Political Economy Factors Shaping News Culture of Hyperlocal News Website www.ippodhu.com

Abstract

In contemporary media ecosystem, media content is not only produced by employees rather it is also produced by its users in the form of curating stories, writing feedback, engaging in online discussions and at the same time disseminating the content through their personal online profiles. Keeping these views in mind, this paper critically examines the political economy of Ippodhu (Tamil Nadu based news website), a hyperlocal news application, in terms of digital labour, audience as participatory commodities and audience as producers, which Alvin Toffler terms as prosumer. Further, this paper explores how social media, analytics, or other analytical tools create value or anti-value for Ippodhu. The qualitative data obtained through in-depth interview reveals that readers/audiences of Ippodhu are commodified in two ways, first they consume the content of the website by spending their time, which will be sold to the advertisers and secondly by creating free content either in the writing stories, uploading photographs or even in the form of comment which will be consumed by other readers/audiences which result in the chain of production of values.