Who's behind the news?
Who's behind the news?
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Co-Founder and CEO, The News Minute · Media Entrepreneur · Independent Media Mentor
Bengaluru (Bangalore), Karnataka, India
The News Minute (Co-Founder & CEO)
MDIF Amplify Asia (Mentor)
Queensland University of Technology (alumnus)
Vignesh Vellore is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of The News Minute (TNM), the Bengaluru-based digital news platform that has established itself as the leading independent English-language source for news from India's five southern states — Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana. He founded TNM in 2014 alongside journalist and editor-in-chief Dhanya Rajendran (also his wife) and veteran journalist Chitra Subramaniam, whose investigations on the Bofors scandal in the 1980s and 1990s made her one of India's most celebrated investigative reporters. Vellore holds a degree from Queensland University of Technology in Australia. Within the TNM founding team, he has consistently been the business and operations mind — responsible for revenue strategy, audience development, technology, and organisational growth — while Rajendran drives editorial direction and Subramaniam has contributed journalistic credibility and institutional gravitas. TNM's third co-founder has characterised Vellore as "a man of few words but hugely funny ways of conveying a message," and has described the three founders as "a rock-and-roll band." He is a mentor in the Media Development Investment Fund's (MDIF) Amplify Asia Program, providing guidance to independent media organisations across the region on business capacity and financial sustainability.
The News Minute launched in 2014, built on a straightforward editorial and business insight: there was no independent English-language digital news platform dedicated to South India. The five southern states — home to more than 250 million people, speaking Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and multiple other languages — were served by major national media organisations that treated them as peripheral to the Hindi-heartland national narrative, and by regional-language media that was not accessible to English-literate South Indians or to the Indian diaspora abroad. Vellore has described the founding thesis in direct terms: "We saw a gap, and we filled it." The three co-founders launched the platform with personal funds and built an initial team of twelve people in Bengaluru, with ground reporters fanning out across the southern states. Within a year, Raghav Bahl's Quintillion Media had invested an undisclosed amount in TNM — seed capital that enabled the team to scale up — and the publication had established itself as what Vellore has described as "the independent voice of the south."
Vellore's specific role in the founding and subsequent growth of TNM has been to manage the operational, financial, and technology dimensions of the organisation while Rajendran managed editorial strategy. In a media landscape where editorial and business functions are often formally separated to protect editorial independence, TNM has operated with a more integrated model — its three founders sharing both mission and governance. Vellore has been candid in interviews about the business realities of independent digital journalism in India: advertising is necessary and can be accepted without compromising editorial integrity if the publication has a clear product, a credible audience, and a culture of independence that advertisers value rather than fear. He has also been direct about the limits of advertising as a sole revenue model, describing a strategic pivot toward diversified revenue streams including branded content ("TNM Marquee" and "Brand Studio"), membership programmes, and editorial consultancy work.
Under Vellore's oversight as CEO, The News Minute has grown from a twelve-person launch team in Bengaluru into a multi-bureau operation with ground reporters in all five southern states. The publication has won a consistent stream of journalism awards under Rajendran's editorial leadership — including Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Awards for multiple reporters, a 2022 National Red Ink Award for Journalist of the Year to Rajendran, and a 2025 nomination for Reporters Without Borders' Impact Prize. TNM was selected from 255 applicants to receive a grant under the Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge for its "TNM Connect" concept, which aimed at increasing reader engagement in the region — an initiative that reflected Vellore's emphasis on user interface and digital engagement as competitive differentiators. He has described the goal as maintaining a balance between what a reader is interested in and what is in a reader's interest: TNM covers Kollywood and Tollywood cinema alongside human rights and politics, because both are genuinely part of the lives of its South Indian readers, and the publication's breadth has been essential to building the audience that sustains its accountability journalism.
Revenue diversification has been a persistent strategic challenge. TNM has grown its advertising base steadily, but Vellore has been forthright that advertising alone cannot sustain an organisation of TNM's scale and ambition. The sponsored content studios, the membership programme, the Google News Initiative grant, and a second undisclosed funding round in 2019 have all been elements of a deliberate strategy to reduce dependence on any single revenue stream. He has also noted that the Indian diaspora — particularly South Indians settled abroad, who constitute a significant share of TNM's international readership — has been more resistant to converting into paying members than domestic readers, a gap the organisation has been actively working to close.
Although Vellore's primary domain is the business side of TNM, the editorial character of the publication is inseparable from the founding vision he shares. TNM has consistently described itself as bringing a feminist perspective to its coverage — embedding gender-sensitive thinking in stories across domains from politics to child rights to cinema — and as practising "solid ground reportage, news and views, campaigns and data-based advocacy." It has been particularly distinctive in its coverage of religious communalism, caste discrimination, and police accountability in the southern states, territories where national media frequently provides inadequate or superficial coverage. The publication has been the subject of multiple legal actions from both state governments and private parties — including a 2025 case in which it filed writ petitions in the Karnataka High Court challenging gag orders on its coverage of a Special Investigation Team probe — and Dhanya Rajendran has been personally targeted with sustained online harassment, including misogynistic campaigns coordinated by fans of Tamil film star Vijay following TNM's coverage of his political activities. Vellore has backed the editorial team through each of these episodes, and his business management of the organisation has provided the financial stability that independent editorial decisions require.
Beyond TNM, Vellore has contributed to the development of independent media in Asia more broadly through his role as a mentor in the Media Development Investment Fund's (MDIF) Amplify Asia Program. The programme provides business capacity building and financial sustainability guidance to independent media organisations from across the Asia-Pacific region, and Vellore's experience building TNM's audience, revenue model, and institutional sustainability over eleven years makes him one of the more practically credentialed voices available to emerging digital news organisations facing similar challenges of finding sustainable models for independent journalism in complex political and advertising environments. The model TNM has built — South India's independent digital news voice, supported by diversified revenue, feminist editorial values, and a clear regional identity — has become one of the more studied examples of regional digital journalism institution-building in India, and Vellore's business contribution to that model is its operational foundation.
Vellore continues as CEO of The News Minute, overseeing the operational and revenue aspects of the organisation and playing what he describes as a pivotal role in conceptualising and developing editorial initiatives aimed at expanding audience engagement, membership, and revenue streams. TNM continues to publish from Bengaluru with bureaus across the southern states. Vellore remains active on social media, primarily on X/Twitter at @vmvignesh, and in the Indian digital journalism community. His public profile remains deliberately lower than that of Rajendran — whose journalism and advocacy for press freedom have made her the more publicly recognisable face of TNM — reflecting a consistent division of labour in which he manages the organisation so that she and the editorial team can manage the journalism.
Vignesh Vellore
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
The News Minute (TNM)
Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Co-founders: Dhanya Rajendran (Editor-in-Chief) · Chitra Subramaniam
The News Minute: thenewsminute.com
About TNM: thenewsminute.com/about-us