publishers here.
