A Newspaper's Cri de Coeur

I was a part of the daily routine of most households and people used to read me along with the morning tea. I had an air of solemnity as I was holding mirror to the society and highlighting some of its warts. I could make or break reputations or even bring down the governments. A late editor of a leading English daily had once bragged he was holding the second-most important job in the country.

At school, teachers would advise students to read newspapers to improve vocabulary and general knowledge. And diligent civil service aspirants used to pore over my editorials, with dictionary close at hand, to help them with unfamiliar words. In pre-television days I was the ultimate window to the world.

However, right now I am facing an existential crisis and pundits have been writing my obituaries for a while. The combined onslaught of television, internet and WhatsApp forwards have been taking a heavy toll on me.

In the pre-internet days when television was the only threat to newspapers, some enterprising publishers tried to remodel me as primarily an advertising and marketing platform and dumb down on social issues. A famous press baron once even said that news is mere space filler among the advertisements, or words to that effect.

So broadsheets became tabloidized and all pages reeked of a Page 3 feel as newspapers stooped to conquer the yuppy eyeballs by providing them a feel good experience. Those working in the newsrooms started getting reprimanded by their higher-ups - please don't carry such 'downmarket' photos, our newspaper has an upmarket readership.

The coming of the internet further eroded my advertisement catchment pool. Thanks to some online classified listing platforms such as Olx and Craigslist, our clientele for classified ads disappeared. For the customers it no longer made sense to go to a newspaper office to submit an ad, pay per word and then wait for days to see it published - when all this could now be done at the click of a mouse and often at free of cost.

Remember those pages and pages of matrimonial ads on Sundays: Highly educated US-settled Iyengar Brahmin engineer looking for a 'fair' bride of the same caste, or a fair, well-educated, cultured Goud Saraswat Brahmin girl looking for an alliance; intespersed with words like 'decent' marriage (a sly hint that dowry will be offered) or 'simple' marriage (no dowry). To digress a little these columns gave a glimpse of myriad castes and other imponderables such as gotra and manglik that come into play while fixing marriages in India.

These ads too started porting off to those dime a dozen matrimonial sites such as Jeevan Saathi, Bharat Matrimony and some to more granular caste-specific sites like Nair Matrimony or even those catering to divorcees like SecondShaadi.com.

Amid all this disquiet on the advertisment front, subscriptions were also on a free fall despite dirt cheap rates. The predatory pricing by some leading players ensured that newspapers remained even cheaper than the daily chai-sutta expense of its readers.

Even in the households where I had entry, it was a coffee-table-to-attic existence, with every family member regarding me as part of the furniture. I was considered way too 'low-tech' and taxing to read because of the falling attention spans of people and the younger generation in particular. There is now even talk of a 'post-text society' dominated by videos and memes.

Those travelling by trains or buses used to carry me to kill time, but now they have their smartphones to stream them music videos and movies. Anyone without a headphone during travel is now considered a Philistine.

While this death in slow motion has been going on for years, Covid-19 pandemic has appeared like one of those masked movie villains who surreptitiously enter the ICUs in the dead of night to pull the ventilator plugs.

My entry suddenly got forbidden to apartments and households. The resident welfare association unclejis saw me as a disease carrier. For many I was a good riddance, as they were happy in their post-truth bubbles - with the daily fix of dubious WhatsApp forwards, plus 9 pm prime time debates aired by North Korean channels.

Newspaper circulations started getting reduced to a fraction of what they were in the pre-Covid era. The smaller ones started shutting down while the larger ones started cutting down on pages, print runs and ultimately jobs. Losing a job during lockouts is the unkindest cut, but for many journalists and other newspaper employees it is the new normal.

In the post-Covid world the newspaper industry will be reduced to its skeletal form and probably the worst hit will be ground reporting with journalistic checks and balances. This will only mean ceding the ground to fake and unverified news, which has already overrun most social media platforms.

The television channels gave up ground reporting long ago and settled for a less expensive model of prime time anchor and panelists engaged in a debate, which at best is a staged circus with very little journalism and loads of propaganda thrown in. Certainly not a good model to follow and not at all conducive to democracy.

Only a handful of publications, mostly online, may keep the flag of journalism, as we knew it, aloft. But for how long is a big question.


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