S M Dutt
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educing number of newspaper titles in the US, Europe and than closing of paper manufacturing machines producing newsprint need to be taken seriously. With number of around 150 newspapers having already announced their closer and the recent news of permanently closing down of two newsprint machines PM2 & PM4 at StoraEnso definitely indicates, a new trend emerging in the news publishing industry.
As the advancements in digital technologies are taking place and readers tend to go on-line with increasing number of electronic reading devices, it seems newspapers in printed form have started fading away steadily in select markets. However, in India, the pace of this process is very slow and not so evident; rather some newspapers are registering growth, specially vernacular ones. But it should be kept in mind that the flow of technological advancements is constantly becoming rather smooth in the era of liberalised economic policies, providing easy access to every one for the technologies being developed. In the fast developing countries like India, changes happen in the revolutionary way as we have seen in the case of mobile phones since the year 1995: cell phones directly came in the hands of millions of people who never subscribed for the landline phone services. Likewise, the availability of free e-mail services has reduced the number of physical/hard copy format post significantly, or may say, has made these outdated.
Similarly, if e-readers become available at affordable prices with user-friendly features, specially with comfort reading and high bandwidth speed of internet facilitating data transmission just at a click, there is no reason to avoid dominating online news services. The new tech-savvy generation with increasing purchasing power and rising literacy rate would prefer to go on-line where they can easily get much personalised news content. Ongoing ‘green’ movement for saving trees may also be an influencing factor for this shift. In this condition, it will be quite hard for printed newspapers to keep growing forever, thus making this a serious issue for newspapers having invested heavily very recently. The companies involved in manufacturing high end printing and other equipments for newspapers are already under pressure to think beyond, thus planning to help create alternate applications.
Ultimately, the emerging scenario is denoting what is going to happen in the upcoming years or decades. However, the transitional period may differ by country or region wise as per the nature of the market, but the change is inevitable. It seems a ‘wake up call’ needs to be taken up proactively for the betterment of the news publishing industry, accepting the evident reality. Indian newspaper industry, where the conditions are quite good yet, has adequate time to meet the changing requirements. The newspapers in the country can better survive for long, making parallelly available with all possible media viz online, e-reader or mobile versions etc, in which quite a few have already initiated. Interestingly hardware and software suppliers to the industry are also ready with their offerings to fulfill the changing requirements of the industry.
