:: Shekhar Bhatia

Tea and some dead-tree news

Shekhar Bhatia

March.27 : My mornings always begin with a cup of tea and a selection of newspapers: a quick look at the headlines, a glance at my emails and comments on my website, and back to newspapers. In that order. I do not know if the ritual would be different if I had not spent 30-odd years as a journalist.

In the course of the day, I also read some foreign newspapers and blogs on the Net, the feeds I subscribe to, and shortlist stories to post on Asian Window, the website a friend and I run. How much time I spend on each of these activities depends on a) how late I wake up, b) what the rest of the day is like, and c) whether the stories are interesting.

My son, a college student in the US, first checks his emails and then reads the news feeds and his favourite blogs on the Internet. I asked him if he buys a newspaper (they call it the "dead-tree version") and he said he doesn’t even know how it is delivered in the US. Earlier he used to read the news on his Mac, now it’s the iPhone. He doesn’t know anyone who buys a newspaper. I have met quite a few of his friends and they are all quite well read and well informed. His logic is: Why should we pay for yesterday’s news when we can get the latest for free.

For me, print and online versions are not mutually exclusive. I read both. On any given day I spend more time browsing the Web than reading articles in print. Online versions reflect a lot more energy than print. And yet, I am afraid browsing the Web is not the same as turning the pages of a newspaper. Be it a broadsheet, Berliner, tabloid or compact, reading the print edition is a habit. It’s all about the feel and, of course, the look. It’s a joy to open an elegantly designed newspaper. You see a stunning photograph, and the impact is dramatic. However elegant a newspaper website, it does not capture that drama.

When I was learning the craft of handling news there were no computers. Our bible was the five-volume set Editing and Design by Harold Evans, the former Sunday Times editor, where we learned the importance of white space and minimalism. That was in mid-eighties. The website of Newseum (news-museum) in Washington, DC uploads daily 700 front pages from 70 countries. Often after a big story — the Mumbai terror attacks or the Obama victory — I go to the site to look at some front pages.

But design is my personal bias. With the exception of a few, Indian newspapers are not design conscious. And their websites are either very basic or cluttered and chaotic. I guess their primary concern is still the print edition and there is no pressure on them to improve their sites. The number of pages may have shrunk due to the recession but, fortunately, there is in no danger of print going extinct in the near future.

My journalist friends from the US talk about hard times and job casualties and how even newspapers that have won Pulitzer prizes are shutting down their print editions. The recession and competition from Internet is forcing them to downsize. A blog called Newspaper Death Watch (the owner, a journalist, clarifies that "if the tongue-in-cheek title of this blog implies that I take some satisfaction in this collapse, that’s not my intent") has an R.I.P. column where it lists the US newspapers that have ceased print publication. At last count there were 12.

In a comment to a story on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s decision to shut down its print edition and go entirely online, a reader remarked: "As long as the newspapers are on the Internet why would I want to pull out 50 cents to buy it in paper..."

Will I pay for online content? I spend money on books and to download songs from iTunes, so why not for the day’s news? I share books with family and friends and listen to music over and over, but a newspaper? The answer, still, is yes, I will. I am all for online news; I just like the feel of print.

Journalists who use smart phones such as the Apple iPhone for news updates say it’s a whole new experience. It doesn’t come close to turning print pages but they like it nevertheless. When veteran journalists start justifying digital news delivery, the times must definitely be changing.

And now there is another gadget in the market: Amazon’s digital-book reading device called Kindle 2. It’s wireless, bigger than a cellphone, has a screen almost the size of a paperback, and can store more than 1,500 books. You buy it for $360 (Rs 18,000 approx.), subscribe to one or more newspapers (from a list of 32, mostly American) that will be delivered to you first thing in the morning (US time). If you lie in the US you don’t even require a PC; get inside a Wi-fi zone and you can download a book in a minute.

For book and newspaper publishers, Kindle 2 is good news: they have another medium for their product. The reviews say it’s an instant hit. I can see myself reading a book on Kindle 2 but not my morning’s paper. I want the print version with my cup of tea.

Shekhar Bhatia can be contacted at shekhar.bhatia@gmail.com