Imagine the cost of sending a text message to your friend next door replying to his message with ‘OK”. It is a whopping 2 Rs in most cases unless you have a fixed monthly subscription. So in other word each word is costing Rs 1.
Now imagine the newspaper delivered at your doorstep, in most cases, more than a kilogram in weight and at least 30 pages in size. It is also the same price.
But newspaper industry produces this very newspaper at unimaginable cost to both the company and the environment and is yet delivered in time at your door step at these throwaway prices.
Now the mobile operators incur nothing to deliver the message but yet take a huge sum for delivery.
Welcome to the world of shrinking readership. India, like any other part of the world, is facing a severe readership crisis of print articles – whether it is a newspaper, magazine or a book.
The more it shrinks; the newspaper industry goes more into red. Many of them goes into the closure mode since they have no other way to survive than advertising, which again is shrinking like readership.
Now has the television viewership or online readership for digital content increased because of this? There is no concrete survey to establish this. Online readership has always been on the rise because of the advent of internet in new areas.
But television channels in India have made a travesty of its journey from good journalism to bad reporting to now sensational reporting. We now see more stars in television anchors than the news they present.
So can this be revived? The answer is a plain NO. It is very difficult, or rather impossible, to bring back lost readers.
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