Who Are We Reading?
Meanwhile in digital news
“Bro, I don’t even read news.”
“Ay da, even if I did, The Times of India is cheaper than your journal thing.”
“What’s so great about your newspaper anyway?”
“Listen… I can all this info online. For free.”
In college, people are more likely to give you ten bucks for coffee than pay five rupees for the journal your class spent weeks working on. When we finally brought out our first journal, we thought we deserved at least 50 rupees for each issue, considering all the weekends spent reporting, all the late nights spent writing and all the stay-backs spent editing. Then we set out to sell it in the canteen and returned begging our professors to bring the price down to two rupees because “Nobody waaaanted it! And and… whoever said there is a future in journalism was LYINGGG!”
If people aren’t willing to pay five bucks for a printed journal, can you imagine how much they’ll pay for an online one? According to the Reuters Digital News Report 2016, while 45% of their sample pays for a printed newspaper, it is less that 20% that pays for online news.
The numbers haven’t changed much in 2017 as they observe “a continued reluctance to pay for online news in any form — overall more than eight in ten have not paid in the last year”. The report also analyses the use of ad-blocker across countries, demonstrating how advertisements fail to produce the revenue needed for news websites to survive.
Who then, pays for digital journalism?
Some websites insist that users disable their ad blocker in order to increase advertisement revenue. For others, paywalls are the answer. Paywalls however — by essentially restricting news to those who have paid for it — are often considered unethical.
The essence of journalism has always been to pursue truth and the public’s right to know… By locking down the news and denying open access to the public, paywalls are anti-journalism.— Bronwen Clune in New Matilda, 2013.
Most therefore, rely on investors.
In some cases, these investors are corporate giants. Like Reliance, which nudged Raghav Bahl out of the Network18 group he founded and bought it over in 2014. FirstPost is part of this group. Fun fact: In 2013 FirstPost merged with ForbesIndia and has since then been described as “not anti capitalist” by R. Jagannathan, the former Editor-in-Chief.
Interestingly, Raghav Bahl and his wife Ritu Kapur went on to create Quintillion Media (a digital media company) that has since invested in multiple online platforms for journalism. It not only funds the Quint, but has also invested Rs. 4 crore in the user generated content portal YouthKiAwaaz. In 2015 it invested in The News Minute — a digital newspaper run by Dhanya Rajendran, Vignesh Vellore and Chitra Subramaniam (whom you may remember from this piece).
However, if you check TNM’s ‘About’ page you will find that its primary financial support comes from the Independent and Public Spirited Media Foundation which also provides substantial funding for The Wire. Founded in 2015 by a group headed by Azim Premji and Rohini Nilekani, the IPSMF is a first of its kind trust in India since it allows for public funded media entities like the British Broadcast Corporation in UK and the National Public Radio in US.
Scroll.in meanwhile, is supported by a similar fund called the Omidyar Network which was established in 2004 by eBay founded Pierre Omidyar.
It is interesting to see that the founders of most of these digital media ventures are aspiring for “editorial and financial independence” and are not in fact young, tech-savy adventurers but rather those with a history in print and television media. More importantly, they’re the guys with networks strong enough to garner visibility for newly launched websites.
(Siddharth) Varadarajan is one of a flood of Indian “legacy refugees” who are fleeing the stifling confines of print and TV newsrooms in search of editorial freedom in a brave, new, digital world. They… (find) in the digital revolution a cheaper path to independence, made all the more attractive by the promise of exponentially greater reach. “We are tapping into an existing tradition of journalism in this country,” says (Naresh) Fernandes. “Those of us who started off 30 years ago, those are the [journalistic] values we reported with, and those are the values we are reclaiming.” — Lakshmi Choudhary in the Columbia Journal Review.
Previous posts in this series focused largely on the people who owned and the people who wrote the news in our papers. The drama in newspaper history, the dynamics of print business and the tussle between the MDs and the Editors was what defined the field. But when it comes to digital journalism, there is a third player in the game.
The reader.
Yes, you :)
When we write, we are often told to keep our audience in mind. As our audience changes, so does the way we present a story.
According to a study in 2007, when the internet first came to India in the 1990s, when newspapers like The Hindu began setting up their web editions (onto which they simply ‘scooped’ the news written for print), readers were largely non-resident Indians, over 80% male, and 50% merely there to access archives. Today, the numbers tell a drastically different story.
To begin with, a majority of online readers are between the age of 18–24.
This is news for the urban, educated, upwardly mobile 18- to 25-year-old who, as (Sattvik) Mishra points out, is loath to be force-fed his greens. “You don’t expect an 18-year-old to open a financial newspaper and read a 5,000-word analysis on the budget.” Young readers instead must be lured into fiscal policy via stories with headlines like “Why the Fuck Should I Care about the Budget,” which speak to pressing concerns such as the price of cigarettes, rum, and Red Bull. — Lakshmi Choudhary on CJR
But this particular significance of the reader is true no matter where one is writing. The difference is that in print it is the only significance while online, it is the least of many.
