Priyanshi Sharma at Maadhyam Season 5, Parul University!
Priyanshi Sharma, co-founder of the independent, youth-focused newsroom Peek TV, spoke at Parul University’s Maadhyam Season 5 media festival on 11 September 2026, in a Samvaad session titled Finding Your Own Path. She was introduced at the festival as among the youngest principal anchors in NDTV‘s history, who anchored flagship programs before studying management at the Indian School of Business and co-founding Peek TV with fellow journalist Vedant Agrawal in early 2025. The conversation moved between her career, the economics of attention, and practical rules for a young journalist.
Accuracy over speed
Asked to choose between speed and accuracy, Priyanshi Sharma chose accuracy, and drew on her years in a legacy newsroom to explain why. She said Peek TV is rarely the first to break a story and, for that reason, has never had to delete one for being false. The discipline, she argued, is what builds trust, and it is more valuable than being first.
Engaging, not entertaining
Sharma drew a careful line between engaging an audience and entertaining it. News, she said, should be engaging, meaning every line gives the viewer a new piece of information, rather than entertaining, which is what gets added to a story the audience has stopped thinking about. She traced the problem to the economics of round-the-clock television and warned that social media, meant to cure television’s excesses, was starting to repeat them through manufactured urgency.
Algorithms and the marathon
On who shapes public opinion, Priyanshi Sharma called algorithms ecosystems that do not understand balance and advised students to compare their feeds with others’ and to go directly to the news platforms they trust rather than letting a feed decide what they see. Using her own ground coverage of a youth protest at Jantar Mantar, she argued that the quality of information travels even without speed.
“Look at it as a marathon and not a sprint.”
Integrity and transparency
Asked what she would never compromise on, Sharma said integrity and described transparency as the safeguard, pressing students to demand disclosure of paid content, including paid political content presented as news. She also defended the vocabulary of caution, the words allegedly and reportedly, as journalistic protection rather than jargon. Her closing advice to anyone wanting to start an independent platform was to begin with one founding principle and return to it whenever a decision is hard. The next generation of media professionals begins with the right foundation. Explore the BA and MA in Journalism and Mass Communication at Parul University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and turn your passion for communication into a profession.
