Talha Ahad on building Asia's first video-only newsroom

A storyteller first, an entrepreneur by accident

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming Talha Ahad to the show — someone he has known since 2013 or 2014, and someone who, in his words, has worked with unusual patience and quiet in what he calls “a very dirty industry.” Talha is introduced as the founder and CEO of The Centrum Media Group, but the first question Muzamil asks is what Talha would actually call himself at this point.

Talha does not give a corporate answer. “By heart, I think I’m a storyteller and a journalist,” he says. “That’s like probably the first thing that comes to mind. After that, obviously, you start working, so you’re an entrepreneur. But I think what I do, how I see myself, is as a journalist.”

That self-description ends up framing the whole conversation. Almost everything Talha defends later — the refusal to take political money, the decision not to put his own face on the brand, the discipline around what TCM will and will not cover — flows from the fact that he treats journalist as the noun and entrepreneur as the modifier, not the other way around.

How a kid in Islamabad ended up obsessed with geopolitics

Muzamil pushes on how someone in Pakistan stumbles into journalism in the first place. It is not a family trade; it is not, as he puts it, something people are interested in unless they have lived through something.

Talha’s account begins in school, where by his own admission he was a poor student academically. The interest started, he says, with novels and with geopolitics. He remembers being in eighth grade, somewhere around the age of eight, arguing with his social studies teacher about America. Then 9/11 happened. Children in class started talking about it. Then came the invasion of Afghanistan, then Musharraf, then Waziristan, then Lal Masjid. Living in Islamabad in the early 2000s and 2010s, he says, meant the political conversation was unavoidable — and unlike now, drawing-room politics were emotional and unguarded rather than reduced to a tweet.

By the time he was choosing a degree, the path he wanted was already clear and the path Pakistan offered was not. He did not want to be a doctor or an engineer. He went to a consultant and asked for any degree, anywhere, with the word “journalism” in it. The consultant came back with fifteen options. He took an admission in London. He completed a bachelor’s in mass communication with a specialisation in multimedia journalism in 2014, and a master’s in film and television, specialising in documentary, in 2015. He worked as a freelance video journalist in London for eight to ten months, then came home in March 2016.

Pakistan’s first female truck driver and the moment TCM became inevitable

Back in Pakistan, Talha pitched a story on Pakistan’s first female truck driver to NowThis. The piece went viral — by his account, more than nineteen million views — and was, he says, the first story of its kind out of Pakistan on that platform. After that, more pitches followed, but the editorial energy international outlets wanted did not always sit comfortably with what he wanted to make.

He notes the political backdrop that was shaping him at the same time. He had moved to England in 2011, into the middle of the Arab Spring and a European migration debate. When he turned on Pakistani television, the prime-time slot was dominated by figures like Tahirul Qadri, Reham Khan, and Imran Khan. The combination — international human-interest video work plus a sense that Pakistan’s TV diet was narrow — pushed him toward starting something of his own.

TCM opened its doors at the end of 2016 in a small office with two or three people. As of this conversation, the company is about to mark its fifth anniversary in January 2022.

”Literally no vision” — and three things that turned into one

When Muzamil asks what the starting thesis was, Talha is unusually candid. “Literally there was no vision,” he says. He did not understand business or monetisation. He had Mango Bash and Patari in his peripheral vision as reference points, but he knew he did not want to do BuzzFeed-style or tabloid work.

Three operating principles emerged anyway. The first was format: young audiences watched, they did not read, so TCM would publish only video. He claims TCM as Asia’s first video-only platform — no parallel article track, no text-plus-video hybrid — and notes that in India, Bangladesh, and across the region he sees no single competitor with the same constraint.

The second was political posture. Watching Pakistani channels lean visibly left or right, he wanted TCM to sit in the centre, present the facts of a story from every side, and let the viewer decide. The name itself, he says, traces back to that intention — Centrum, as in centrist. He cites the 2017 TLP coverage as proof of concept: TCM was, by his account, the first digital platform to cover Khadim Hussain Rizvi properly, and the same videos were shared by both the right and the left.

The third was the deliberate choice to humanise subjects who had been flattened by mainstream coverage — Pakistan’s first female truck driver, Pakistan’s first female MMA fighter from the north, Khan Baba (whose feature, Talha confirms, was shot by him). Six to eight months in, the editorial line started evolving toward social-impact stories: a viral series on Julie that helped move transgender issues into mainstream conversation, a series of Journalist Diaries, a series with bureaucrats, and most recently a Guantanamo Bay returnees series.

Muzamil cuts in to name what he is hearing. A lot of TCM’s work, he says, is taking groups of people who exist in Pakistan only as a stereotype — journalists, transgender Pakistanis, returnees from foreign prisons — and giving the viewer enough of the human behind them that the cap they fit into stops being interesting. “Absolutely,” Talha says.

