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CALLING READER 2.0
Technology has changed the way news travels and is received. If you have a relevant message, someone somewhere is ready to listen. Trick is to get it right, writes Vijay Jung Thapa.
In 1961, Arthur Miller wrote: “A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.” I’d like to re-jig that a bit. “A good newspaper is when a nation’s citizens start talking and sharing with each other.”
Welcome to the connected world. To understand the future of news, one needs to delve into the past. How did people get their daily news fix just 500 years ago in a world where there was no TV, no radio and … no newspapers? Simply put: by word of mouth from their relatives, friends and the community. Everyone was a receiver and transmitter of news.
But with the advent of technology (like the printing press) everything changed dramatically. Suddenly news — in the shape of a newspaper — was being generated by a small set of people for a much larger audience. They named it mass media. Information only flew one way and the audience could be best described as placid “news observers”. Radio and later TV too amassed their own faithful followers, getting a monopoly of attention. No longer. There’s a relatively new kid on the block — and it’s called the Internet. Today we are witnessing the chaos of a huge shift from the disconnected to the connected. And we are just beginning to understand the consequences. The lessons are immense.
For one, the new digital natives aren’t interested in being placid consumers of news anymore — they want to create and communicate their own version of news. While TV or a newspaper may still hold their attention — it doesn’t monopolise it. They share information and trust what their friends and peers are saying more than any mass media organisation.
Social networks, Google, Flickr, Twitter and a host of other technologies are allowing people to do just that. It’s like an ancient wheel that’s coming full circle. Today everyone is a news producer — uploading videos, blogs (there’s a new one on the Net every 0.13 seconds) or pictures and sharing them with everyone. If you have a relevant message, someone somewhere is ready to listen.
So how do these momentous changes affect us at hindustantimes.com? To my mind in at least two main ways. One — you can no longer send the same content through a delivery system to millions of people. No one’s interested. The diversity has to be immense — and the need of the hour is for customised content. The way to achieve that is to allow your audience to be part of the news generation process. They have to believe that news in the Hindustan Times is a two-way street and that we are not only voicing their concerns but allowing them to upload their real stories.
Secondly, we are going to see an implosion of digital content. It’s like a huge tsunami wave rushing in to consume us. How does one make sense of it? What is garbage and what is relevant? What do I pay attention to? So a key task for a relevant news organisation in the future may not be the generation as much as the filtering of content. To make sense of it, to contextualise and put it in perspective for everyone. If we do this effectively, the future is ours.
Vijay Jung Thapa: Editor, New Media
