Background / Challenge

The Economic & Political Weekly is a legacy social science research journal. It was first published in 1949 as the Economic Weekly and in 1966 as the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW). The journal occupies a special place in the intellectual history of independent India.

Although EPW had been investing in frequent digital efforts, it lacked strategy and a long-term vision for its digital life. My strategic response for Economic and Political Weekly’s entry into the digital space prioritised the following:

1. Strategy

   Expanding user base, increasing visibility and, marketing core brand values.

2. Usability and Accessibility

   Defining clear user personas, and use-cases.

3. Efficiency

   Improving the traffic, and more importantly the quality of traffic.

4. Quality

   Adhere to the EPW tone of voice, and be mindful of its space in the media as a legacy journal.

Economic & Political Weekly is a journal that is backed by serious research scholars, and academics. Its authority lies in being a journal with robust and rigorous editorial practices and policies. A content strategy here had to be set with specific goals and objectives for the various content types that would be produced, we had to brainstorm and think deeply about not just the purpose of what they served, but also to whom.

To this end, as part of their digital team in an editorial capacity, I worked closely with the General Manager, Advertising, Circulation teams to ascertain answers for certain key questions in order to be able to create an operational plan.

By using analytics, we were able to build an actionable framework to create alignment on our goals, and objectives.

I co-developed the long-term content initiative with the following aims.

• Editorial // Innovate and create editorial products/properties to market original and serious research produced by EPW.

• Social // Build a consistent platform-specific identity for EPW on social media.

• Usability // Redesign the website to give a fresher look and feel while also prioritising user experience, and incentivising subscriptions.

• Revenue // Develop models of revenue generation through consistent digital marketing.

Brainstorming for the project began in early July 2017, where we looked at the content that was produced in the journal, and discussed specific usecases. We realised that by tweaking the way in which the story is told, and why extracting digestible nuggets, we would reach a diverse, new, and young audience.

We built a microsite with a distinct editorial identity, including a new look and feel, as a way to pitch ‘Engage’ as the cooler cousin of the EPW. We did this with the intention of having a complete main website overhaul in the future, which would be an appropriate transition move for a journal with a change averse reader base.

Engage' is built on the core ideas of:

• design • storytelling • communications • research

Engage, as a microsite hosts infographics, visual essays, curated reading lists, debate kits, and discussion maps based on the original research papers produced in the EPW. These content products were then appropriately tailored for sharing across social media platforms. Since 2017, Engage now also includes video and audio content properties.

To know more about this content initiative, please visit: www.epw.in/engage