Building an audience is a protracted and painstaking process which
demands perseverance more than anything else. Going into what
constitutes the standard for a majority of people is beyond the scope of
this article but my message is: you cannot just sell anything.
Relevance is also not the sole criteria for an acceptable content of a
viable new media outlet. While credibility is the main virtue behind
people's sustained interest in such a venture, it is the most delicate
thing as it takes years to be built but minutes to be erased.
Desist from preaching and making unsubstantiated and overarching predictions, that is my ordinary approach to many contemporary issues. That is the best way to avoid being prematurely discredited, whatever one writes in whichever field. But too much of caution risks making one irrelevant to the readers by shying away from burning issues of the day. A cautious approach with relatively valid arguments is thus the optimum policy, it can be safely said.
The issue of New Media has been in discussion for long. I have been actively engaged in the realm and have been a very enthusiastic member of the evolving community of non-traditional stakeholders of today's media world. Subsequently, I have been aware of the talk about new media challenging the traditional media.
To start with, the traditional (T) media, at least in this article, means the established forms of communication like newspapers, magazines, televisions and radio. And new media means those which are struggling to gain prominence in society as forms of communication but are yet to succeed. Blogging and a host of related online outlets working without well-established hierarchy as in the T media, and most importantly, needing no large scale investment, could be logically included in this. Social networking sites, being very important cousins of the new media, are better characterized by their popular name of 'Social media'.
Frankly, the two media cannot be compared in same terms at this point of time, at least in South Asia. If Traditional (T) media is the pompous and obese middle-aged,the new media till today is a cachectic infant. While power and connections of the T media make it a notable presence in the society, they constitute the parts and parcel of inherent downsides and limitations of this form of media. On the other hand, despite the relatively small and less visible role it has played so far in shaping the society, the very slimness and lack of connections of the new media comes as its asset when it comes to competition with the powerful old rival.
I have been observing these features of the two media for long but one unprecedented account of T media prompted me to compare it with new media in this way. That was the autobiography of
the-most-sacked-editor-of-India Vinod Mehta.
I
reviewed Mehta's book in this blog but my temptation to draw some more meaningful inferences from experiences of the veteran editor refused to die away. After all, his career spans at least the precious three decades during which many experiments took place in the traditional or mainstream media in India. In a sense, the media industry in India 'matured' during the period by appropriately(?) accommodating to the liberalized economy over the past two decades. Mehta's account of the journalism in India is thus an illustrious tale of strengths and weaknesses of T media. At heart of his personal story is the unending struggle between the owner's efforts to optimize profits anyhow (even ditching the best interests of millions of people when it came to that) and the editor's effort to balance that by using his judgment to the extent possible.
One simple inference that can be made from plain reading of the book is this: while the corporate funding of the 'free' media in the form of advertizements has no alternatives in today's world, the very lifeline has the possibility of choking a publication by forcing it to compromise on contents. While the shadow of ownership of the media house and its links with the powerful people and companies is not always visible in the contents, that works endlessly and the balance between the owner's need to optimize profit and keep the beneficent advertisers happy and the editor's effort to bat for the interest of larger public is very delicate and tenuous.
