Digital avatars

There was a time when foreign correspondents wrote for readers in their home country. The very word evoked images of remote, faraway lands, exotic cultures and strange and unusual customs. These correspondents were authentic witnesses to world events and cultures and chronicled them, filtered through the lens of their own perspectives and personal experiences. Their narratives followed the standards of journalism as defined by their newspapers — but they were expected to add context to their copy, and often mined their own lives for the stories they wrote.

And then the world got hyper-connected, and everything changed.

Today’s foreign correspondents write for readers “back home” as well as readers in the country they are covering — just as much as local journalists write for international readers. Actually everyone today writes for this global, wired, urban reader who has access to much more news at his fingertips than ever before.

So, how should traditional newsprint media differentiate its product? Because that’s what news has become today — aggregated content for websites, a product to be consumed by readers who are looking to add value to pure informational tweets.

Any seventh-grader can tell you that media and technology are hyper-linked. Each time technology changes, media has to reinvent itself. If the 1990s was about broadcast journalism, this decade will be about digital news. Already, media houses offer innovative digital versions of their newsprint stories to increase their digital footprint as well as online reader engagement. International newspapers are leading the way in repackaging their news digitally as quick, valuable accounts of the day, synthesising, analysing, summarising — categorised under different heads — like agile, innovative news engines, in order to retain and boost readership to survive.

Oh, I’m not talking about news aggregation models that sites like the Huffington Post, Newser or Gawker follow, but the web-avatars created by the disaggregation and repackaging of news providers’ own painstakingly gathered on-ground reportage and analysis. Digital platforms have become cheaper (even though newsgathering itself has not). With newsprint costs no longer limiting content delivery budgets, news providers can actually offer an entire range of products to consumers through blogs, specialised portals, podcasts and websites, tailored to fit different requirements, even as boundaries between information, news, analysis, views and opinions get further diffused.

As its own media reporter David Carr says, the New York Times with 80 blogs, 17 million people visiting its website and 100 videos a month, is “fully engaged in the revolution.” From community news sites like the hyperlocal borough-based The Local, which micro-covers New York’s East Village and a couple of communities in Brooklyn, to more regional coverage in Chicago and as far as the Bay Area, to the country-focused “India Ink”, these blogs are led by Times journalist working with paid stringers, local journalism schools as well as citizen journalists. Times journalists act mainly as moderators, ensuring that the newspaper’s standards of journalism and integrity are met as they combine their experience with the community’s enthusiasm and students’ youthful energy.

“We want to create multi-way conversations,” associate managing editor Jim Schachter, who oversees all NYT’s digital initiatives tells me from his Eighth Ave office. In fact, he says India Ink was an initiative of Times journalists posted in India “who saw the opportunity to serve the Indian market with authoritative reporting,” and wanted to lead conversations at the domestic as well as diasporic levels.

Actually, the Wall Street Journal figured this out even earlier. It always had differentiated versions of the Journal for Europe and Asia, but was quicker on the digital draw perhaps because its parent company was used to providing financial information and business news electronically through Telerate and its joint venture with The Associated Press (AP-Dow Jones), though through very different models, to specialised consumers. It has almost 60 global blogs, including one on wine. Its “India Real Time” blog started a year ahead of India Ink and leverages regular posts from the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires reporters “to provide a unique take on the main stories in the news.” This early mover advantage in country-specific blogs (Japan Real Time, Korea Real Time among others) and more importantly, that they translate into the local language at the click of a button (so India Real Time translates into Hindi!) ensures it an edge — and guarantees a greater reach among readers. Which is its ultimate aim — finding new readers for the WSJ, says Paul Beckett, South Asia bureau chief. Considering that this is the only way foreign media can percolate into the Indian media space, “we’ve made a virtue out of a necessity,” he says.

Jyoti Pande Lavakare is a Delhi-based writer