It is heartening to note the approval for my last column, “An Indian global voice,” from the vast readership of this newspaper. The encouraging mails were not restricted to readers but also to some of the regular contributors to The Hindu . Academic Shiv Visvanathan wrote to say that he liked my point about The Hindu being an Indian global voice and that it has tremendous possibilities.
Online news consumption Some recent studies, research and empirical data analysis validate the clarion call of Prof. Robin Jeffrey and my own desire to see The Hindu as a distinct global player with an Indian voice. First let us take a look at the quantitative study from my alma mater, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2014 tracked and compared changes in online news consumption across 10 countries (the U.S., the U.K., Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Japan and urban Brazil). This year’s report found more compelling evidence about the pace of the multi-platform revolution and the increasing use of smartphones and tablets for news. The report also explored different ways in which people are paying for news, the growing importance of video content, and has some unique data about the role played by different social networks for news in the participating countries.
Trends The executive findings reveal some of the major trends: 1) The use of smartphones and tablets has jumped significantly in the past year, with fewer people using their computers for news. More than a third of online news users across all countries (39 per cent) use two or more digital devices each week for news and a fifth (20 per cent) now say the mobile phone is their primary access point. 2) The number of people paying for digital news has remained stable over the past 12 months, although there is a significant switch to more valuable ongoing digital subscription in most countries. 3) The social media index for news developed by Reuters Institute shows Facebook is by far the most important network for news everywhere. Although Twitter is widely used in the U.S., Spain, and the U.K., it is far less influential in many other European countries. Google+ is emerging as increasingly important for news, along with messaging application WhatsApp. 4) European respondents remain strongly committed to news that tries to be neutral (or impartial) but Americans are more interested in hearing from brands and reporters that are open about their own views and biases. 5) Traditional brands remain strong in most markets, with cross-platform newspaper reach averaging 75 per cent in most countries, but pure players and aggregators are now more or as popular in the U.S., Japan, and Brazil.
Nic Newman, one of the authors of this study in his introductory note on key findings wrote that in this web of contradictions he and his team found evidence that trusted news brands and trusted reporters remain important to almost everybody. “The names of those brands may be changing, along with the means of delivery, but notions of credibility, immediacy, and relevance remain core ingredients of success,” he asserted.
Tasks for journalism While the Reuters report was a survey based one with number crunching and data analysis, George Brock, a former editor of The Times and currently a professor at City University, London, looked at the qualitative aspects of journalism of the future in his book, Out of Print . I have borrowed the title of this column from one of his chapters in that book as it gives some idea about how to get ready for the next step of purposeful journalism. According to Brock there are four core tasks that journalism should perform, and it would be better done by people trained and experienced in this work and by groups or organisations that can produce output on which consumers and users can consistently rely.
Brock’s four tasks are: verification, sense making, witness and investigation. For him, verification is important because it eliminates doubt about what happened, especially about things that are likely to be disputed. Good journalism, says Brock, makes sense of facts that it selects and transmits and that it involves the exercise of judgment, which involves risk. He says that irrespective of the hugely amplified power of digital recording, there remain situations best captured, with whatever technology is available, by an experienced eyewitness. And, finally, he asserts that investigation require skill, experience, patience and resources to tell facts of importance that are hidden.
If one reads the Reuters study and George Brock’s book concurrently two things emerge clearly. The media landscape has changed vastly but the rules of what constitutes good journalism remains intact. The lesson from these studies is that reliability and trust drives numbers even in this digital age. Sustainable business models for new age journalism are in the process of being born. George Brock is sure that it is unlikely that the single powerful model that ruled for nearly a century-and-a-half — the cross-subsidy of reporting by advertising — will provide the platform. He sees a combination of solutions that vary from market to market and from culture to culture. The failure of The Daily , a news magazine tailored for iPad, backed by the financial muscle of News Corporation and Apple, comes as an indicator that technology cannot replace three fundamental impulses that drive readers towards certain media platforms — trust, reliability and authority.
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