Put three executives who have committed their lives to journalism together in a room with a former TV anchor, and a frisson of rivalry, but most of all commitment shows through.

The element of competition present between former NDTV frontwoman Nidhi Razdan - who is also an associate professor of journalism at Harvard - and newspaper publishers Sivakumar Sundaram, Anant Goenka and Jayant Mammen Mathew brought extra life to the first day of WAN-Ifra's Indian Media Leaders eSummit.

Encouragingly, all reported an industry coming back to life and even relative prosperity; predictably most agreed that the COVID-19 pandemic had advanced the progress towards digital, though still emphasising the importance of print.

Sundaram, who is chairman of the group executive council at Times of India publisher Bennett, Coleman & Co, says some of the changes will be permanent, with working from home "the new normal".

Less likely to change, however, is the mode of print distribution which, for the Times of India, is "out of our control outside the factory gate". With "print our DNA" as well as the primary revenue source, opening up the process has had to be "bottom up".

"We had to work at each level, but a newspaper full of advertising signals a return, with lots of offers to bring back confidence... disintimidating the business model," he said.

Executive director of the Indian Express Group Anant Goenka says after "such an apocalyptic thing", the recovery had started, with "some light at the end of the tunnel", while admitting it had flickered at times.

"Distribution is picking up, and we are going back to being a solid independent and relevant business.

"The next stage will come from getting money from the reader, which as an industry, we've always been terrible at," he says. "Whoever's best at it will get disproportionate returns, and that's where the excitement is."

Malayala Manorama executive editor and director Jayant Mammen Mathew said the publisher had had few distribution problems in Kerala - all the newspapers got together to make sure papers got out - but advertising dried up completely.

"After the first quarter, things have opened up, but advertising has not come back completely, and it has taught us that going forward, it's time newspapers faced up to the need for a paywall," he said.

That might not be a paywall for whole website, but "we need boots on the ground and someone has to pay for it. We have to get used to people paying online, per article or for the whole website."

Fearing that regional cost cutting could lead to news deserts - bad for the industry, credibility and journalism - he hoped for a better second half of the year, while a questioner raised the possibility of consolidation, "which wouldn't be a bad thing".

Observing that it was "always tough to get money out of readers", Jayant Mathew asked, "have any of us really tried?" Investment in behavioural change would have to come from those with money to invest.

"People are used to so much free news, so there's no value in that," he said, arguing that a paid site would need to offer much more, "lots more for the reader to make it worthwhile, and then it's sort of endless".

Sivakumar Sundaram argued for new initiatives, but also "the need to see how we can repurpose the content we have - snackable bites, podcasts and other formats". User-generated content was an option, but with reporting, "you need your own identity", he said.

Despite concerns about the costs - some publishers had to cut salaries - most agreed that while journalism was expensive, "without it there's no product".

The youngest of the trio, Anant Goenka raised the commitment to journalism, "There's no business like it, and these are very interesting and challenging times.

"Stories are more read than they would have been nine months ago," he said. "We just have to be patient about the money."

Peter Coleman

Pictured (from top): Anant Goenka, Nidhi Razdan and Sivakumar Sundaram