Make way for the new media

With this piece, I complete one year of writing for Deccan Chronicle. It has indeed been a gratifying experience to transcend the entire paradigm of the media cycle from 160 characters on Twitter to 60-second sound bytes on television and 1,600 words in print. In the case of the latter, much to the consternation of the editors who had to contend with pieces way over the word limit. An oft-repeated transgression that they have overlooked with generosity and magnanimity.

Over this period of time, I have deliberately refrained from writing about the media to put some time, space and distance between my thoughts on this matter and my former remit.

In the first of the occasional and staggered pieces on the media to follow, let us commence by looking at the structure of the Indian media and the contradistinction between the traditional qua the new media.

India has 99,660 print publications, 832 permitted private TV channels out of which 406 are news and 426 non-news. Twenty-one odd TV channels are run by the public broadcaster some in the terrestrial mode. There are 245 private FM radio stations and 179 operational community radio stations. Supplementing this is a network of 229 broadcasting centres, 148 medium frequency, 54 high frequency and 168 FM transmitters of the All India Radio.

The print media has a combined penetration of 14 per cent of the population that translates into 173 million households. One sixty eight million homes have access to cable and satellite TV. All India Radio alone covers 99.19 per cent of the population. There are 952.34 million mobile phone subscribers in India out of which 116 million have Internet-enabled smartphones. The number of Internet connections are estimated at 302 million and the number of social media users at 145.2 million and rising. In all, it is a bewildering but vibrant paradigm.

What, therefore, are the projections for the traditional media and how would it square up to the challenge of the new media? The golden lining for the print sector is that it is projected to grow at a combined aggregate growth rate (CAGR) of 8 per cent in the medium term when many global print institutions have shut shop and switched over to the digital space. India is bucking the trend, though most of the growth is expected in the regional space.

The proliferation of television still remains the poster child of the liberal information order that came to hold the field post — the opening up of the skies to private players. New players are still entering the TV genre everyday. Radio has got a new lease of life due to the hand-held phone explosion. The upcoming FM phase-3 auctions that have been in the works since 2011, could add another 839 stations across 294 cities. If the Supreme Court rules that news should be permitted on private radio stations it would make the state of play all the more stimulatingly chaotic.

The cheeky dare to the traditional media is the new media that rides on the back of the Internet — the most impudent tryout with ochlocracy and the largest ungoverned space on planet earth. The sardonicism of the Internet is that it is one thing built by humans of which they understand less and less as it evolves.

In the next few years, the world’s virtual population would outnumber the physical population on planet earth. A virtual civilisation exists in the ether that is increasingly becoming immune to the rules of engagement of the corporeal world, and governance gurus have no clue how to deal with this apparition.

As the new or social media becomes the first port-of-call for all information, the virtual world would be awash with massive amounts of low-grade and unverified content a-la-citizen journalist marvel. It would make the contest to put the feed out first almost rapacious among the traditional media. In the process, credibility, which, in any case, is at an all time nadir, would be a casualty.

Rather than compete in an unwinnable race, the traditional media can evolve into a credibility filter, certifying as to which virtual source is credible. A kind of ISO 9002 or a standards organisation, while continuing with it’s originally envisioned role of a more profound and informed voice in the public discourse. It would liberate both print and television from the breaking news syndrome and actually allow them to become the contextual and analytical mien.

A classical specimen of this credibility certification paradigm was the live tweeting of the Abbottabad raid by an insomniac social media buff. If there would have been a believability benchmark, the traditional media would possibly have picked it up and the world may just have watched it live. Traditional media organisations need to learn to live with the reality that they cannot be everywhere all the time.

Another structural issue that the traditional media has to cope with is how to democratise itself. The top down discourse where people have to suffer the agony of excruciating editorialites or anchorities on a daily basis, is passé. That is the reason why, despite having 400 odd news channels, they collectively account for only 7 per cent of total television viewership. The remaining 93 per cent is occupied by general entertainment channels.

According to industry-accepted audience measurement indices, the largest Hindi news channel has a viewership that extends to 0.14 per cent of the populace and the biggest English news channel may just be circumscribed to 0.01 per cent of India’s population.

Despite a historical dominance stretching back three centuries to 1780, when James Hickey founded the bi-weekly Bombay Gazette, the biggest circulating Hindi newspaper reaches only 1.35 per cent of the people and the largest circulating English newspaper only 0.63 per cent of the public, while the analogous social media numbers are climbing exponentially.

The traditional media has a legacy of ownership issues going back to days of the Jute Press. The manner in which television licences have been doled out over the past two decades is the most corrosive chapter in India’s economic liberalisation story, despite the poster child status enjoyed by it. It has not led to market diversity but fragmentation compromising the independence of newsrooms.

The Chinese wall between boardrooms and editors’ cabins has now morphed into a seamless funnel of synergy where the latter dictates the former in increasing if not domineering measure.

As the fabled editor of the Patriot newspaper, R.K. Mishra told the Rajya Sabha way back in 1974, “Now, where is the freedom of the press? What do we have? In India we have the freedom of the newspaper proprietor, and in some cases the delegated freedom which is enjoyed by newspaper managers.”

The new and current affairs portals on the World Wide Web do not carry these legacy burdens. They are not publishing or streaming videos for an offline entity and then mutating it to fit an online paradigm. They can leverage the advantage that the democratised social media allows — to crowd source preferences and customise content accordingly. Not for very long can corporate agendas of media barons and the ideological predilections of editors hold sway.

If they do not change, they would perish and this is just the beginning with 4G, Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-plus carriage technologies, coupled with artificial intelligence, transforming the new media on an everyday basis, the fun has just begun. This is a narration of just one out of the myriad trials that traditional media will have to surmount.

The writer is a lawyer and a former Union minister. The views expressed are personal. Twitter handle @manishtewari