Aditya Chati's response to a post on Indian Online Journalism

There is a fundamental problem here. The Net never said that it would change
people. The Net never said that it would improve human thought patterns,
sophisticate human thinking and lend a sudden maturity - emotional and
intellectual - to the human race.

The Net is a technology. A new medium if you will. The Net cannot make a
better world. Only people can. What the Net can do and has done is
considerably help those people who want to change the world. But it cannot
give the will to change the world. The will is from without.

The Net is democratic, and whatever said it is cheap. And because it is
democratic, it affords avenues to all. From the ridiculous to the sublime.
The Net does not give the ability to distinguish between the two though.
That is the ability of the human mind.

Today a single individual can tell a story. Information will get out however
much the print media governed by rich barons muzzles it.
One man with only an idea can hope to change the world. And that is what the
Net has given. That was possible earlier of course, but the Net has made it
substantially easier.

Why should anybody expect corporates to suddenly turn altruistic saints,
countries to stop fighting and the rich to start scattering largesse just
because the Internet has now come into being?

And even in today's world, things take time. The free transfer of
information made possible by the Internet is the beginning only. At least
nobody has a monopoly over knowledge and infomration now. The rest will
follow. The world will change only if there are enough people committed to
changing it. The Net has at least made it possible for people, facts, data,
to extend their scope and coverage.

Whether we use this reachability at all and what we use it for is the
decision that will change the world. Not the existence of the Internet.

The speculative, carpetbagging element is a pan-historic, pan-cultural
phenomenon. Why are we surprised that it has happened to the Internet? At
least that element has been eradicated pretty quickly, we should be thankful
for that.

There's no Internet doomsday as there's no Interent panacea. Our problems
are ours alone.

To scapegoat a technology for these problems strikes me as puerile, childish
and self-defeating.

I started this weblog early this year. The intrinsic value of it is indisputable. There are many journalists who have used weblogs very efficiently. Yet, this does not seem to be the case in India.

Two interesting weblogs by journalists are:
http://www.andrewsullivan.com/
http://www.poynter.org/medianews/

Recently, I involved my students in covering the State Assembly Elections. It didn’t quite turnout the way I wished it would. But the experiment did convince me that weblogs are very useful for journalists. We need to make full use of the potential of this new technology.

Indian Online Journalism(IOJ), the forum, was founded on the 20th of August, 2000. IOJ is essentially a forum for journalists to discuss the development of New Media in India.

To subscribe to IOJ please send a mail to indianonlinejournalism-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.
The homepage is: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indianonlinejournalism
It is a moderated forum.

Welcome aboard.

Birthday Greetings

A year ago a dot-com caused a furore in the Indian media scene by announcing its arrival in grand style. It had to be the masthead of the Times of India.

A year ago I was working for the news channel of that dot-com. I had moved there from economictimes.com. From the content-rich perch I descended down to fend/fight for content. All we did was sub agency copies and the odd story from the correspondents(thank God for that).

To my dismay the stress was not so much on journalism but on just having a news channel.

I slowly but surely learnt that this ain’t no rediff.com. I don’t think those who mattered also knew how to look at the news channel as an entity.

In a horizontal portal you cannot expect to generate a lot of original content. Logistically, it is very difficult. I guess it does not make business sense either to establish a vast network of correspondents and stringers. It is naive on our part to think that purely online ventures will run like a regular newspaper.

But the point is nobody looked at an online venture as a publishing activity. Majority of the online ventures in India are run by MBAs from the best institutions you can name. They are inevitably busy trying to hold on to their fat salaries. Their relevance lies in running-down creative people.

Do I sound pathetic. Yeah. The dot-com demise is proof that these management graduates didn’t have the foggiest idea about what online publishing was all about.

As the dust settles down I'm not sure if some more “big players” will try desperately to fall.
At least they seem intent on doing just that. While there is still some sense and a lot of money they should rethink their strategies. Most have forgotten about the masthead but few will forget Tehelka. Than means journalists trained or untrained can do a far better job in the market place that all management graduates put together.


Subhash Rai

The new netiquette:
1. Friends don't send friends HTML email
2. Friends don't accept HTML email from friends
3. Friends don't let friends use Outlook or Navigator to read email
4. If you or a friend must break the above three rules, then disable Javascript
5. If you or a friend must break the above four rules, remove Javascript
code from the HTML emil you forward (ask a geek for help)

-Declan
For more visit:

politechbot.com: If you forward HTML email, it could be eavesdropped

Online Media: Old News? (washingtonpost.com)

We need to know more on what's happening in our own backyard.

Subhash Rai

This blog will discuss the Indian Online Journalism scene. The topic might not be so hot today. Someone has to start. Let it be me.