We are India’s leading independent digital news organisation. Our journalists pursue in-depth and investigative reports that bring insight and hold the powerful to account, making us a trusted news source for millions.

At a time when independent journalism in India is facing unprecedented pressures, our small newsroom punches above its weight, producing impactful work that reaches the widest number of readers among digital-only news outlets in the country.

In 2018, we were recognised as the Best News Website in South Asia by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. Our reporters and contributors have won five Ramnath Goenka Awards, six RedInk Awards, an award by the International Center for Journalists, the International Press Freedom Award by the Committee to Protect Journalists and five Shriram Awards, among others.

By contributing to our reporting fund, you will help our reporters go further and dig deeper. Your support will ensure we can continue to ask the questions that need to be asked, investigate the issues that need to be uncovered, document what must not go unrecorded. With democracy in churn in India, the country needs high-quality journalism that is factually rigorous and fiercely independent. We at Scroll.in are committed to this challenge.

What is Scroll.in’s revenue model?

Scroll.in generates revenue via advertising and reader contributions.

What are the different modes of payment?

You can contribute to the Scroll Ground Reporting Fund via UPI, Credit/Debit Cards, Payment Wallets, and Bank Transfer.

Do I need to provide GST?

No, you don’t need to provide a GST number to contribute to the Scroll Ground Reporting Fund.

Do I need to provide PAN?

If you reside in India, you need to provide a Permanent Account Number to contribute to the Scroll Ground Reporting Fund.

Do you accept cash?

We don’t accept cash as a contribution to the Scroll Ground Reporting Fund.

I want my friends and family to support Scroll.in, can we support as a group?

You can pool in money as a group and one of you can choose to be a contributor to the Scroll Ground Reporting Fund.

Are the contributions Tax Exempt? Do you provide donation certificates for these payments?

No, the contributions to the Scroll Ground Reporting Fund are not tax exempt. At the moment, we don’t provide a donation certificate for your contribution to the Scroll Ground Reporting Fund.

Do I have to be an Indian citizen to contribute?

No, you don’t have to be an Indian citizen to contribute to the Scroll Ground Reporting Fund.

What information will Scroll.in collect from me when I make a payment? Is my information safe?

We collect your name, contact information, and PAN (Indian Residents Only). Your information is stored securely, and not shared with any third parties.

Can I make an offline contribution?

No, offline contributions are not possible at the moment.

Are there other ways beyond donation that individuals can support Scroll.in?

If you are unable to support us monetarily, do consider amplifying our work by reading and sharing our reportage.

How do I get in touch with Scroll.in?

You can write to contribute@scroll.in to get in touch with Scroll.in regarding your questions about the Scroll Ground Reporting Fund.

FAQs: Why should I support Scroll.in? was originally published in Scroll.in blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Most journalists in Delhi would say yes, it is a problem. We’re constantly asked, ‘what’s new in this?’ ‘Naya kya hai?’ If someone’s already done it, that means we shouldn’t do it. We’d be cheating the audience, to an extent, and more importantly, ripping off the work of another journalist, which isn’t fair. We have to bring something entirely new to the story (not just presumably our superior narrative skills) or else wait until there is a news peg to write about it again.

This view is not only commonplace in our newsrooms, it’s also seen as ethically right, since you wouldn’t want to effectively steal someone else’s idea. It’s also entirely misguided.

This again drives back to the idea that most journalists tend to write for their peers and editors, not for the reader. What is more important — annoying a fellow journalist who did the same story or reiterating, maybe even introducing, an important topic for the reader?

Sure lots of people have written about sparrows dying. But do enough people know about it? Statistics will show that audiences are large and disparate, and that a surprising number of people are loyal to brands — at Scroll, rather unexpectedly, we found tons of people coming directly to Scroll.in or reading us via the newsletter, instead of just waiting for us to float up on their social networks.

This means they look to us as destination and might not have had a chance to see the sparrow story anywhere else. Moreover, as Vox Editor Ezra Klein points out in this excellent podcast with Stratechery’s Ben Thompson, “90% of our audience doesn’t read anything anyone writes. Then, of the people who do it, they forget 90% of it in 90 days.” Just because you’ve written it doesn’t mean the readers saw it, or remember it. And if it’s an important subject — like dying sparrows — it’s worth reminding them about it.

I’ll quote further from Klein on that podcast:

What had struck me so much about what I had been doing, particularly at a magazine, on my own was the deep fear of ‘in’ journalism. You would have these editorial meetings, I think it was a fear driven by the scarcity of a magazine… you can only put so much on those pages, so you really have to have this brutal cut-throat competition for what makes it. I remember an article being pitched and killed because some other very very small magazine had done it five years ago, and this idea, I think as an analog to the rational economic man, of the sort of perfect news consumer who read everything and remembered everything.

…

I used to have a professor of history who had the 90% rule. I think he said that, ‘90% of Americans forget 90% of everything in 90 minutes.’ In this case he was talking about the difference between Americans who have a short view of history and Europeans who will go to war over things a 100 years ago.

But I think in journalism it’s very much like that. Even I forget what I had written two or three months ago. And so there is this tremendous waste imposed by this belief where we don’t want to reuse things we’ve written before because we think we’re cheating the reader, but actually, as I say to my writers, 90% of our audience doesn’t read anything anyone writes. Then, of the people who do it, they forget 90% of it in 90 days.

There is just this very strange, cultural almost guild-like bias in journalism against deriving value from the work we’ve already done and it just means this tremendous body of knowledge that we’ve created is effectively inaccessible to readers, and if we could find some way — this is so much what Vox is about and we’ve definitely not fully or even majority cracked this code — but if we could find some way to make this more valuable to people, we would all be so much more efficient in doing our jobs.

TL;DR: We’re driven by this silly compulsion — particularly silly online where scarcity of space is not really a problem — that what we write has to be new. Journalism, as Klein says, has become about delivering ‘new information’ to readers when it should be about delivering knowledge.

There’s nothing new about the Goods and Services Tax, but what would be more valuable to a reader? Me updating, improving and cleaning up an existing explainer that uses links to drive people into deeper understanding or me struggling to find some ‘new angle’ that will let me cover GST?

(The one thing that constrains this is that our distribution tool remains the headline, a terribly inadequate device, at least while we’re aiming primarily at Google and Facebook. When readers come directly to the site/app, it’s on us to guide them to these pieces. Klein acknowledges this when he says Vox’s much-vaunted cardstacks aren’t exactly a massive hit).

This struck home also at a Gender/News workshop by @chasingiamb and @MauMauing, where it came up over and over again how often we miss stories of gender bias because we have normalised them. There’s nothing new in them, and so we don’t end up reporting them.

I think this works on multiple levels and speaks again to how our journalism, because we’re so disconnected from the people who read us (outside our immediate circles) becomes so much about impressing or not annoying fellow journalists and editors, when instead we should think of the most valuable way of conveying information to the audience.

One more quote from that truly excellent podcast that anyone in new media should have already listened to.

Now the ability to go deep and say whatever you want and just keep trying out the model a million times, I’ve actually found that, contrary to what people thought would happen, the audience really wants that. The audience wants help thinking about things, not just help getting information. I think it is still an under-served market in journalism, in part because our products are not designed for it. That’s something we’re trying to think about in card stacks and other things at Vox, how do you make these models, how do you unearth the rest of the iceberg of your coverage. Yeah the little tip above the waterline, that’s the news, but it’s everything underneath, the model that you’re using to understand that’s really valuable but it’s usually opaque to the reader.