KOTTAYAM: The future of media lies in convergence and single vertical organisations have begun leveraging it for streamlining their newsroom operations, said Vinod Mathew, Resident Editor, ‘The New Indian Express’, Kerala. He was delivering the keynote address on ‘Journalism in the time of Convergence’, at the two-day UGC national media seminar held at St Stephen’s College, here, on Thursday.
Vinod asserted that there is no question of print media withering away and dying in India in the near future as in the West, following the deluge of information through the new media. “The good, old-fashioned reporting still holds the key to newspapers doing well in a crowded market. In-depth and analytical reports, and the occasional investigative stories, well narrated still have an enormous market,” he said.
To that extent, social media networking sites have been functioning as catalysts in the transformation of newspapers, sometimes even influencing the style of functioning of the newsrooms, he said. “The emergence of social media such as Twitter and Facebook has resulted in the timely delivery by reporters; on the other hand they serve as an alert mechanism for the news desk. This provides ample space for forward and backward integration and the loop gets completed when the content finally goes into print. What starts off as 140 characters in a tweet or 100-150 words in an online report later gets developed into bigger stories for the newspaper,” he said.
Vinod also fielded numerous questions from the audience comprising budding journalists from Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), MASCOM and students of St Stephen’s College. Deepu Joy, assistant professor, IIMC, chaired the session. The seminar on ‘Mass Communication - Challenges, Trends and Future’, organised by the Department of Oriental Languages, at St Stephen’s College, Uzhavoor, in association with the IIMC and Kottayam Press Club concluded on Thursday.