The Net: Media's threat or opportunity?

Anand Parthasarathy

One of the new words thrown up by the whiz kids who dream up the public relations ploys of major corporate entities is 'coopetition'. This can be conveniently rolled out when a player is not quite sure if it is better to be seen taking on all challengers with hard edged competition in the 'maidan' – or more pragmatic to accept that some of them are better – making it wiser to cooperate in search of larger long term goals.

 

Sadly, even a decade after access to the Internet became widely available to Indians, the print media seems to be unsure about its strategy to address this high tech challenger, not quite sure if the Net should be seen as a threat that must be fought off to preserve its tradition turf – or an opportunity that must be seized, to remain in the game. 

If so many Indian print journalism players have a Web presence, that is mostly the result of a domino effect rather than a carefully thought out strategy. If your main local or regional competitor has content on the Net – so must you. Surprisingly, the very media players who might be expected to be most Net-savvy were sometimes slow to realize the potential of Internet for adding a new dimension to print coverage. It is only in recent weeks – as part of a major design make-over, that the The Hindu's stable mate Business Line, began putting supplemental material in its Web edition, with pointers in selected items of the printed paper. Both papers have committed a large amount of storage, by retaining the full content of their print editions as archives on the Web, continuously since the turn of the century. But this very valuable resource (quite rare among Indian newspapers) is rendered somewhat less accessible after the paper decided to dispense with a dedicated search engine of its own and took the easier option of adding a button for a Google search. 

Again, it is a fairly recent development for Indian newspapers to have discovered something that has been blindingly obvious almost ever since print publications put their content on the Web: A significant number of readers still look for the precise look and feel of the printed edition – the familiarity with the traditional organization of front and back pages and designated spaces in between cannot easily by replaced by a random rehashing of the same content. Hence the popularity of 'e-papers', which preserve the exact physical placement of news and features in the print edition. To its credit, the Indian media has, by and large provided this extension of the Web edition for free – rather than charging a premium as so many publications abroad have done. 

This may not be altruism, so much as a canny appreciation of what the Indian reader -- even when he or she is an expatriate – will or will not pay for: A few years ago, the India Today group, launched an excellent site, touted as the first 'pure play' Web newspaper called "Newspaper Today". It was a soundly conceived and well-received service with a respectable 'hit rate'. But those in charge clearly lacked the patience for the long haul. Within months, they converted access to the site into a subscription mode: Newspaper Today disappeared soon after.

Print media groups who run multiple dailies or magazines, have been able to leverage their strengths to create large, attractive and comprehensive web sites: The web editions of The Hindustan Times group took early prizes for its attractive web resources – and others like the combined site of the Indian Express group or even Indian language players like the Dainik Bhaskar or Eenadu groups continue to provide a rich and varied fare that draws on the geographical spread of their portfolio of publications.

While almost every Malayalam newspaper in Kerala, the '100 per cent saksharatha state', has a strong Web presence, it was, interestingly the Kerala Kaumudi group that very early saw the need to drive Web presence with a designated Web Editor and a creative team -- rather than merely transferring the days' print contents to the website. It also realized a fact of life that many Indian language players are still learning: that regional chauvinism does not pay – at least on the Net. Large chunks of the readership for the web edition of a Bengali, or Tamil or Hindi newspaper may come from 'sons of the soil' settled abroad, who may not even be able to read the script of their mother tongue: Yet in the long run, these are the steady users whose 'eyeballs' will provide the commercial rationale for a Web operation. 

The main Kaumudi site today, opens with an all-English news page. It is only by clicking to enter a Malayalam language option that one can access the groups individual publications like the Kerala Kaumudi daily or the Kala Kaumudi weekly.

Will the Indian media 'make money' from a Web presence or will the print editions have to subsidize this e-dge for some more years to come? Advertisement revenue from the Web is now mostly a small extension of the classified small ads sections of the printed edition – and unlikely to be a major milch cow. Some, like the Indiatimes operation of the Times of India group, have reinvented their Web presence as awesome e-commerce-driven resources, offering everything from discounted air tickets to a huge list of recorded music and lifestyle products. That may be the obvious, but not be the only way to go; Clearly media worldwide, not just in India is still searching for the magic bullet that will make the Internet a self-sustaining if not seriously profit making part of its business plan. 

In recent months, it is fashionable to point at the increasing popularity of blogs as sign that traditional media may be under threat from so called citizen journalists. It is not to detract from the service provided by such public spirited Netizens at times of crisis like the Mumbai train blasts in July 2006 or even the infamous 9/11 World Trade bombings in the US, to say that objectivity and accuracy of reporting -- the cornerstone of good journalism-- remain professional achievements, not something that can be left to the good sense of lay reporters. One may not go as far as to condemn blog journalism and wikipedia-type resources as 'untreated sewers of information' as Thomas Friedman, author of "The World is Flat", famously did at the NASSCOM Summit in Mumbai earlier this year. But one can at least appreciate the argument. 

Meanwhile, a web site address on the masthead of the printed newspaper remains what it has been for a decade now: A way of saying: 'We have our flag planted on uncharted territory. Maybe one day, we'll get lucky and find gold beneath our footprint in Cyberspace.' 

(The author is Consulting Editor - Information Technology with "The Hindu”, and is based in Bangalore)

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