In 1997, as part of the IndiaWorld family of portals, I created Samachar.com with the aim of providing an aggregated cornucopia of top headlines across various well-regarded news sites. Samachar soon became the home page for millions of Indians who logged on to the Web. Here is how it looked (a partial recreation from 2001).
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Since then, we have had various other aggregators, including Google News, Dailyhunt, Inshorts, etc, which do a very thorough job of aggregating the headlines. Yet, I admit that I continue to miss the Samachar USP and its consequent innate efficiency i.e. displaying the top headlines organised by source.
In today’s world of fake news, the questionable veracity of news items and multiple means of dissemination of data/news (read Whatsapp forwards!), source matters, more than ever. Disinformation is a pervasive reality – trust and quality journalism is more important than ever. As is an exposure to diverse viewpoints.
To bridge this gap, we have created Vartam Headlines where the focus will primarily be to aggregate authentic, source-based news items. Vartam Headlines will not, admittedly, be the fastest or the quickest ‘breaker of news’. It will neither be the publisher of the ‘newest’ items. For that there is Twitter. Vartam Headlines aim is simple: aggregate the most important and relevant headlines at any point of time.We curate 10 main sections with almost 100 news sources each with 5 headlines. It is also updated every 30 minutes.
Hopefully, our efforts prove to be a time-saver for you and assist you in staying abreast of what’s transpiring in India and the world, in the language of your choice. I do fervently hope that Vartam Headlines also becomes your start page. Because “news source matters”!
Here is a glimpse of the Vartam Hindi Headlines page:
And here is the snapshot of the Vartam Tech Headlines page: 
Postscript
- We have renamed the microns (micro newsletters/nudges/nuggets) site from MyToday to Vartam Microns. MyToday will become the micron publishing platform.
- Vartam is the brand we will use for various properties to give you the best return on time invested!
- Coming soon: Vartam Stories.
