There isn’t a media conference these days where the subject doesn’t wind back to online vs offline journalism. Usually the debate is polarised between those who accuse 'hardcopy hardliners' of being fossil dinosaurs, and traditional hacks who think citizen journalists are impostors.
Till recently, I confess, I was a skeptic. The digital divide globally and within our countries made the debate only theoretical for us in developing countries. Before we stick computers into a classroom, I argued, how about making sure it has a roof first? What’s the point of 'leapfrogging' to computer literacy when schools don’t have textbooks, teachers are often absent and school kids suffer from chronic malnutrition?
These arguments are still valid, and some of them have been levelled at initiatives like 'One Laptop Per Child'. Nepal’s internet penetration rate is 5 per cent, but a survey showed 20 per cent had used the internet in the last three months. According to a BBC Trust poll in 2007, nearly 80 per cent of those using the internet accessed it from cybercafés, mostly to check emails, and stayed online for only 1-2 hours a week. But things are changing rapidly because of the online application process for the US visa lottery, and with 17 per cent of Nepalis living and working abroad at any given time, VOIP and chats have spread the use of the internet.
But how much potential is there for online journalism? Till a few years ago I was a hardcore hardcopy guy. Now, some Nepali FM stations have more listeners downloading broadcasts from the net than tuning in through the radio. If you miss the BBC Nepali service at 8:45 PM you can listen to it at your leisure online, although you may have to wait a while for the full download in Nepal because of low bandwidth. When Nepali Times started in May 2000, it was online for the first two months before the first hardcopy edition came out in July and today, we have more readers online than in print.
At a recent media conference in Hong Kong, panelists for a session on the sustainability of online journalism listed the pros and cons. There was the familiar listing of the minus points of online journalism:
- citizen journalists lack training and this hurts the credibility of the content
- the information surplus makes it difficult to find relevant information
- any Tom, Dick or Hari can do blogs
- readers visit sites they agree with, leading to ideological ghettoisation
- content is prone to misuse for defamation
- not 'mass media' but 'individuated media'
The plus points were also familiar:
- digital, multimedia content
- interactive
- dynamic updates, deadlines meaningless
- end of geography
- the medium levels the playing field
Most panelists agreed that neither side was right, nor wrong. The consensus was that online media is like a tiger, and if you don’t ride it, it will gobble you up. Just as radio before the advent of tv was different from radio after tv, newspapers too have to adapt to survive. The newspapers of the internet age have to change hardcopy content in order to complement news portals, their online editions have to separate products and not be treated like an afterthought where paper content is dumped. Content has to be written to contribute to a pool of knowledge of the subject that updates past coverage and will itself need updating in real time.
Online news sites do not compete against each other for eyeballs, but together they compete against social networking sites. An average reader of a news site in the US spends only 2-8 minutes a month there, but they spend at least 7 hours a month on Facebook alone. Readers are no longer reading an entire newspaper from start to finish, they pick and chose what they like to read online and preprogram their computers to do the sorting for them.
There are many examples of newspapers and magazines that have adapted their hardcopy editions to the internet age (The Economist, by making its paper copy complement online information, has overtaken Time and Newsweek in North America in circulation) or launched award-winning sites (The Guardian) that are now far ahead of the hardcopy in terms of readership.
The critical issue is revenue. The consensus in Hong Kong was that very few news outlets can get away with charging for content, and the only models that work are with financial magazines. The hope is that ad revenue for online will pick up and ultimately overtake the paper edition. But for the foreseeable future in Nepal, the income must still come from selling the hardcopy and the space in it to pay for the online editions.
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