Will newspapers still be called newspapers if they are not printed on paper? Or will it simply be called something like online news site or news-in-hands or news onscreen?
It is kind of absurd in the Nepali context to think that newspapers are facing a big challenge from technological advancement in the digital form, especially at a time when newspapers are actually growing in numbers and overall circulation. According to an internationally-acclaimed prediction, Nepal is among the last nations from where newspapers would disappear, some 40 to 50 years from now.
But it is safe to say that there will be a time when newspapers printed on papers will no longer be mainstream; rather it would be an alternative source of information. The increasing trend of reading news onscreen is certainly going to have a big impact on the future of newspapers. This is also because unlike many other technologies, web technology impacts very quickly and one would not be completely off the mark to predict that in a couple of decades or so, newspapers would become a rarity!
Wait! Here, I mean that the newspapers printed on pulp paper and thrown to our doors early in the morning will become a rarity. News or the process of news production will remain intact, perhaps more important than ever.
NEWS ONSCREEN
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The hardware that is making big news these days is e-reader. Beginning from Amazon’s Kindle to Barnes & Noble’s Nook to Sony’s Reader to Apple’s iPad, e-readers are hot products. Right now, there are a handful of newspapers with Kindle or iPad editions – the number that is certain to grow in the years to come.
Cell phones are getting smarter and becoming more of a versatile device with technology empowering it in becoming a ‘handheld companion’, which is now much more than just a ‘phone with alarm and text messaging’. The size of devices such as Samsung’s GalaxyTab and BlackBerry’s Playbook, which are a little bigger to be called a cell phone and a little smaller to be called an e-reader or netbook, are emerging and could go on to become hot products.
With every hot product, there are predictions on how that is going to change what we already have. For many technology writers, e-readers and handheld companions are the future of newspapers. The technological advancement is happening at such a rapid pace that if some company in the near future announces the launch of a foldable device, it would not be a surprise.
The debate on whether newspapers will disappear has been forgotten for good and the new debate is whether e-readers and handheld companions will save the newspaper industry.
What I am wondering about is whether newspapers will still be called newspapers if they are not printed on paper and only available onscreen, or will the word ‘newspaper’ become history and replaced by a word like news onscreen.
For me, newspapers should not be called newspapers if they are not printed on paper. They simply should be called news onscreen regardless of what design they have or in which device they are available. And, in such a scenario, the news industry can neither remain content with once-a-day update nor can they avoid multimedia content.
THE INDUSTRY & PROFESSION
In this backdrop, the question ‘Is digital media killing journalism?’ has become irrelevant. The right question now is: Will digital media be able to save the news industry and the journalism profession?
The death of newspapers – meaning the end of printing news on papers – will not be the death of both news industry and the journalism profession. The printing press may become history, but there will be digital content production department in news industry. New devices can of course save the news industry that can simply close down printing presses (and replace it by a team of web designers and programmers) in the fight for survival with the online news portals.
Journalism will become more participatory with readers actively participating in news prioritizing (by their consumption and display-customization of content).
The threats from bloggers and individual news producers will diminish once the digital form of newspapers becomes the main source of information on those new devices. People will rather prefer to go to well-presented, designed and rich content of newspapers, which will be delivered wirelessly to the devices frequently. Blogs will remain a powerful medium but not to the extent that it will be a threat to the news industry.
I believe newspapers are not the yardstick of the life of journalism. Journalism is collecting, writing and presenting of news and in doing so following some universally-accepted principles such as accuracy, objectivity and fairness through some medium, which can either be newspapers or take on a digital form.
Journalism should evolve; the principles we hold today for it were not the exact principles held a few decades ago and they will not remain the same in the next few decades. So, even if there are no newspapers, journalism will continue to remain though the principles guiding it may change.
Newspapers may not remain as popular as it is today, but news industry will remain as it adapts to a new dominant medium as demanded by the new technologies.
(Published in Op-Ed section of Republica national daily. This is a revised version of a blog post I wrote earlier.)
