News Websites : History and Response
BY: Dr.Y.Bala Murali Krishna
The Hindu was the first newspaper in India to have started its news website in 1995 taking advantage of the growing popularity and availability of the Internet.
Other newspapers, both English and the language papers followed suit. A majority of the daily newspapers in India, both national and regional, had opened their web editions.
Even popular magazines like the Outlook and the India Today besides Tehelka had launched their web editions with highly attractive features to compete with one another.
A UGC sponsored study undertaken by former of the department of mass communication and journalism, University of Pune, Dr.Kiran Thakur, in collaborationwith his colleague Dr.Ujwala Barve, revealed that the newspapers were forced to open their own web-editions with attractive features to cater to the growing demand of the varied netizens, particularly the NRI’s and the youth.
This is to help boost not only their circulation but also earn added revenue by selling space through the web portals. Apart from publishing digital editions of respective newspapers, they opened the websites with colourful features to suit the varying tastes of the discerning public.
Some even had taken advantage of the ‘multi-media platform through convergence technology’ the internet offers and started embedding audio-video and photographs besides infographics in respective websites, leave alone updating the content very often.
Despite availability of convergence technology, Telugu news portals continue to be primitive with none venturing to introduce attractive features like audio-visual clips and the photo albums, leave alone instant commentary link for each of the main news items and updation of the news items very often.
There is every need for making the regional language news portals very dynamic to attract various segment of the readers so that they would be forced to read respective newspapers for detailed news and analysis.
Interestingly, even the national, regional and international newsagencies had opened their ownn websites and started catering to the requirements of the subecribers through the webportals by offering various products like photos and infographics, besides presenting the news in English, Hini and even Urdu.
They were simultaneously serving the subscribers through the V-Sat system direcctly at the doorstep of the subscriber providing realtime news service.
The regional news agencyblike the neighbouring Associated Press of Pakistan had taken the bold initiative of serving its subscriber with convergence technology besides providing the products in Urdu, Pushto and even Arabic.
Interestingly, the global news agencies like the Reuters and the AP and the AFP started serving the subscribers with news and even opinions and comments countrywise and in different languages across the globe.
