Gaon Connection Completes Five Years of Rural Journalism

Gaon Connection completes five years of bringing the issues of rural India to the mainstream news cycle.

Gaon Connection has won some of India’s highest journalism awards including the Ramnath Goenka Award and the UPFPA-backed Ladli Award for writing on gender.

(Photo Courtesy: Gaon Connection)

India’s only rural media platform Gaon Connection has completed five years of operations. After its launch on 2 December 2012, Gaon Connection has established itself as a true and authentic representative of rural India. It was started as a weekly newspaper but soon it became a daily. It has now claimed a strong presence in the digital world as well.

The rural reach of Gaon Connection is growing.  Photo Courtesy: Gaon Connection

Rural India was missing from the mainstream media’s radars for years. Even regional newspapers did not carry the news items relevant to the rural India. Gaon Connection changed that by becoming the India’s first professionally run rural media platform. In the last five years, Gaon Connection has not only been able give voice to the rural India, but has also won many prestigious media awards.

About Gaon Connection

Gaon Connection is India's biggest rural media platform – a two-way street that takes information to knowledge-starved rural communities and brings information from there about everything from everyday civic issues to role models and from media-dark areas to urban India.

Gaon Connection has several key verticals: digital, print, audio and video content, India's biggest media survey team, and a massive ground presence of smartphone-armed cadres at the district, block and gram panchayat levels. This combination is almost unmatched in India's media landscape. The Gaon Connection team currently operates across Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand and is soon expanding its content footprint to all Hindi-speaking states.

A Rewarding Journey So Far

Gaon Connection has won some of India’s highest journalism awards including, twice, the Ramnath Goenka Award, and five times, the UPFPA-backed Ladli Award for writing on gender.

Gaon Connection team members with Neelesh Misra, the founder. (Photo Courtesy: Gaon Connection)

The bedrock of Gaon Connection is its swiftly expanding cadre of digital-era community journalists who are part of its "Swayam Project". They are multiskilled, creating videos, audio content, community newspaper editions and carrying out ground activation across far-flung geographies. They are part of a pyramid that has team leaders at the Block and District level, and in Lucknow where the Swayam Project editorial team rewrites, edits and packages the stories and publishes them.

Photo Courtesy: Gaon Connection

The Quint Connection

The Neelesh Misra Show will be launched on 15 December on The Quint and Quint Hindi.(Photo Courtesy: Gaon Connection/Altered by Liju Joseph/The Quint)

Gaon Connection and The Quint have now entered into a unique collaboration to bring Neelesh Misra, India's most loved oral storyteller, to tell the stories of rural India through a unique content offering, "The Neelesh Misra Show".  This weekly show is one of its kind which targets the underbelly of India. Anchored by Misra, who is getting back to his journalistic roots, the show will present a new story, a new issue with a new perspective every week. The show will be launched on 15 December on The Quint and Quint Hindi.