Blogs anyone?
I started working as a journalist in India in 2007, when I joined Thomson Reuters. Since that time India has made some strides as an economy, largely for the good. But the media has largely been slow to adapt to new technologies.
The best way to see this is the number of journalist bloggers. Some people in the software industry have become bloggers and prospered, but they are a small minority. In the newsrooms I worked in, almost nobody blogged. Blogging was seen as this pastime if you don’t have work, or if you want an online substitute for your personal diary. That was the case in the United States when blogging started - and today a large percentage of journalists have their own blogs, and they are powerful voices.
One reason why blogging among journalists hasn’t taken off is because it is seen as a pastime. One day as I was blogging some colleagues came up to check it out and I could detect amusement in their voices, like “He blogs. What a weirdo!” That image was finally shattered when Reuters decided to start its own blogs, with some people dedicated to running it and posting on it. Suddenly the newsroom accepted blogging. But the last time I checked, blogs from Indian journalists in the newsroom were barely visible - on any topic.
I left Reuters to join a business newspaper and found an even stronger aversion to blogging. No one in that newsroom ever blogged or wanted to blog. Blogs were like this weird medium where people say anything. “I don’t want to go into all that,” said a colleague who wrote a story every two days. Another said that the consequences of blogging could be grave. “You never know what might happen,” he said, sounding weirdly cautious. Don’t you think before you write?
I gradually became less regular with my own postings, as none of the people I knew ever read them without me expressly requesting them to. It’s true that I was no Perez Hilton either - but some encouragement from friends or casual visitors would have been good.
Why this aversion to blogging? Partly because most people in India, including journalists, are extremely cautious about writing about others, and expressing opinions is not as natural as in New York. I once wondered why a colleague, who was covering telecom, didn’t do a blogpost on the corrupt minister who was jailed in the country’s biggest telecom scandal? He said that he did not want to get into trouble. This from a guy who was breaking news everyday about how the minister had sold telecom licenses at far cheaper prices and directed money to his own pocket.
The other reason is that blogs haven’t really taken off - because very few people read online. Only about 10% use the internet, compared to majority of the population in developed countries. I would hardly get comments on my online stories on the webpage - I would get them more through text messages and phone calls. My friends would praise a story in office but won’t ‘Like’ it on Facebook.
Low internet reach means less readership. Just like my own enthusiasm for blogging kind of petered out in 2-3 years, so did many others’. Also unlike news organisations in the U.S. which support blogging by their employees, Indian editors see that as an unnecessary hassle which is not worth the effort, given the small online audience. “I would need to appoint a small team to make sure no one posts stuff that is controversial, or plain rubbish,” said an editor to me four years ago. Instead of using blogging as a medium to get new followers to the site, it was seen as a burden. That stance has changed somewhat - some Indian publications do have blogs now - but they’re a random collection of posts and not updated regularly.
Perhaps the most important reason is that Indians love to talk and argue face to face. When travelling on New Delhi subway, which makes the New York one look antiquated, I would most often be the only person reading. People sitting next to me would try to peer in my copy of Forbes, hoping for something entertaining, and then look away. In crowded restaurants and pubs, journalists would be debating issues like the rise of India’s right, or how a story in a news channel sucked, but they won’t go and comment on the news online. I asked a journalist the answer to this question and he said “It’s such a hassle to go online!”
Blogging itself is growing - its just not growing among journalists. Blogs related to software, cricket and Bollywood are quite popular, if not necessarily very credible.
Indians still love reading papers and magazines, and I don’t mean online. I used to get papers delivered to my house and so did all my neighbors. Newspapers are booming there, and advertisers are happy to spend on print. Online is not big, yet.Internet connections are slow, spread of smartphones is low, and widespread power cuts don’t help. More people live in Indian rural areas, with next to zero connectivity, than the total population of the U.S. and western Europe combined.
It might take years for infrastructure issues to be resolved, but unpopularity of blogging by journalists has less to do with this and more with the reluctance to express opinions. Till that mindset changes, you are likely to hear only silence when you ask “Blogging anybody?” in an Indian newsroom.
