'Print media will flourish in India'

Hyderabad: Will the print media lose out to the new media and TV onslaught as it happened in the West? The speakers at a seminar on ‘The Continued Resilience of Print Media in Asia’ here on Saturday expressed confidence that the print media would grow extensively.

N Bhaskara Rao, founder chairman of New Delhi-based Centre for Media Studies (CMS) elaborated on the resilience of the print media in the country, specially the regional media. The plenary of International Association of Media and Communication of Media and Communications Research (IACMR) in collaboration with CMS was held at HICC.

He pointed out that Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan were glaring examples of resilience of newspapers in the country. He said AP has witnessed proliferation of news channels in the last decade, nearly two million additional circulation has been generated and the number of Telugu dailies too have increased.

“The extent of migration away from print is minimal but gain is much more, particularly of first time readers. This was possible because of appetizer effect of news bulletins, their more of the same content priorities and preemptive nature of reporting.”

Siddarth Varadarajan, eminent journalist and academic, drawing his experiences as the editor of the Hindu and The Times of India, opined that print media was more about business models than about journalism. He blamed the very cheap price of newspapers for the fall of this form of journalism. He spoke of the allied business of media groups and dependence on advertising for survival.

Dr Debao Xiang, a Chinese Scholar from Shanghai University, said the new media was influencing the mainstream media which was controlled by the state. He explained that print media is innovating in the digital era and reinventing itself with web applications such as messages and RSS feed that were now quite popular- even larger than pint version subscription.