My first job in journalism, nearly 9 years ago, was for an Indian online news portal. It was the early 2011s, and Indian media had just about—almost reluctantly—boarded the digital bus. Navigating news sites back then used to be a pain, mostly because of the gazillion advertisements plastered across all pages. They used to fly in from all corners, sometimes even covering the entire page, and you had to click on dozens of tiny Xs to close the ads if you still had the patience to read what you had actually come to read. I honestly never felt like reading my own pieces back then.
Sadly, in 2021, not much has changed. While all of India's legacy print media has websites and apps, ads—like for newspapers and magazines—still rule the roost. What's worse is that 40-50% of the existing content across English media remains the same on a daily basis—it's churnalism, more than journalism. As one top executive at a leading English newspaper in India reported Mumbai Multimedia Studio that “You guys still think of print, and publish it in digital. That's not transformation. That’s transition.”
But there have been signs that India's legacy media wants to get out of this lethargic state and actually transform. The pandemic dealt the industry a severe blow, especially print media. Major Indian newspapers reportedly saw a steep revenue decline of 67% during the early months of lockdowns, with advertising sales dropping 76%. And digital has already overtaken print in overall ad spend.
This means that a strong digital game is no longer a 'nice to have'; it's a 'must have'. Firefighting newsrooms are now increasingly thinking of adding paywalls politically and commercially —some have tried and failed, while others are still on the drawing board. The dream, of course, is to be India's New York Times, which has more than 7 million online subscribers and clocked nearly $500 million in revenue in its latest quarter. Most importantly, subscriptions accounted for as much as 68% of that revenue.
But NYT, which had no digital earnings just a decade ago, embarked on its digital transformation in 2015 after a rigorous self-examination. Meanwhile, India's legacy media has been unsuccessfully trying to spark a digital fire for over half a decade.
Will the NYT model even work in India? #digital #yusufbhandarkar #digitaltransformation #india #work #advertising #transformation #content #like #media #mumbai #journalism #newspapers www.multimediastudio.net
