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I finished writing a book called the Price of the Modi Years a few days ago. It should be published later this year. It is a history of India since 2014 and I have examined the facts and the data on various parts of the polity like the economy, national security, governance, the judiciary and so on. I do not want to talk about the contents of the book because it has too much detail and in any case some of my views may already be familiar to readers. What I did want to talk about was where some of the material was taken from.

Of the sources that have been quoted in the book, the one that has been cited most 85 times is a website called TheWire.in. Another website, Scroll.in has been cited 54 times. In comparison, the Times of India has 37 citations. The reason for this is that I have found that the websites have carried more of the sort of reports that I was interested in than the newspaper.

The fact is that in the last decade or so these websites and others like them like News Click and The News Minute and Alt News have become as important a source of news as the traditional media like newspapers. Most of these sites were founded by journalists and survive on donations and some grants. They are not owned by big business houses or traditional media houses, and that is one reason why their content is different.

Traditional media is dependent on the Central government for several things. For instance, the Modi government spends Rs 1,200 crore per year (Rs 100 crore per month) on advertising. The Central Public Sector Units spend another Rs 1000 crore or so. So roughly about Rs 200 crore of money is given to media each month, an enormous sum which comes at a price. The various state governments and their budgets are separate from this.

The rest is here:
Rs 200 Crore p.m. to the Modi Media but Govt wants control over digital media - National Herald