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The new technologies are accelerating a
shift of power away from traditional voices of authority in journalism
and politics. However, new media designers predict that the day-to-day
mass audience will splinter further into niches, because people will want
to create their own customized flows of information.
In politics, citizens already are treated as demographic niches, and
our common values rarely are addressed. Candidates and political interest
groups deepen our divisions by fashioning single-issue appeals to narrow
voter populations. If we are looking for a national sense of citizenship,
of shared interests and goals, we will have even more difficulty finding
them in the niche media.
Technological trends are radically privatizing or individualizing how
we spend our limited free time. The fundamental values of both journalism
and politics are being challenged, in part because of the new technologies.
Their problems--and their revitalization--are inextricably linked. The
future of both depends on how effectively they can revive their core standards
and regain the public's trust. Today, "news especially electronic media
news," many times an artificial construct is under cloud. Unless journalists
work now to save it, ethics of objectivity that developed in journalism
in the seventies and eighties as both a reform effort and a response to
market opportunities may be doomed.
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The idea that these audiences simply have fled to television news is
not an adequate explanation. Latest NRS (National Readership Survey) figures
prove that in spite of television news penetration the newspaper readership
has expanded. Indeed, the national television networks, which once enjoyed
the attention of a captive nation, now compete with many alternative offerings
on cable. Now that legal obstacles have been removed, the new telephone
companies are laying fiber optic networks, enabling them to transmit their
own news and classified services directly into the home. Ironically, we
are losing our gatekeepers just when we need them most.
People are overwhelmed by news products and imitations: infotainment
magazine shows, infomercials, docudramas, home videos, talk shows, and
Internet gossip, all competing with traditional news stories in the old
and new media. Citizens need a trustworthy guide not just for reports
about what "officially happened" around the nation each day but for the
enormous flow of information that is gushing into their homes.
News organizations have responded to the new media environment in several
ways. Many journalists, instead of beating their entertainment and propaganda
competitors, are joining them. The increased competition spawned by the
new technologies has led some traditional news purveyors to "go tabloid"-increasing
coverage of celebrity gossip, bizarre crime, and sex scandals to try to
retain their mass audience. Television news and magazine programmes on
Indian news channels, in particular, have loosened their standards and
definitions of what makes news.
As news organizations react to these new technologies, many are concentrating
on the look and feel of their delivery systems, trying to figure out how
they will sell what is basically the same old content in new media formats.
This may be the wrong focus. Digital technologies now free the news from
any fixed delivery medium, enabling consumers to convert content instantly
into video, audio, or text. The journalist's challenge isn't the medium
but the message. As consumers start experimenting in cyberspace, journalists
need to address more urgently not the delivery format but the quality
of their core product: reliable and useful information on which citizens
can act.
Many journalists would vehemently deny that their product is in trouble.
Certainly some of the best journalism ever practiced is the work of the
current generation of news professionals such as Rajdeep Sardeasi, Shikha
Trivedi, Dibang, Deepak Chaurasiya, Prabhat Shunglu, Nupur Basu, Rajesh
Badal, Barkha Dutt in television and Sankarshan Thakur, Ritu Sarin, Shudiranjan
Sen, Rashmi Saxena, Basavi, Sreekant in newspapers. And some highly successful
news offerings by NDTV on Star News, Aaj Tak, the Indian Express, India
Today, The Hindu and Business Standard prove that audiences still appreciate
high-quality journalism.
News is India's daily meal of politics and policy information. Instead
of informing citizens in ways that might be useful to them, today's influential
reporters often focus on interpreting political and public policy news
as if they were professional wrestling referees. It is common on any television
news channel that the reporters provide narrow, superficial, pseudo-insider
coverage of the government's actual business or activities. The citizens
are never provided the real news on policies, reforms and public welfare
decisions. What you get to read or watch is nothing but neatly packaged
infotainment where even the most sombre or poignant information is dramatized
in the form of sensational revelation of innocuous information. Young
journalists, taking cues from their more prominent colleagues, instead
of asking a contesting political candidate, "Why are you contesting for
this Assembly or Parliament seat?" the question is often asked, "How do
you plan to win the election or how can you win?"
The journalist earlier used to gain status by dining yet not aligning
with his subjects; now he gains status by just aligning with them. Instead
of highlighting problems in a way that would corner the political system
or administrative system, journalists now reward the politicians, by not
letting any relation to serious political argument, let alone to grown-up
ideas about conduct and morality. Instead of proving that journalists
are unbiased guardians of the public trust, this perpetual negativity
may one day backfire.
If the television news channels continue to cover the world cynically
and assume that everybody is Machiavellian and motivated by their own
self-interest, it might invite their viewers to reject journalism as a
mode of communication because it must be cynical too. Increasingly, people
see journalists as a special interest group, like any other, which manipulates
them in order to throw its weight around or make a buck.
In the digital world, journalism is liberated not just from time but also
from space constraints. The reporter's dream has come true: now there
is a bottomless news hole, thanks to new technologies and the Internet.
Online news customers become archaeologists; they can start at the surface
with the headline, digest, or summary of the news, and then click on words
or pictures to enter layer upon layer of longer stories, related features,
analysis pieces, and sound and video clips. Finally, they will reach original
documents and discussion groups on an issue.
The new technologies offer journalists not only the potential perils of
competition and scrutiny but also the potential benefits of an expanded
role: connecting citizens to information and to each other. To succeed,
journalists cannot connect simply for the sake of connecting; they will
have to deliver something of additional value to the customer. Interactivity
is only one of the dramatic technologies now changing the television news.
More significantly, the hot "scoop" loses its commercial value in this
competitive environment. Reporters, who rate each other on who gets the
news first, prize scoops. However, the value of the time-sensitive scoop
is lost in the constant news marketplace. Even though more and more television
news channels "burn their brand" into each video frame to mark their scoops,
the news consumer rarely remembers who had a news item first as she surfs
through scores of channels.
A news organization will need something exclusive to offer if it is to
occupy a distinct niche in the multichannel environment. A news channel
with a trusted anchor and a newspaper with trusted editor will have an
advantage in the new marketplace, and a different kind of exclusive scoop--a
research or analysis piece that has been developed by the news organization
alone--will sharpen the purveyor's competitive edge.
(The writer was editor of Zee News and Star TV Interactive and is
currently working for the Community Media .)
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