[Assam] Article

[anitak goswami]

Newspapers are here to stay

 — Ranen Kumar Goswami 

The
high birth rate of television networks is a death threat to newspapers,
so goes the popular perception. Some pompous preachers are writing
obituaries, especially at seminars in Western cities. Yet some others
say the market is exhausted, real journalism will be on television, and
there is no future in smearing black ink on dead trees and getting
child labour to deliver it on cold mornings.

But proving all of
them wrong, newspapers have refused to die. Simon Jenkins, who writes
for The Guardian, says: “Most of this doom-talk emanates from America,
where newspaper circulations have indeed been falling for decades. The
popular view is that this is because of competition from television and
the internet. The electronic media offer more readily accessible
information. As a result, not a year passes without another noble title
sinking like a battleship in Pearl Harbour, its reporters enacting the
Front Page for gleeful television cameras.” In a signed article in
January 2006, Jenkins wrote that, “in 1981 the outlook for British
papers was indeed grim. This is not because they were losing money –
most had relied on outside support for years – but because their
production and editorial methods were inflexible and deterred
competition. Even so, daily circulation was little changed from 20
years earlier, hovering at a million either side of 14 million......
British popular newspaper sales have continued to fall, from 13 million
overall in 1965 to less than 9 million today. But they are a separate
publishing market. Upmarket newspapers show a reverse trend. Their
daily circulation has defied every pundit, rising by a third since 1965
from two million to close to three million. The figure for the serious
Sunday titles is the same today as it was then, 2.7 million.”

In
India too, there’s no room for despair. Leading media watchers point
out that with newspapers in ten different scripts and 13 major
languages, the newspaper revolution in the country is unparalled
anywhere else. Renowned political scientist Professor Robin Jeffrey,
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University,
Australia, in his scholarship on the growth of successful newspapers in
a dozen Indian languages over the past three decades, highlights a
lively and buoyant situation. He says five factors are mainly
responsible for this. They are improved technology, which enables the
production and distribution of larger numbers of more attractive
newspapers; steadily expanding literacy; expanding purchasing power;
aggressive publishing that is driven by profit, power and survival and
seeks expansion; and political excitement. In Professor Jeffrey’s
opinion, for the past decades, the Indian regional language newspapers
have provided the hinges for the idea of a nation. The end of the
Emergency and the beginning of the 1990s spurred the growth of the
regional Press, catalysed by the communications revolution. Between
1976 and 2001, newspaper penetration trebled and daily circulation
increased six-fold. In 2005, advertisement revenue in the print media
exceeded 2000 million US dollars. The daily circulation of newspapers
saw a steep rise even during the 1990s when satellite television made
rapid inroads. However, as newspapers have become a mass industry, they
have lost their political potency as they are vulnerable to pressures
from the government and advertisers. Also, the increasing
corporatisation of media houses poses more of a threat to a free
many-voice Press than the prospect of foreign direct investment, says
Professor Jeffrey.

N Ram, Editor of The Hindu is of the view
that television is rapidly closing the gap with the print media in
terms of advertisement revenue and financial clout, but the quality of
its content delivery needs to be critically examined. Ram’s view, as
expressed in speeches he has made in various fora, is that despite a
statistically modest reach, the internet has profoundly affected
journalism practice. Issues such as tablodisation of content, the role
of market forces, the devaluing of editorial content, Rupert
Murdoch-style price wars and rampant corruption are increasingly under
examination. On the other hand, the National Readership Study in all
its recent surveys has shown that readership of daily newspapers is on
the rise. They now reach over 200 million people across the country.
There are at least more than a dozen dailies which are part of a ‘five
million club.’

But the scene in America seems to justify the
doom-talk. A study conducted by journalist Tyler Marshall and the Pew
Research Centre’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has concluded
that the state of the American news media in 2008 was more troubled
than a year ago. Carried out in the first quarter of 2008 and published
on July 21, 2008, the study was based on two primary sources of
information: face-to-face interviews with editors and other newsroom
executives at 15 daily newspapers across the United States and the
responses to a 43-question survey, administered by Princeton Survey
Research Associates International (PSRAI) and sent to editors of 1,217
daily newspapers. The Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), a
part of the Pew Research Center in Washington DC, is a research
organisation that specialises in using empirical methods to evaluate
and study the performance of the Press. The website of the study is
http://journalism.org/node/11961. A chapter in the study is “The
Changing Newsroom,” which says: “Meet the American daily newspaper of
2008. It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is
thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and
national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a
range of specialised subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in
an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part
of the paper. The crossword puzzle has shrunk, the TV listings and
stock tables may have disappeared, but coverage of some local issues
has strengthened and investigative reporting remains highly valued. The
newsroom staff producing the paper is also smaller, younger, more
techsavvy, and more oriented to serving the demands of both print and
web. The staff also is under greater pressure, has less institutional
memory, less knowledge of the community, of how to gather news and the
history of individual beats. There are fewer editors to catch mistakes.”

The
study captures the American newspaper industry in the grip of two
powerful, but contradictory, forces. On one hand financial pressures
sap its strength and threaten its very survival. On the other, the rise
of the web boosts its competitiveness, opens up innovative new forms of
journalism, builds new bridges to readers and offers enormous potential
for the future. Many editors believe the industry’s future is
effectively a race between these two forces. Their challenge is to find
a way to monetise the rapid growth of web readership before newsroom
staff cuts so weaken newspapers that their competitive advantage
disappears. The study claims itself to be an attempt to document where
newspapers are in that race. In short, where is the industry headed?

According
to the survey, the majority of newspapers are now suffering cutbacks in
staffing and even in the amount of news they offer the public. The
forces buffeting the industry continue to affect larger metro
newspapers to a far greater extent than smaller ones. In some cases,
these differences are so stark it seems that larger and smaller
newspapers are living two distinctly different experiences. Fully 85
per cent of the dailies surveyed with circulations over 1,00,000 have
cut newsroom staff in the last three years, while only 52 per cent of
smaller papers reported cuts. Recent announcements of a further round
of newsroom staff reductions at larger papers, including the Los
Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Washting Post, indicates
these differences may be widening further.

On the other hand,
newspaper websites are increasingly a source of hope, but also of fear.
Editors feel torn between the advantages the web offers and the energy
it consumes to produce material often of limited or even of
questionable value. A plurality of editors (48 per cent), for instance,
say they are conflicted by the trade-offs between the speed, depth and
interactivity of the web and what those benefits are costing in terms
of accuracy and journalistic standards. Yet a similar plurality (43 per
cent) thinks “web technology offers the potential for greater-thanever
journalism and will be the saviour of what we once thought as newspaper
newsrooms.” Despite an image of decline, the study informs, more people
today in more places read the content produced in the newsrooms of
American daily newspapers than at any time in years. But revenues are
tumbling. The editors expect the financial picture only to worsen, and
they have little confidence that they know what their papers will look
like in five years.

Some negative signals notwithstanding. We
would go back to Simon Jenkins: “ Newspapers are, like books, damned by
futurologists because their medium, print on paper, is antique. In
truth they have shown that they can grasp each new technology,
including computers, and bend it to their will. What Gutenberg invented
no one has bettered. Dead trees live. Read on....”

PUBLISHED IN THE ASSAM TRIBUNE ON THE 13TH OF FEBRUARY, 2009


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