Newspapers rarely made money from circulation. Most of their revenue came from advertising. Now, with people reading news online for free, circulation and advertising models of the past have gone for a toss
Part of my day job is to look after the digital affairs of this newspaper, and in doing so, I have access to all the search queries, visitors make on Google to reach our website. It is remarkable to think that today somebody sitting 10,000km away can search for a specific story from a few months ago and find it using a search engine based on a different part of the planet, all within a few seconds.
It is also remarkable that more people can access this newspaper online than read it physically. On some days certain stories can have hundreds of thousands of visitors. For example, our Dehradun edition carried a story about the confusion regarding the date of Raksha Bandhan. Thanks to the internet, this story became one of our most popular stories that day even though it had not appeared in our Delhi edition.
Everything, from films, documentaries and music, is stored online. If one desires they can listen to hours of music on internet radio stations, watch films off websites such as YouTube and access classroom lectures from some of the leading universities in the world, without paying a penny. There is, therefore, little doubt that the Internet has significantly transformed humanity’s ability to access information.
Of course, that has not been without challenges. While the Internet has opened up this newspaper to a whole new readership and to people who may have never heard of this institution, we, like many other news publishers, are suffering as well. Running a news organisation is an expensive proposition. A network of reporters to file stories, copy-editors to edit them, and editors to take the final decisions, cost money.
For better or for worse, the circulation battles that took place in India in the 1990s made physical newspapers a loss-making product. The cost of the newsprint that goes into papers is a multiple of its cover price; factor in distribution and the fact that the newspaper hawker takes most of the cover price and it comes as no surprise that most newspapers and many magazines make next to nothing from circulation. Money is, therefore, raised through advertising. Some media houses have been very good at raising money from advertising; others, particularly smaller papers, have not been so successful; some have sold their editorial souls and others, like us, have not.
And now there is the Internet. On one level, the Internet does provide a level playing field to smaller news organisations as a website address does not depend on any hawker to distribute it. But the Internet has also played a key part in merging the different roles of television and print media into one multimedia news service. Newspaper websites can have breaking news on a minute-to-minute basis, which they can broadcast to all their followers on social websites such as Twitter and Facebook. Television news channel websites can host long documentaries and written analysis by their newscasters and anchors.
Yet, the Internet has also led to decline in revenues. This newspaper’s website, like many others, puts out advertisements hosted by Google but the fact is that the American search engine giant keeps a bulk of the revenues. Even with direct selling, Internet revenues for larger news organisations can never match the lost revenues from adverting, both for television and print. And viewers have, on the whole, decided that they want news for free, although some newspapers have decided to go the fully-paid or partially-paid route. It is a route that few newspapers and magazines want to take, but not everyone has millions of dollars in the bank. Rest assured, this newspaper is not yet thinking of this route.
We also live in an incredibly fast news cycle. Within seconds of Islamist Al Shabab terrorists storming a mall in Nairobi, Kenya, pictures and videos began to circulate on Twitter, and large news-gathering operations such as Reuters and the Associated Press had stories up in a few minutes.
The leisurely morning newspaper read is all but dead, because the fact is that many of us have smartphones and thanks to being always online due to mobile broadband, news is always on our fingertips. Once upon a time if the hawker failed to deliver the morning newspaper, and on the days following Holi and Diwali when most newspapers are not distributed in Delhi, it felt like one was almost naked. Today, the biggest tragedy in most lives is if the network goes down or the broadband stops, even if it is for a few minutes. It is indeed remarkable how many people have multiple network connections just to be able to be always online.
Regrettably, the speed with which news comes also has led to the requirement to be able to scream and shout, whether on television or through headlines, just to be noticed. Banner headlines, once a rare occurrence, are common nowadays in certain newspapers. Even the evening newscasts, other than on Doordarshan, are often so loud and animated that nothing can be understood. This has also led to the creation of an ‘outrage’ factory, which has made news cater to the lowest common denominator among people.
Conversely, the ‘outrage’ cycle after a certain piece of news also dies down within a few days after the next ‘outrage’, with the old ‘outrage’ ostensibly solved on television but with nothing happening on the ground. For example, the rapists and murderers of Jyoti Pandey will be hanged but women’s safety, discussed ad nauseum by television channels and even in newspapers, has not really improved in India. This country, sadly, remains a horrible place for a woman. Yet, instead of continuing to debate this issue daily, hammering it in the authorities and educational institutions, it lies forgotten and is wheeled out only when the next ‘outrage’ takes place.
True, India is a large country and there are a multitude of problems that engulf it every single day. Many of these problems can be solved with better governance, and it is the role of the media to point that out. It seems bizarre that instead of setting the agenda, media houses are having the agenda set for them by others on the Internet in a bizarre feedback loop.
News organisations have to adapt to the Internet, but most of us have not managed to adapt well. When Jeffrey Bezos bought The Washington Post he paid a 10th of the valuation that the venerable newspaper had at its peak. Sometimes, a guy with a laptop and a data dongle can break news faster than a properly managed organisation and that is something that will not change, it will only intensify.
We may live in the golden age of information dissemination, but the golden age of newspapers and TV news channels is behind us. How we, as an industry, manage the future will determine what sort of future the world will have.