Tushar Banerjee moves on from ABP Network, joins Bloomberg News

NEW DELHI: News of Tushar Banerjee’s departure from ABP Network landed on LinkedIn with the sort of understatement that only makes the move louder. “Some personal news,” he wrote, before revealing he has joined Bloomberg News, where he will work alongside the wire’s editorial team in India. For an industry watcher, it is a tidy full-circle moment: a correspondent who cut his teeth at the BBC and NDTV, then spent the best part of a decade rebuilding one of India’s biggest regional-language news operations, now walks into a newsroom of over 2,700 journalists and analysts spread across some 120 countries.

The scale of what Banerjee leaves behind is worth dwelling on. As vice-president, digital, at ABP Network, he ran a vertical spanning eight languages, with cost and revenue responsibility attached. Under his watch, organic reach grew by nearly 400 per cent and indirect monetisation by 600 per cent, no small feat in a market where digital advertising economics remain brutal and platform algorithms change the rules every quarter. He managed over 300 editorial, SEO, MIS and partnership staff, with 14 direct reports, while the network’s monthly views crossed four billion, a figure that would have seemed fanciful when he joined in 2019.

The headline numbers from his tenure read like a highlight reel: 140m monthly active users during the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, and 3bn video views during the 2024 general election, arguably the largest single democratic exercise on the planet. Getting there meant a deliberate pivot away from the website and towards video and platforms, a bet that paid off as audiences in India increasingly consume news on YouTube, Instagram and connected TV rather than on browsers. Banerjee also had a hand in emerging formats such as AI anchors and subscription products, while keeping the operation compliant with India’s thicket of media regulation, from the information and broadcasting ministry’s rules to the Digital Personal Data Protection Act.

His career arc has a certain logic to it. Before ABP, he was head of audience growth at NDTV Convergence, and before that spent over four years at The Quint as head of product, where he launched the Hindi-language vertical and built its video-news team from nothing. Earlier still came a stint as a science and technology correspondent for BBC News in Delhi, and a first job as a sub-editor at NDTV. Seventeen years in journalism, in other words, spent almost entirely at the intersection of editorial judgement and product engineering, which is precisely the skillset that global newsrooms now prize as they chase digital-first audiences.

Bloomberg, for its part, gains an operator who understands India’s news consumption habits from the inside, at a moment when the country’s growth story is squarely on the radar of global capital. Banerjee’s brief, working closely with Bloomberg News’s India editorial team, suggests the wire wants to sharpen its coverage of a market that increasingly moves global markets of its own accord. For Banerjee, it is, in his own words, one of the bigger honours of a career built on chasing audiences across formats, languages and platforms, and it caps a run at ABP that he has called seven very special years.