The reader, limited to but one or two letters to the editor, is taken seriously in the world of print only when accompanied by “worthy” credentials. Online however, readers are transformed. Here, what with comment features, user-generated content platforms and above all else, social media spaces like Twitter, readers may respond freely. They may disagree with what they see as biased reportage, they may contradict what they know to be false, may contribute their own sides to story and all the while, have their opinion “worthy” enough to be expressed not just over tea with their neighbours, but rather in the very same spaces that professional writers express themselves in.
See it as a kind of mutual fourth wall break. While digital media journalists now address and cater to readers directly, readers too, address and respond to journalists directly. There is not only the thrill of Deadpool talking to you, but also that of talking back to him! Conversing with him!
We are no longer the all-seeing all-knowing journalists…digital has wrecked those hierarchies almost overnight, creating a more levelled world, where responses can be instant, where some readers will almost certainly know more about a particular subject than the journalist… The ‘People Formerly Known as the Audience’ don’t just sit there, and if you don’t listen to them, work with them, work for them, give them what they want and need, they have plenty of other places to go. — Katharine Viner in The Guardian.
That is what news becomes online — a conversation.
Take the example of the recent explosion over the #metoo campaign and Raya Sarkar’s controversial list. Newspapers could only report it as “Raya Sarkar publishes list, well known feminists respond with Statement” and that’s that. Two positions — either for or against. Online however, it is not just the well known feminists who responded. My Facebook feed was flooded with lengthy opinion posts written by everyone from Nivedita Menon’s colleagues to my own classmates, from my own professors to those “named and shamed”, from journalists to science students. For me, a reader who is following the issue in this ever-updating digital realm, it is not black-and-white opinions but a lavish variety that make the news what it is.
It is the Op-ed then, that takes centre stage.
Whether it is DailyO, Huffington Post India or The Wire, such websites are mostly feeding on opinion… this is the reason why Raghav Bahl has been arguing since quite some time now that journalists can no longer afford to be generalists who are tasked with covering different beats. They have to develop an area of expertise so as to present an informed opinion which the online reader is diligently scouting for. — Saif Ahmed Khan on The Citizen
One of the things we learnt in journalism class last year was the way in which news is prioritised. Local news over news from Germany, news of national relevance over college news, men’s cricket over women’s badminton, et cetera. Basically we were told that majority wins and that the stories we want to read may often be given space only on inside pages or not at all. What’s more, these stories (like the one about our college NCC getting into trouble over the ‘I am Gauri’ protests) may never get follow-up pieces explaining the situation in more detail.
But online it would.
Because online, reaching out to extremely niche markets is a lot simpler.
Think of it this way. Say I am a huge comic book fan and would like to start a monthly newsletter that reports specifically on the women artists in that field. If I were to do so in print, I’d have to find people with similar interests within my area. In other words, if I distribute the newsletter within my college of 4000 students, I might find one other kid who’s interested. On the other hand, if I do so online (in a country that has over 450 million internet users) I could potentially get 100,000 people to subscribe!
Because circulation online is determined not by distance but rather, by network. By who shares what on Facebook, by who retweets what on Twitter, by recommendations and likes and vlogger and blogger reviews.
An example of this is Khabar Lahariya. Founded in 2002, it is a newspaper run entirely by women journalists that covers local news with a focus on gender and education. Published in local dialects it had a readership of about 80,000. In 2013 Khabar Lahariya launched their online version in order to let “the world know what they are publishing”. Because news needs to reach not just the ones it concerns and involves, but also those who aren’t aware of it yet. If I was reporting on an incident that occurred in my college for instance, I would want the news to reach students from other colleges as well as my own.
In print, it is the editor who decides what’s on the front page. Online, if you think about it, the reader can. By customising our newsfeed and putting together various beats of interest from a range of websites, we can effectively choose the kind of news that we want to see in a bold banner below the masthead.
The thought of this is super cool and simultaneously super scary. Imagine if my newsfeed was one that prioritised Ranbir without Deepika over Ranbir with Deepika then I might actually believe that the world cares more for Ranbir without Deepika over Ranbir with Deepika. Which is ridiculous because come on, everybody knows that Ranbir with Deepika beats Ranbir without Deepika any day.
Um.
Where was I?
Right, so one way of understanding the history of newspapers in India is by breaking it up into four phases. The first begins in 1780 with Irishman James Hickey’s Bengal Gazette — a phase characterised by multiple British newspapers bickering amongst themselves. Then we have the phase that follows the 1857 uprising, during which multiple Indian newspapers take on the British Raj. The post-independence phases is a somewhat confused one as Indian publications hesitate to criticise the very government they once fought to establish. But their reserve begins to break after Nehru’s death and with Emergency they find purpose again. Then as Liberalisation in the 1990s brings with it the Internet, the fourth phase of digital news begins.
Perhaps we are on the verge of a fifth stage now. But before we conclude, just note that the rise of digital media doesn’t necessarily mean the downfall of the newspaper industry. What I’ve completely excluded from this series is regional news. Remember when we looked at TOI and their readership of seven million. Well, the Dainik Jagran has more than 16 million. So don’t give up on print just yet.
FURTHER READING:
Thank you!
