Comtemporary India

The Changing Role of the News Media in Contemporary India

N. Ram

President Contemporary India Section

Indian History Congress

72nd Session Punjabi University, Patiala 10-13 December 2011

The Changing Role of the News Media in Contemporary India

N. Ram

President Contemporary India Section

Indian History Congress

72nd Session Punjabi University, Patiala 10-13 December 2011

The Changing Role of the News Media in Contemporary India

N. Ram1

The global scenario

The news media are in crisis across the developed world. Journalism as we know it is being described, obviously with some exaggeration, as ‘collapsing’, ‘disintegrating’, in ‘meltdown’. In this digital age, there is gloom in most developed country, or ‘mature’, media markets over the future of newspapers and also broadcast television. Two decades after a call issued from a conference in Windhoek, Namibia for the establishment of World Press Freedom Day, ‘the arrival of the digital revolution – the evolution of the Internet, the emergence of new forms of media, and the rise of online social networks – has reshaped the media landscape and made “the press” of 2011 something that those gathered in Windhoek in 1991 could not have imagined’ (UNESCO 2011). There is a strong sense that ‘the news industry is no longer in control of its own future’ (Rosenstiel & Mitchell 2011) and that it is technology companies like Google and the social media that lead the way and look set to hegemonize the public space that once belonged to the news media. The global financial crisis and economic slowdown of 2008-2009 sent several western media organizations into a tailspin. Advertising revenues, the lifeline of the newspaper industry, took a body blow during this period. Many big newspapers, whose strengths had been sapped and whose situational advantages had been undermined over the years, went into bankruptcy or protection against bankruptcy. The New York Times was bailed out by an emergency loan of US $250...