Online media will be a 'tough challenge' for print publications in Barak Valley: Arijit Aditya

“Aspiring Barak”, an event organised in Silchar on Sunday by Barak Bulletin, a unit of Barak Darpan Private Limited, on the occasion of its first anniversary, witnessed a host of programmes including a couple of panel discussions on important topics.

The event, which was held at Rajiv Bhavan last evening, featured one of the panel discussions on – “Role of regional media in digital age”.

The panelists were Arijit Aditya, editor of Dainik Jugasankha, Taimur Raja Choudhury, editor of Samayik Prasanga, Mukesh Agarwal, chief executive officer of Barak Valley Cements Limited and Bibhuti Bhushan Goswami from The Times of India. The session was moderated by Arindam Gupta, staff correspondent of The Assam Tribune.

Sharing his opinion, Arijit Aditya said online media is a “big threat” for print media and web portals like Barak Bulletin and other online platforms are going to pose tough challenges for print publications in Barak Valley in the days ahead.

He said web portals have the advantage of publishing a news shortly after an incident and as such that news becomes stale and unfit to be given by newspapers to their readers the next day. Thus, print publications need to come up with “something extra” in order to maintain their readership and survive in the market. Besides, social media, which has the power to spread anything like a wildfire, is another factor which provides impetus to the news stories published by online web portals, he said.

“If an incident happens, online media can publish it within few minutes. Print media does not have this advantage and thus they would always have to give something extra and something different to the readers for their sustenance,” he said, adding that the emergence of a couple of web portals in Barak Valley will be a challenge for the print publications.

Taimur Raja Choudhury said print publications (vernacular news dailies) have been ruling in Barak Valley and will do so in the coming days as well, considering that people are not as such tech-savvy in the rural areas.

“It is true that online news portals are emerging gradually, but print publications will always have an edge as far as Barak Valley is concerned. In rural areas, people prefer reading newspapers only,” he said.

He, however, added that online news portals might become a threat in the coming days and print media publications need to develop a different and innovative approach in case of presenting news to their readers.

Mukesh Agarwal said online media can publish news stories immediately after incidents/events, however, they often do not have the time to properly analyse the stories. This is an advantage in case of print publications, he said.

“If an incident happens, online media can publish it immediately but they lack the time to check how far the news is true. Print publications, on the other hand, always have adequate time to properly check and analyse the veracity of news stories and explore the depth of different aspects related to the stories,” he said.

Bibhuti Bhushan Goswami echoed Agarwal saying print media publications have this freedom to thoroughly analyse all the aspects of a news before publishing it and thus there is almost no chance of fake news. Online media, whereas, are always in a race and often suffer because of paucity of time. Owing to this, fake/untrue or incomplete stories are found at times in web media, he said.

Print media has much more credibility when compared to online news portals, he added.