Venkatesh HR

India

BOOM Live

Can journalists build products? What I learned making a word game in the age of AI

H R Venkatesh has either been building a journalism product or thinking about building one since 2016. This started after a memorable stint at New York's Newmark School of Journalism as an entrepreneurial journalism fellow, where he built NetaData—which failed. Since then, he launched WordSutra, a media literacy word game heading toward beta, and Teen Lab!, an AI and scam literacy initiative for teenagers. Venkatesh is Director of Training, Research and New Initiatives at BOOM Live. His work focuses on how news organisations can fight disinformation, bias, and polarisation across South Asia. A John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford and former ICFJ Knight Fellow, he founded Ekta News Coalition, India's first collaborative newsroom. He was a founding editor at The Quint and Senior Anchor at CNN-IBN. He was a Chevening scholar at Oxford University.