In 2008, I realised that the lack of a bottom-up media platform is leaving millions out. YKA started as a personal blog, soon to become a media company with a big focus on letting anyone tell stories on issues that mattered to them. Over the last 8 years, not much has changed. The media is still largely top-down. Even new media outlets have failed to recognise and realise the true potential of a community driven, people-powered platform. Even though today we carry the internet on our pocket-sized devices, the fact that very few media platforms actually engage in people-powered storytelling for a global audience is still leaving millions behind. YKA, over the last 8 years has served over 16000 stories – all powered by you.
And we’re not done yet.
We’re excited to announce that starting today, you can publish your stories directly on Youth Ki Awaaz – and build your audience through your personal and professional networks. And share them faster and more easily!
So what does this mean exactly?
Simple. Anyone who has a story to share, on an issue of importance, can just log into YKA, use our editor to share their stories, photos, videos and publish them directly on the platform. You can even save your posts as drafts and come back to edit them later, right until you hit publish. All we ask is that you publish only those stories that fit our broad categories (society and its issues, culture, environment, politics, gender, sex and sexuality, human rights, popular culture, education, entrepreneurship and stories of social change). As a rights-based platform, for now, we are only open to stories in these categories.
With this, we are also optimising our homepage for a better user experience. We’ve also made this cool list of steps you can follow to help your story make it to the homepage. And again, YKA being a rights-based platform, we also strongly recommend you read our community guidelines before you publish – your stories must meet our community guidelines. Anything in violation of these guidelines will be taken down as soon as it comes to our notice.
With its new feature of letting those who like your posts Follow you on YKA, the platform gives you the power to cultivate your own audience with your special brand of storytelling. Not just that, you can also Follow your favourite authors and keep up with what they have to say.
Not just individuals, we will also be working closely with publishers so they can reach out to the amazing YKA audience. To begin with, you will see publishers such as Our Better World, Khabar Lahariya, INK Talks, Women’s Feature Service, Boom Live and our very own The Cake ❤️.
We know we’ve only scratched the surface of how powerful a people-driven storytelling platform can be. We don’t have all the answers, but we’re figuring it out as we grow – with you.
Youth Ki Awaaz is built for everyone. We’d love for you to sign up and give it a shot.