Mumbai : The Indian Express and Arré, the digital media brand from UDigital, have announced a strategic partnership aimed at producing investigative documentaries for a world audience.
The Indian Express is part of Express Group of publications, which also owns other print brands like Financial Express, Jansatta and Loksatta. UDigital, the company that owns the brand Arré, is the digital media venture promoted by Indian media veterans Ronnie Screwvala, B Saikumar and Ajay Chacko. Arré aims to bring a new idiom of cross-genre and cross-format storytelling to India’s burgeoning digital audience of over 300 million internet consumers and more than 700 million mobile consumers.
This collaboration will see a print media brand come together with a new-age digital brand, to create a fresh expression for journalism, documentary filmmaking and storytelling.
From human interest to geopolitics, socio-cultural issues, crime and emerging youth culture, these documentaries will use fact-based reportage to connect with the Indian audience, as well as the global ones, who are interested in stories from India and the sub-continent.
Ronnie Screwvala, co-founder, U Digital, says, ‘We are delighted to partner with an institution like The Indian Express Group, which has stood for journalism of courage, and we hope to break new frontiers of storytelling for a new generation of Indian and global audiences. This collaboration represents a new generation of partnerships that bring together complementary strengths in the digital era.”
B Saikumar, UDigital’s co-founder and MD, comments, “We admire Express’ exponential growth over the past few years on the digital medium, and we are looking forward to bringing alive, across new media, the path-breaking work done by their team of fearless journalists. The raison d’etre of the partnership is to make documentaries that appeal to the mainstream and resonate with the youth.”
Commenting on the initiative, Anant Goenka, wholetime director and head – new media, The Indian Express, adds, “Arré is an ambitious and exciting project championed by a visionary leadership that understands the need for high-quality, original content produced in a made-for-digital format. Not digital-first, or digital-friendly, but digital-only. We believe that some of the journalism that we have been doing has the potential to reach an even wider audience. With Arré, there’s a meeting of minds in terms of commitment to quality storytelling and the need for a different and disruptive tonality. We’re excited by the potential of this powerful combination.”
The partnership with Arré adds an exciting new dimension to The Indian Express’ investigative and explanatory journalism,” notes Raj Kamal Jha, chief editor, The Indian Express. “Arré’s team has a formidable record of excellence in TV and cinema. Together, we shall work to translate our journalism – done first for print to the highest standards of fairness and accuracy – into the evocative language of a documentary and ensure that the story always gains in translation,” he further states.
