About Us
Why this site exists
KeralaNews 24×7 is an English-language news site about Kerala, written at the level of detail a Malayalam newsroom treats as ordinary. We name the district. We name the panchayat and the ward when the story is about a panchayat or a ward. We say which bulletin a warning came from and at what hour it was issued. That is usually the first detail to fall out of the copy when Kerala gets compressed into one paragraph for a national page.
Our readers are people inside the state who read faster in English than in Malayalam, people who came to Kochi or Thiruvananthapuram for work with no Malayalam at all, and a very large number of Malayalis in the Gulf. Those last readers set how the desk runs. Someone in Sharjah checking a phone before a shift does not need atmosphere. They need to know whether the road to their village is open, and whether yesterday’s rule change touches their visa category.
How we started
Our founding editors came off newspaper desks and wire copy. One spent years subediting stories that arrived in translated English from reporters who had done the reporting in Malayalam, then watched the specifics get shaved off on the way to the national page. The ward became “a village”. The reservoir level became “dangerously high”. Four named district collectors became “authorities”. The reporting was good. The English version of it thinned out every time it moved up a desk.
What turned an old complaint into a website was a monsoon week and a run of phone calls from relatives abroad. The questions were small and practical, and no English-language site answered them. National coverage had a toll and a stock photograph of a submerged bus stop. The Malayalam evening bulletins had shutter levels, camp lists and the names of places actually under water. We began with a cheap domain, a plain template, and one rule written at the top of the district spreadsheet. Every weather story names the districts, quotes the issuing authority, and gives the time of the bulletin.
The mistake that wrote our rulebook
In our first serious monsoon we got something wrong that still shapes the desk. Chasing minutes, we lifted a list of red-alert districts from another English site’s headline instead of reading the bulletin ourselves. The warning had been revised an hour earlier. Two districts on our list did not belong there, and one that did belong was missing. A reader wrote in to say the collector’s office had told them something else.
We took it down, replaced it with the bulletin text, and published a note explaining what we had done. That note is still up. Two rules came out of it, and both have cost us traffic since. Alerts, reservoir levels, casualty figures and holiday declarations come only from the authority that issued them, with the hour attached. And if that makes us last, we are last. Being late and right is a bad afternoon. Being fast and wrong, in a state where families pack a bag on the strength of a headline, is worse than that.
Monsoon reporting and the Gulf desk
Those two are obligations here rather than sections. In monsoon season the distinctions matter more than the adjectives. An orange alert for Idukki is not an orange alert for Kerala. A reservoir sitting at its rule curve is not a reservoir about to be opened. A holiday declared for educational institutions in one district is not a state holiday, and writing that loosely means somebody drives to an office that is open, or keeps a child home from an exam.
The Gulf work is less dramatic and just as consequential: visa and amnesty windows, attestation and medical-test procedures, labour-rule changes in individual Gulf states, fare spikes around Onam, the process for repatriating a body, notices aimed at non-resident Keralites. We read the notification instead of relaying the screenshot of it, because the screenshot is usually a year old and the gap between two visa categories is somebody’s job. A rule announced in Riyadh on a Thursday afternoon reaches a house in Kollam on Friday morning, and we would like it to arrive accurately.
Who runs it
The site is owned and run by the editorial team that started it. No parent company, no investor with a seat, no political party behind us, and no government money at any level. Our ownership and funding page lays out the structure and every revenue stream we have, and we update it when something changes rather than when somebody asks.
We describe the team by role instead of parading portraits, because the role is what tells you who is accountable. A managing editor owns the daily list and the corrections log. A news editor handles the districts and the stringers who file from them. Copy editing is a second pair of eyes, always, and nothing carrying a place name and a number goes out on one read. The editor on state politics has sat through Assembly sessions and local-body counts. The editor on the Gulf desk reads ministry circulars for a living.
How the money works
We are ad-supported and free to read. No paywall, no metered articles, no registration wall in front of a flood update. Most of our income is display advertising, the majority of it programmatic, with a small amount sold directly. Where a sponsor pays for a post it carries a label, it looks different from our journalism, and nobody in the newsroom writes it. The rules we sell against are public on our advertise page.
Buying advertising here gets you an audience and nothing else. No advance look at the story list, no veto, no quiet removal, no phone call that works. We have refused election-season money, and we have refused the paid achiever profile that regional media in this state sells as a matter of routine. Both refusals hurt. The alternative hurts more and does not wear off.
When we get it wrong
We get things wrong. The useful question is what happens next. Our corrections policy sets out the mechanics: corrections are appended and dated on the story itself, significant ones are flagged at the top, and we do not quietly patch a sentence and pretend the first version never existed. The URL stays where it was, because deleting a URL to lose an error is a form of lying.
How we source, verify and attribute is written down in our editorial standards. Claims that circulate as forwarded screenshots are a permanent condition of covering Kerala and its diaspora, and the way we test them sits in our fact-checking policy. We work to the IFCN principles without claiming a badge for it.
Talking to the newsroom
One inbox reaches us: support@keralanews247.com. Tips, complaints, corrections and the mail telling us we have misspelled a panchayat all land in the same place, and editors read it. If what you are sending is sensitive, our contact page explains how to route it before you send anything.
District tips are the best mail we get. A collector’s order, a copy of a tender, minutes from a panchayat meeting, a photograph of a notice pinned up in a government office: those have started more stories here than any press release has. If you are unsure whether something is worth sending, send it and let us decide.
