The future of newspapers in India: An existential crisis

 

The first newspaper in India was the Bengal Gazette in the late 1779. Since then, it had continued to grow, until recently, when the pandemic hit us. The main strength of newspaper has always been the credibility that it holds, of being very minimally biased. It has always presented both sides of the story. The no-rush way also helps in curating the whole news in a properly articulated manner. Unlike the new-age mediums such as TV and the internet, it isn’t about how fast information is given out, but how complete and detailed the information is. 

The internet is available in India since early 2000, but the cost was not affordable for a large part of the nation. Since the induction of Reliance Jio, the cost of data in India is the lowest in the world, which Rs 7 per GB. Since then, the availability of written content has also increased and a large part of the content online is free of cost. The information is given out quicker than ever before. The abundance of space lets publishers put anything and everything over internet, irrespective of its newsworthiness. 

The cost of producing a newspaper is high. The setup of equipment for printing press, the infrastructure to assemble printed papers, mode of travel and distribution, are all expensive. There are multiple people in the workforce ranging from marketing and circulation managers, beat reporters, copy editors to editorial teams and editor in chief. The average cost of production of a newspaper in India is Rs 20, whereas it is sold at Rs 7. The newspaper largely depends on advertisement for their revenue. A lot of advertisers have reduced the usage of print media for advertisements and are majorly investing in TV and Internet based advertisements, thus creating a deficit in the newspaper industry.

After the announcements of lock down, the acceptance of newspapers went low because of the perception that the newspapers may carry virus, which most reports denied later on. The reluctance for distribution also grew by the hawker’s association and the vendors, initially in Mumbai and then spread all across the country. Leading publication like the Times of India and The Hindu made it clear that they won’t publish physical edition but the online version would be available. News magazine-Outlook, sports magazine-Sportstar have already suspended print editions.

Due to the long-continued pandemic, the advertisers that were still investing in advertisements stopped it. It was due to two reasons: one, their own economy and industry was going down and they cut down the investment here and second was because a major readership of newspapers was in school, colleges offices and libraries, almost all of which is closed due to the pandemic and hence the advertisements would have very minimal views.
Though most of the papers are available in the e-paper format, that is the scanned version of the regular one, it attracts a minimal fee of subscription.

How many people do you think are willing to pay for unbiased information, where they can get spicy content free over the internet? The world will return to normalcy one day, but will print media get its readers back, is a difficult question to answer right now!