About

More than 25 years in digital newsrooms. JATO is what I learned.

I’m Subhash Rai — a journalist who also writes code. I built the internet edition of The Economic Times in 1999 (a CMS, by hand, in Java), and in 2000 I founded Indian Online Journalism / OnlineJournalism.in — one of India’s first online-journalism communities. That name has been my professional identity ever since.

Since then I’ve led digital newsrooms from the inside: Internet/Digital Editor at The Hindu, Digital Editor at Hindustan Times (the integrated newsroom that crossed 100 million pageviews), Associate Editor at The New Indian Express, and Web Editor at the Economic & Political Weekly, where I put six decades of archive online. I’ve advised newsrooms independently — from The South First to Newsclick to The India Forum — I speak at WAN-IFRA, and I chair the Centre for Initiatives in Journalism.

I build this from inside the craft, not from a venture lab.

Why I built JATO

Two things are happening to journalism at once, and I’ve watched both from the desk. The commodity floor is collapsing — the fungible fact anyone can rewrite is being swallowed by AI answer engines. And the reporter at the base files into a fog: more public record than any newsroom can monitor, no thread to her own archive, no idea what became of her story.

The intelligence that could help pools at the top of the newsroom, or doesn’t exist at all. JATO is my answer: give every reporter the intelligence only the top can see — and make the work a machine cannot make, the work that survives the collapse, legible and reachable.

The moat is the mission

Everything in JATO passes one test: does the reporter at the base benefit, or only the hierarchy? That is why it is:

• Primary-sources-always — it never invents a source; every claim links to where it came from.
• Decision-support, not autopilot — it never writes the article. The journalist decides.
• Built for the reader-as-subject — the fair-chance logic asks whether a story reached the people it was for, including the people the market cannot see.
• Vendor-neutral and fair-source — read every line, run it yourself — the fair-source code is request-access for now, and two tools are open source (MIT) and public. No surveillance vendors baked in.

These are not features. They are the decisions only a journalist would insist on — and the reason a newsroom can trust the thing.

Let’s work together

If you run a newsroom, advise one, or build for journalism — I’d like to hear from you.

OnlineJourno belongs to a family with OnlineJournalism.in — my home since 2000.