And why is NTMN saying goodbye?

Welcome to the archive site of News That Matters Not.

The archive site will help you browse through some of the best satirical news stories published on the Indian web in the early years of this decade. Just so you know, before all the newbies hijacked your internet and you went gaga over them, there was NTMN. For nearly six years.

Also read: Bidding Goodbye – Founder’s Note

We hope that as the mainstream media drives you crazy, we can still drive you crazier, and guess what, even manage to get respect out of it.

What is NTMN?

Founded in late 2009, News That Matters Not was one of the premier satirical websites in India during 2010-2013. It published satirical news stories covering politics, society, media, youth, and popular culture.

The website’s peak readership for its most popular stories ran into hundreds of thousands of pageviews and social media shares. It was one of the few popular and respected platforms among young writers and readers active on the social media in those days. NTMN’s internship programme received nationwide attention among the student community.

In late 2011, the organization received its first international award, the 8^th Manthan South Asia Awards, for best content in digital news and media. The jury appreciated the product’s social value as a writing-based venture and its value as a youth platform. A year later, it was runner-up at World Summit Youth Award in the “Pursue Truth” category.

Who are we?

Till mid-2013, the website was led by Sugandha and me – we were engineering undergraduates when we got together to set up our award-winning team, with an ambitious vision for content in what were the early years of social media-led public discourse.

Most of our team members were students and alumni of some of the best institutions in India and abroad. In mid-2013, one of the lead authors of the website, Kumar Pratik, took over as editor-in-chief, and in 2015, NTMN was led briefly by Pratul Bagri and Rakshit Ranjan, with support from some of the veterans, Aashish Aryan, Rishi Ayyer, Bijender Sheoran, Vishal Dayama, and the senior leadership team.

As we moved on after our student years, we gradually got busy with our own lives and careers… and NTMN stopped being what it used to be. I taught in an underserved community for two years, and today, like Aashish, am a full-time journalist. Sugandha works as a product manager and Pratik is a management professional. Vishal continued doing what he did best at NTMN – satire – and he works full-time with All India Bakchod now. Bijender and our star digital artist, Rajat Goel were founding members of Citizens for Accountable Governance.

Why the archive website?

We wrote with the goal of “inspiring change through humour”, and the awards and media coverage that we got encouraged us in what we did. For most of us, NTMN was a period of self-discovery and it gave us purpose in life – and today we are furthering our goals for the society and the world through means and professions we felt were best. But in the process, we were unable to do justice to the faith our loyal readers had put in us: we disappeared. We could not do justice to the organizations that saw promise in our work and awarded us on international platforms.

We hope we gave you the best content we could provide, while we could as a team. We hope we made some difference to the lives of our old-time readers. We assure you that though NTMN does not publish any more, each of us is still doing things that we believe will serve the purpose we set out to serve when we produced the work that you loved, on NTMN.

Times change quickly on the internet. Those who used to read online satire in the early 2010s are probably not reading satire any more, or maybe they prefer it in other formats. Then there are those who have just started getting involved in social media discourse, and they missed the times when we were active.

We thought it was important to make our stories available in the best possible contemporary format, so that they still appeal to the “latest generation” of readers.

The archive website will be NTMN’s tiny legacy on the web.

Love and power to you. Stay vigilant, and fight the injustice. For others and for yourself.

Tanay Sukumar
Founder and Editor-in-Chief (2009-2013)
Editorial Director (2013-2015)

Additional reading:

Some like it soft: Indians and satire (a critique of satire websites in India), The Hoot, March 2016
My experiments with news satire, Youth Ki Awaaz, July 2014
NTMN in the media | Awards won by NTMN

[Email: tanay.s91@gmail.com]