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The challenges in retaining the reader

On May 6, 2008, The Hindu, in the column “This Day That Age” had an item headlined, “Television and Newspapers”, published on May 6, 1958. It quoted Sir William Haley, Editor of The Times as forecasting a struggle between newspapers and television. Speaking in London on May 1, 1958, he said newspapers would have to “rethink our production, advertising, finances and staff policy, fighting for anything we believe in, namely the written word.”

That was when TV had not made inroads in India. But in the mid-1980s when I was News Editor in The Hindu, the Editor cautioned me: the challenge from TV is coming up (there was only Doordarshan then) and the paper would have to reorient itself and change the way news was packaged and presented — moving away from bare narration of facts to provide background, analysis and interpretation, to make the newspaper different from TV.

Twenty years on, these words get a new emphasis when the challenge to newspapers is tougher in the digital age. As a report for the World Editors Forum points out (The Hindu –Business Line, May 7, 2008), newspapers must innovate, integrate, or perish. Greater emphasis needs to be placed on comment and opinion. While newspapers have survived the competition from TV, the challenge is more serious now. The report forecasts that the most common form of news consumption will be through the digital media, such as online or mobiles, within a decade. The number of young people reading newspapers is declining in mature media markets.

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The challenges ahead call for new thinking. Major newspapers abroad now have stories appear first on their websites and then, perhaps in a different form, in the print edition. This makes news a continuous process with revision and updating going on, including inputs from readers who become participants, not mere consumers of the product. Citizen journalists, now seen on television, will also play a part in newspapers, which can no longer afford to brush them off. Such participation, in my view, will be mutually beneficial — new ideas, facts from one side and the needed perspective from the other.

The new medium of blogs cannot be a real competitor to the old and established media; blogs are mostly dependent on the print media for their content and do not have much original reporting. But where they have original content, this can provide material for a newspaper to develop.

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Has the need for a totally different approach from what is seen on TV been fully understood? Visually yes, content wise, no. Most of the stories on Page 1 have already been seen/heard on the electronic media the previous day. That gives one the feeling that the content is driven by TV. Rarely is there something exclusive, totally new. With such content, how can the page retain reader interest?

The picture is often different on the inside pages. There are stories that generally do not interest TV where the emphasis is on the visuals, on action. But even these stories in the print medium can do with better, crisper presentation to draw and hold reader attention. The attraction of the inside pages however is not a recent phenomenon. I recall my Editor telling me that he looked first at the inside pages before he turned to Page 1.

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It is a matter for comfort that The Hindu does not resort to dumbing down news on these pages to titillate the reader. Its coverage does not result in a “structural shutout” of the poor, which P. Sainath highlighted in his address at the convocation of the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, on May 3, 2008. No doubt corporate affairs and events get extensive coverage, but there is no “corporate hijack” that he sees in the media world in general, nor is there any “privileged right of corporate giants.” But there is another kind of hijacking that reader S. Sivaraman (Srirangam) refers to — by political parties resulting in newspapers abdicating their responsibility to the public to give them the full picture.

Sainath decried the failure of the media to report in adequate detail events like the current crises in food, agriculture, and labour. The Hindu has been devoting a lot of space to the impact of the spurting prices on the public. This is the supply end of the food chain. The production angle also needs equal, if not more, attention. There are many constraints and bottlenecks in agricultural production and also a shift from foodgrain production to commercial crops. These await a detailed critical study. Agricultural economics is a specialised field that needs, but does not get, expert coverage. Sainath has done commendable work in highlighting the humanitarian crisis on the farm front. The other areas too need attention. Labour issues are now a totally neglected area.

There was however one point in the report of the veteran journalist’s speech that made my eyebrows go up. Sainath urged journalism graduates to “correct the failings of the Indian media in the last decade.” Can any journalist employee in a newspaper rectify its lapses? What then can the new entrants do?

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There was another report on the media (May 2, 2008) that raised doubts in me. “More Indians want media without government control” was the headline of a Washington report of a survey by “WorldPublicOpinion.org” to commemorate World Press Freedom day. The headline, I thought, was dubious as also the statement in the report that “a modest majority of Indians realised the importance of media freedom.” Does one conclude that there are Indians who want government control over the media and that media freedom does not exist in India?

One-third of the respondents (there was no indication of the size of the sample surveyed or its physical distribution), the report said, felt the government should have the right “to prevent the media from publishing things that could be politically destabilising.” If true, that is a dangerous view — who is to decide what will be “destabilising”? There were more views on similar lines in the report.

readerseditor@thehindu.co.in

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