About Us

Cover365 is an Indian digital magazine. We cover national news, films and television, cricket and the rest of sport, technology, and the internet stories that half the country is arguing about by lunchtime. We publish in English, mainly for readers in their twenties and thirties who follow all of that at once and have never thought of it as five separate interests.

The name is a promise about the calendar rather than a boast about volume. News does not take Sunday off, cricket schedules ignore public holidays, and the film release calendar is busiest exactly when everyone else has gone home. We staff for that.

Why we started this

The people who started Cover365 had spent years on Indian digital desks first. The work, on a bad day, went like this: open a studio press note, rewrite four paragraphs into eight, put the actor’s name at the front of the headline, publish, open the next one. Again and again before lunch. Nobody on those desks was lazy. The incentives did not reward finding anything out, and after a while you stop noticing that you have not asked a question in a month.

What pushed us into starting our own thing was the box office. India has no independent audited body that publishes ticket sales. The opening-day figure you read is released by the people who made the film, or by a trade account close to them, and it travels across every site in the country with a rupee sign attached and no attribution. Reporters know this. Readers, quite reasonably, assume somebody counted.

Cricket has its own version of the arrangement. A story about a player being unhappy in the dressing room tends to surface a few weeks before a contract conversation, sourced to someone with a stake in how that player is perceived. A rift is cheap to place and nearly impossible to disprove. Tech has the review unit and the embargo brief. Trending culture has the screenshot nobody traced back to its original upload.

The plan was narrow and has not changed. Apply ordinary reporting standards to the beats everyone else treats as filler between the serious stories. Say where a number came from. Explain whose interest an anonymous quote serves, or admit we cannot and let the reader discount it accordingly. Never describe a marketing event as news.

What we cover, and what a story has to survive

We run five beats: national news, entertainment and cinema, cricket and sport, technology, and trending culture. They are not walled off from each other, because our readers are not. A dispute over a film’s release in one state is a politics story.

Every item on the morning list has to answer one question: what do we know that the press release does not? Sometimes the answer is small. We called exhibitors instead of nobody, we read the whole tribunal order rather than the operative paragraph, we checked whether a fitness clearance says what the announcement implies. Small is fine. Nothing is not.

Trending stories get a separate check, because most viral claims in India arrive as a forwarded clip or a cropped screenshot. We look for the original upload, its date, and where it was actually shot before writing a line about what it shows. That work kills stories regularly, which is the point of it. Our fact-checking process sets out the steps, and our editorial standards cover sourcing, anonymity, and images we did not take ourselves. We work to the IFCN principles on verification and transparency.

How the money works

Cover365 is free to read. No paywall, no metered limit, no registration wall in front of an article. Advertising pays for the newsroom: display placements sold directly, plus the programmatic exchanges that fill the rest of our inventory. If we ever add another revenue stream, it goes on the ownership and funding page first.

We are independently owned and run by the founding editorial team. There is no parent conglomerate above us, no political party behind us, no state money, and no investor with a film slate or a franchise to protect. Nobody outside this newsroom reads a story before it publishes.

The firewall between editorial and commercial is unglamorous and absolute. The people selling advertising do not sit in the list meeting, and editors are not told which brand is booked in which week. An advertiser cannot buy placement beside favourable coverage of itself, cannot ask to be kept away from unfavourable coverage of itself, and cannot see a piece before publication. We have turned down money over each of those, and the terms sit on our advertising page.

The people doing the work

We are small and do not pretend otherwise. The team is a managing editor who runs the daily list, section editors across news, entertainment, sport and technology, a staff of reporters, and freelance contributors who cover regional cinema and domestic cricket we could not reach otherwise. Everyone here worked a beat somewhere else first, which is the only reason the standards above are enforceable. You cannot spot a placed story if you have never been offered one.

Expertise here means something specific. Somebody on the desk has covered enough domestic cricket to know what a fitness clearance actually certifies. Somebody else has sat through enough promotional rounds to recognise a quote handed identically to every outlet in the room. We name roles rather than individuals on this page because responsibility sits with the desk, and bylines belong on the stories.

When we get it wrong

Early on we published an opening-weekend collection figure because every larger site had it and the traffic was obvious. It came from a trade account, we attributed it to nobody, and it sat well above anything the ticketing data supported. We took it down, replaced it with the little we could stand behind, and left a note on the page rather than quietly editing the number. That is the origin of a rule we keep: no collection figure publishes without the name of whoever supplied it, in the sentence.

Around the same period we passed on a dressing-room rift story that three bigger sites ran inside a day. One source, an obvious motive, nothing checkable. It went nowhere and nobody was ever held to it. We got no traffic and no credit for sitting it out, which is roughly what sitting things out pays.

Errors are corrected on the article itself, dated, with the original wording described so you can see what changed. We do not delete a story to make a problem disappear. Our corrections policy explains what happens after you report something.

What we will not do

Commercial content here is labelled as commercial content, styled so it cannot be mistaken for reporting, and written by people who are not on the editorial desk. No arrangement exists in which coverage is the consideration for something else. Not travel, not access, not a review unit we get to keep, not an ad booking. Copy approval is not on offer at any price.

The things we refuse, because they get asked for weekly:

Sponsored articles built to look like news, with the label shrunk until a reader misses it.
Coverage promised in advance as a condition of a junket, a set visit, or an interview.
Softening an accurate line because a publicist or a studio asked.
Running a figure or a rumour because competitors have it, when we cannot say who told us.