Five years, no funding, and a services arm nobody talks about

Muzamil moves to the harder question: sustainability. A 24-year-old with a safety net can run a startup. But rent, salaries, and personal expenses force a real answer eventually. Was there seed funding? A Series A? A cash-cow product subsidising the journalism?

Talha says the language of seed funding and disruption only entered his vocabulary about two years before this conversation. For the first eighteen months, three or four people sat in a small flat with their heads down and worked. He notes, almost as an aside, that the most common Google search around TCM is still “who is the founder of TCM?” — by design. He did not want the brand attached to a personality. When people think of TCM, he wants them to think of Julie, of Journalist Diaries, of the Guantanamo series — not of him.

The monetisation answer is unglamorous and important. He spent evenings googling business models, called Shane Smith of Vice (“Suroosh,” he calls him, since Suroosh Alvi is Canadian-Pakistani), and concluded that the Vice model — grow valuation while burning cash — would not arrive in Pakistan for fifty years. So TCM took on production-services work. Then a little branded content. Then they stopped the branded content entirely for two years because of how brands wanted to behave.

The structure he describes is precise. TCM’s news arm has been paying its own way for the last two years. The way it pays for itself is by selling journalism-adjacent production services to clients — the work stays inside the company’s competence, not adjacent to something else. “It keeps my core sustained,” he agrees when Muzamil names the model back to him.

The offers he turned down

This is the section of the conversation Muzamil seems most interested in protecting. Many digital media founders end up “losing their way,” he says — staying nominally independent while letting the money come from places that bend the work.

Talha describes the meetings without naming the meeting-takers. Owners of the three biggest TV channels in Pakistan have offered him various things. One of them, he says, sat across a table looking at him in a particular way and made it clear the price was to be quietly absorbed into a larger orbit. Talha walked out and could not process the conversation for half an hour. In the last two years, investors from the development sector and the corporate sector have approached him. He has taken zero rupees of funding. Every rupee in the business is service revenue.

He distinguishes that posture from a different kind of offer that is, he says, the easiest money in Pakistani digital media. A narrative is ready. The brand wants it pushed. The placement is supposed to look editorial. “We have refused,” he says. He returns to the same frame from the start of the conversation: he never had a businessman’s mindset. A fifty-million-follower exit to a buyer is not the goal. The journalism is the goal, and a lot of sacrifice has come from holding that line.

Where is censorship actually located in Pakistan?

Muzamil tees up a question he says he has been arguing about with a younger journalist. His view: outside national security, Pakistani journalists are not as censored as they claim. The state, in his reading, does not actually have the bandwidth or the interest to censor most things.

Talha’s answer is more careful and, in the end, mostly agrees. He notes first that the definition of national security in Pakistan is itself very broad. Then he steps back. As a journalist, he says, you can usually tell when a story is biased and when the reporter has bothered to include the other side. A lot of what gets labelled as censorship is something else: the editorial position the reporter has already taken before they filmed anything.

Stories from Balochistan are doable, he argues. You can go yourself if you want; you can use fixers; you can run interviews on Zoom. The harder part is what happens when a reporter brings the finished story back to a TV channel and the owner declines to run it. At TCM Academy, he says, this is the single most common feedback they get from working journalists: “Sir, we are making this, but our editor doesn’t run it. How do you run it?”

Has he himself received the calls? Yes. After the Manzoor Pashteen interview. After Khadim Hussain Rizvi. After Lal Masjid. After Guantanamo. He describes the calls as fascinating in a particular way: the unstated assumption on the other end is that the caller knows TCM is not funded by anyone, and is therefore worth calling individually. Some calls cost him sleep. But the line he holds is simple: “If you have to work, do it properly, otherwise just do something else.”

Muzamil presses the broader point. Even The New York Times, he notes, has admitted to running sensitive stories past the US government on national-security grounds. If the so-called free-world champion of journalism has that arrangement, then claiming Pakistani journalism is uniquely censored is, in his words, “an easy cop-out.”

Talha takes it one step further. “There is a very thin line between journalism and activism,” he says. “A lot of journalists who complain about censorship — as an audience, you see them not as journalists but as activists. The prime-time slot from 8 to 11 on Pakistani TV is 90% not journalism. You can clearly see which side they tilt to.” Social media, he notes, has made that distinction unavoidable — anyone can check a TV anchor’s Twitter feed and see the position the on-air voice is supposedly neutral about.

What journalism actually is

Muzamil asks Talha to define journalism, plainly. The story Talha tells in reply is one of the most memorable beats in the conversation.

In London, he says, he used to go to journalists’ clubs — places where Channel 4’s anchors, well-known correspondents from Al Jazeera, documentary filmmakers like Ollie Lambert would all show up. He approached one of the biggest names at one of those events, introduced himself as a journalism student, asked for a coffee. The reply was kind. The card he was handed had a single title on it.

