Anmol Malhotra, a former corporate lawyer, felt it was important for children to read the daily news and learn from it, but found that many of them did not find it enjoyable. Passionate about news himself, he decided to fill the void: he founded Newsahoot, an online platform to provide children with age-appropriate information in a way that they would understand, appreciate and enjoy. retain.

Speaking about his motivation, Anmol, a former pupil of St John’s School, said: “Over the last few years there has been an increase in communalism, violence, fake news etc. worldwide. Traditional news outlets often present information in a way that may be insensitive or cover issues that are not age-appropriate. We believed that Newsahoot could fill this gap by adapting the information to children. »

The 24-year-old, who studied law at the Rajiv Gandhi National Law University, Punjab, says he has always been a keen follower of the news. “I also had the chance to teach children through various initiatives at school and college. All of this experience came in handy when I started designing Newsahoot.

Newsahoot publishes an article every day in six categories, namely the world, India, science and technology, health, environment and social sciences. Each of the items offers three levels of difficulty that children can choose from. Each article is broken down into its most basic form, then enriched with information adapted to each level. There is also
a hover glossary feature to add to children’s vocabulary. Each of the meanings is written by the team most skillfully.

WhatsApp notifications are sent to children and parents as an article is published.

Newsahoot, says Anmol, operates on an extremely affordable subscription model (less than the cost of most English dailies). This keeps it cluttered and ad-free. For now, Newsahoot, which is run by a lean team of five youngsters, is fully seeded, but Anmol plans to seek investors shortly.

The young entrepreneur says he is very satisfied with the response. “The feedback has been pretty healthy. We onboarded thirty kids into our beta program in May. We were initially skeptical about parents allowing their children to read real-world news. But the children exceeded the expectations of all the adults involved in the process. A parent told us
that her son had asked his older siblings if they knew what NATO was (after reading our article on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict).

Another relative told us that news was discussed at her house every day during meals. One of our followers, Rashaad, informed us that it was his first time reading the news and it was super cool to see everything happening in the world.

Anmol wants to make information accessible to as many children as possible. Discussing his future plans, he said, “We have a few new features in the works that we will be rolling out over the next few months. Despite the emphasis on scaling, it is a personal challenge for me to ensure that the quality of content we deploy to our subscribers is top notch. We pride ourselves on providing great content and I want that to continue. In the future, once we have investors, we want to turn Newsahoot into an app-only service. This will help us be more accessible to our target audience.