The Quint

In May 2014, Raghav Bahl and Ritu Kapur, the promoters of Network18 ended their shareholding of the media conglomerate with the takeover by Reliance Industries.[11] Following the controversial exit, they founded the digital media company, Quintillion Media. The company was the first major investor in the tech startup Quintype founded by Amit Rathore.[5] Quintillion Media launched The Quint publication in January 2015 on Facebook and as a website by March 2015.[8][12] Quintype took over the digital technology operations of the publication.[12]

In April 2016, Quintillion Media partnered with Bloomberg L.P. to create the business and financial news organisation BloombergQuint.[10][13] By December 2016, The Quint website had crossed the mark of 10 million unique visitors.[14] In May 2017, The Quint launched the fact checking initiative WebQoof.[9]

The offices of The Quint and Raghav Bahl's residence were raided by the Income Tax Department of India in October 2018 in connection to an alleged case of tax evasion, the raid was termed as a survey by the Income Tax officers.[15][16][17] Raghav Bahl released a statement which termed the raid as an attack on journalistic freedom while appealing to the autonomous Enforcement Directorate to back The Quint such that a precedent is set against repetition of a similar exercise on any journalistic entente.[18][19][20] The Editors Guild of India raised concerns that while the department was within its rights to carry out inquiries, the conduct of such exercises shouldn't be akin to intimidation tactics.[21][22]

In May 2020, The Quint was acquired by Gaurav Mercantiles, a firm with Bahl and Kapur as directors who had earlier acquired 66.42 per cent of the firm. Gaurav Mercantiles, which is listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange was earlier into ship breaking and trading and had not made any revenue after March 2018.[23][24]

A story published in the Columbia Journalism Review in late 2016 identified The Quint as one of several independent and recently founded internet-based media platforms – a group that also included Newslaundry, Scroll.in, The News Minute, The Wire and ScoopWhoop – that were attempting to challenge the dominance of India's traditional print and television news companies and their online offshoots.[25] The news portal won a host of awards at WAN-IFRA South Asia Awards 2017.[26] Four of their journalists won the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Awards in three categories in 2019.[27][28] Two of the publication's journalists also won the Red Ink Awards in the same year.[29] The Quint has been certified by the Poynter Institute's International Fact-Checking Network for its reporting in WebQoof, its in-house fact-checking division.[30][31][32]

In February 2017, The Quint published a sting video focused on how the Army's Jawans were being deployed as Sahayaks and performed a variety of menial tasks for officers;[33] the profiled Naik committed suicide a week afterwards[34] in fear of an impending court-martial.[35] The Army subsequently booked the Quint reporter for abetting his suicide, and violating the Official Secrets Act of India by trespassing into a prohibited area.[36][37][38] Media critics had since dubbed the sting-operation as "overzealous journalism" with a host of ethical issues.[39][40] In 2019, Bombay High Court quashed all charges against The Quint noting the Army to be vindictive.[41]

Kulbhushan Jadhav is an Indian national who was arrested in Pakistan on charges of terrorism and spying for the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) – India's external intelligence agency.[42] After the arrests, on 5th January 2018, The Quint published a story by the journalist Chandan Nandy which claimed that Jadhav was being used to collect intelligence for India and that two former chiefs of the Research and Analysis Wing had allegedly stated that they were against the recruitment of Jadhav as a spy.[43] The Hindu's Frontline magazine also published a story with a similar claim.[44][45] The stories were picked up by Pakistani media agencies as apparent confirmation of Jadhav's affiliation.[46][47][48] It drew criticism in India; the media watchdog Newslaundry raised questions on how The Quint could have been privy to such information.[49] The publication retracted the story on 7 January stating that the factual accuracy of the article required rechecking.[43][49] The story was later quoted by Pakistan in a related International Court of Justice case.[50][51]

On 27 March 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic in India, The Quint published an article which reported that India was in stage-3 transmission (community transmission). The government's Press Information Bureau denied the occurrence of community transmission and labeled the story as "misleading". The Times of India published a "fact-check" affirming the PIB statement and clarifying that the person being quoted did not have medical qualifications but had a PhD in Quality management.[52][53] The report had quoted Girdhar Gyani, the head of the NGO, Association of Healthcare Providers.[54] However, the publication did not retract the article but updated it to include information about Girdhar Gyani having been appointed as the convener of a Covid-19 hospital task force.[55]

The Quint website received a monthly unique readership of approximately 16 million as of March 2019. According to Google Analytics, nearly 69% of the readership was estimated to be between the ages of 18–34. In addition, the website had a subscriber base of over 175,000 readers on WhatsApp. The combined monthly exposure of unique users through all internet assets of The Quint was estimated to be 100 million. Per February 2019 data of CrowdTangle, the publication was the largest digital only news publisher on Facebook.[1]

• Official website