“It said reporter,” Talha says. He was shocked. In Pakistan, he points out, the moment you call someone a reporter you have lowered their status. The job title every TV personality wants is something grander.

“As a journalist,” Talha says, “your job is to report. That’s your ultimate job. That’s it.” Collect the maximum number of facts from every side. Raise the relevant questions. Stop screaming. “You probably weren’t this excited at your own wedding as you were the day Mian Sahib was arrested,” he says, of the news transmissions that night. That excitement, in his definition, is not journalism.

Building a viewer who can hold two ideas at once

Muzamil makes the structural argument back. The current generation, he says, is being introduced to the world in a partisan way — pick a camp, hold it, defend it. He and Talha both grew up reading newspapers in which the news was the news and the opinion was confined to two pages clearly labelled as such. Television and then social media broke that separation.

Talha’s framing of TCM’s mission lines up with that. He wants the kid growing up right now to be able to make adult decisions on a base of information that includes more than one side. The Journalist Diaries series, he says, is the simplest example. There was a particular public image of Hamid Mir as a journalist. Sitting down to interview him for the series, Talha says, “I was like, this is a completely different person.” Same with other senior journalists he had only known from television as a child.

The pipeline now extends further. Police diaries. Bureaucrats. Judges. A series with people who spent seven to ten years in Guantanamo Bay — four of whom were Pakistani, picked up from Afghanistan, Indonesia, and the UK. A forthcoming series with families of drone-strike survivors, including families where nineteen or twenty-five people died in a single attack, and where a second drone strike hit the funeral procession for the first. “These are the stories,” he says, “and they are one-and-a-half-hour interviews each. We pull ten, fifteen, twenty minutes out of them.”

Muzamil asks the obvious question: were these people complicit, or accidental? Talha is straightforward. They claim accidental. They are now planning to sue the US government. He does not know how those cases will go. What he does know is that Pakistani media, with very few exceptions, will not touch the subject — even though The New York Times, Vice, and others abroad cover it routinely. “I don’t know why Pakistani media is not touching these topics,” he says. “Yes, you will get calls. But you’re in the business. Otherwise, go and do something else.”

Pakistani advertising still wants the CEO on camera

The final long thread of the conversation is about monetisation in a different sense — the gap between the kind of native, story-led branded content that exists internationally and what Pakistani advertisers are willing to commission.

Muzamil makes a proposal in real time. Nobody in Pakistan, he says, has built the equivalent of How It’s Made for local industry — beautifully shot, personality-free explanations of how cement is made, how Tabasco is bottled, how Pakola is produced, how Ding Dong bubblegum gets to the shelf. He believes TCM has the grit and patience to attempt it, and that there is genuine commercial appetite for it from the brands themselves.

Talha agrees the opportunity is there and explains why nobody has executed on it. The Pakistani advertising market, in his read, has not matured around native formats. Pitch a brand a thoughtful, philosophical, audience-first concept and the reply will be: “No, you should say our CEO has done such-and-such” — that is the talking point they came for, and they want it in the video. Pitch them anything subtler and the logo placement question takes over.

He cites an instructive contrast from his time working with NowThis. They shot a story about a barbershop, funded by Gillette. The word Gillette appeared exactly once, in an “in partnership with” line at the end. In Pakistan, he says, the same brief would come back with notes about where the logo should sit in every cutaway.

Muzamil tells the story of an early campaign he himself ran with U Phone around 3G’s launch — a piece the brand had initially wanted as a comedy. He produced it as a serious, emotional film instead, deliberately under-charging and over-delivering, then released it on his own studio’s page and credited the brand at the end. The follow-up calls from other brands came on the back of that proof of concept, without arguments about price.

The shared diagnosis is the same. The model exists. Native, story-led, valuable-to-the-viewer branded content is the cleanest revenue path for a newsroom like TCM. The block is that someone has to absorb the cost of educating the first two or three advertisers about what they are actually buying.

Going regional, going global

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks where TCM goes next. Talha has clearly thought about this in a way he did not at the start of the company.

The first move is regional. TCM Arabic has just launched. TCM UK is planned for the following year. Branches, in other words, not a single Pakistani audience.

The second move is editorial. Two years ago, TCM Originals shifted the company toward longer-form original shows; that direction is going to continue. The base mission — give the viewer growing up right now enough information to make adult decisions later in life — has not changed.

The third is the social-impact line he has already been building: bureaucracy, the judiciary, drone-strike survivors, Guantanamo returnees, transgender Pakistanis, beat reporters. Each one is a category he believes Pakistani mainstream media has either misrepresented or refused to cover.

The conversation closes on the same note it opened. Talha did not start TCM with a vision deck. He started it because, by his own account, he is a journalist first. Five years and six thousand videos later, that is still the answer he gives when Muzamil asks him what he does.