News on the Internet
BREAKING NEWS: Sunil Saxena; Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited, 7, West Patel Nagar, New Delhi-110008. Rs. 275.
EVEN IN the most wired of nations, the U.S., the majority of people get their news about Iraq not on the Internet, but on television. A survey found that among those who log on regularly, some 17 per cent said their principal source of war news was the Internet, while those who relied on television was about 80 per cent.
These findings by the Pew Internet and American Life project might disappoint the advocates of New Media who would like to see it emerge as the main source of news in the not-too-distant future. But there is something deeper to the Pew report: more readers have been getting their news about Iraq first online, compared with the period just after the September 11 terror strikes.
In fact, there was a surge of interest in the Internet when the Iraq occupation was imminent, because of the diversity of news and opinion there. Though television was still on top when the U.S. bombing started, it soon became apparent that more true stories on the situation were available on weblogs run by journalists and others, than on television channels featuring embedded reporters with "permitted" footage. Internet news was in serious competition with traditional media. Time then, for news websites to take themselves seriously.
This book by Sunil Saxena is a chronicle and a guidebook to the brief history of news on the Internet, with particular reference to India. It is also a textbook and a sourcebook with practical chapters on writing and editing creatively to make the most of the medium.
The author uses his experience of starting websites for the New Indian Express group and of teaching students at a journalism college to give "Breaking News" a longer shelf life than a period-specific volume might merit.
He traces the evolution of news websites, from the time they were started by news organisations to provide material from their print editions to mostly Non-Resident Indian (NRI) audiences as a matter of prestige, to the present when technological changes have ramped up competition. There is also a brief and naturally inconclusive discussion in the book about the question of whether websites affect print sales; the newspaper research and consulting firm Belden Associates reported results of a study that showed single copy sales of newspapers had negative growth last year contradicting earlier studies that seemed to show a beneficial impact of websites on print sales. Such fears, coupled with weak advertisement revenues, have resulted in print being placed above online in the scheme of things in many Indian newspapers.
However, the competition among websites is intense and the author looks at the frantic search that websites make for good stories all the time and how they try to innovate with headlines, pictures and text to keep the online reader coming back.
Websites score over other media when stories break; unlike television, which "pushes" programming to the viewer, the Internet is a "pull" medium where a variety of content, including visuals, sound and other graphics, can be downloaded from a variety of sources at the same time.
The content built up by newspapers in searchable form also becomes a resource for scholars and the public alike when they look for background and insight into particular topics.
The book presents a simple account of how this hyperlinked universe is built and the ways in which the online journalist must exploit its capacity to widen his reach. To illustrate the Internet's capabilities, the author chooses an example that he is most familiar with — the coverage of the attack on Parliament in 2001 by the website of the New Indian Express group. With its "practitioner's manual" approach, the book gives a step-by-step account of the website's coverage, that could serve as a general framework for coverage of such breaking events.
The perspectives on why online advertising failed in India and how a basic understanding of the working of search engines helps improve traffic to the website will help beginners. The truth about the news websites in the country today is the race for traffic through a high degree of tabloidisation.
The book gives it some degree of importance and acknowledges the impact of dumbing down on New Media. These issues are bound to be looked at more closely in the coming years as news websites become more important.
The challenge before the medium is to create strong journalistic foundations, as the author notes in his chapters on style, privacy and law. That will be vital to differentiate the serious sites from the cyber-tabloids.
G. ANANTHAKRISHNAN
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