5 Years of Tehelka

The Tehelka brand has a mass appeal of fiery journalism. And, to the people who made it happen and are still making it happen, Tehelka stands for much more than that. Of these assets the one I relate to most is survival against all odds; because that’s how my journey with Tehelka has been. Coming from a 6-Sigma organization where everything is by the book (a Green Book for processes and a Playbook for deliverables), I never thought I would survive here even for a year. Over here, publishing the book is a weekly miracle.

There is not much hope for a website to survive in an organization with just about enough resources to get the print cycle going at the speed of rusty computers clicking away like typewriters. I feel out of place in an infrastructure that seems reminiscent of Jurassic age! Yet, for some reasons I’ve been marching ahead with the website mostly as a one woman army.

Fifth Anniversary Edition

Tehelka has finished five years and the recently finished task was to recreate the past on the web. The challenge was to accommodate the massive number of milestone stories and the usual ambitious expectations of the bosses to bombard as much information as is possible or not possible. And, all this on a static, manually generated HTML website. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said Jurassic age. A manual news site in the era of convergence is as ancient as dinosaurs.

Yet, one has to do the best one can. After much brain crunching, I’ve finally laid out the home page as my best effort towards effective communication design, if not technology. The objective was to create an organized framework of the various vistas that Tehelka has explored over the years and under each category present a glimpse of the star stories and give a subtle hint to what more lies underneath.

This is what I did:

- Organize information so that it is easy to assimilate.

- Create a structure to guide

- Present just about the enough number of highlights – not too less and never too much to dilute the effort and confuse the reader

- Leave a scope for further exploration

- Allow easy updates on a regular basis to keep the page looking fresh