Indian News Sites Cater to Expats

[icernet-admin at listserv.cddc.vt.edu]

Indian News Sites Cater to Expats

India's deep digital divide means most people are far from wired, and don't
get their news online. Even those who use the Internet don't use it to get
news of India -- they prefer to read papers. For now, Indian news sites are
popular mostly with expats hungry for news of home.

By Mark Glaser

If India is a land of paradoxes, then the world of Indian online media fits
in perfectly. While many Indians have a fascination with technology, they
depend on newspapers for most of their news.

Though Internet cafes have sprung up like chai shops on every corner, most
Indians do not go online, and Indian news sites still depend on Indians
abroad for a huge chunk of their readership.

And while India has received a surge of high-tech jobs outsourced from the
U.S. and Europe (including much of Reuters' content operations), it remains
a rural country where 60 percent of the population lives on less than $1 per
day.

If you want to reach people online in India, you have to worry about more
than just getting them computers and Internet access. The United Nations
Development Programme reports that 40 percent of rural and 20 percent of
urban households lack electricity in India.

The Computer Industry Almanac estimates that just 16 million of the 1
billion people living in India were Internet users in December of 2002. The
expatriate Indian community -- a huge source of traffic to Indian sites -- 
likely tops 2 million in the U.S. alone (it was 1.7 million at the 2000
census). And for those without an Internet connection, the flourishing cyber
cafes in India offer plenty of access.

Prem Panicker, managing editor of Indian portal Rediff.com, recounts just
how quickly Indian Net cafes caught on. He told me via e-mail how he was
covering elections in 1998 in small towns and cities in northern India. Each
night, he struggled to find online access to file his stories, at cafes that
had such horrendous connections that he ended up writing copy by hand and
faxing it to Mumbai instead.

"Two years later, when travelling in that same part of the world, I found a
cyber cafe on every street," he said. "Connections were better, access was
incredibly easier -- to the point where, for me, the progress in just two
years was an eye-opener. Today, it would be difficult to find a small town
or city in India where there wasn't a cyber cafe on every other street."

Rediff started in 1996 as a way for Indians living abroad to follow the news
from home. But by 2000, Indians started going online in larger numbers, and
Rediff -- which now has 27 million registered users -- found its readership
split almost 50/50 between Indians in India and Indians abroad.

"This in turn meant the Web site developed a dual mentality -- we had to
cater to the diaspora, and equally to the Indians back home," Panicker said.
"Obviously the needs of the two segments would vary."

Indians in India were going online for free e-mail and instant messaging, so
Rediff provided that -- along with shopping and pre-paid long distance
calling cards.

The younger Net generation in India is not into hard news, according to
Panicker, who says the site's most popular sections are entertainment (with
an emphasis on Bollywood), cricket and then news. Rediff started hosting
Weblogs for readers a year and a half ago, but struggles to get users to
update blogs regularly.

Obstacles to online success

Along with Rediff, the feisty independent Indian site Tehelka.com rose and
fell with the Internet boom. Tehelka broke two huge scandals at the turn of
the millennium: one on score-fixing in cricket matches, and the other
showing government defense officials took bribes from a phony arms
manufacturer. The latter expose led to the resignations of the presidents of
two main parties in the ruling coalition, but it also brought down
Tehelka.com with a raft of government inquiries and charges.

Tehelka's editor Tarun Tejpal says he is planning to resurrect the site and
launch a weekly newspaper funded by readers' subscription fees. His staff
has shrunk from 120 journalists down to just three, according to a recent
BBC report.

Tehelka's planned move to print has some precedence. Rediff bought a weekly
newspaper called India Abroad, which it distributes from the U.S. But
reaching a mass audience within India poses challenges beyond just
distributing your news to far-flung villages in remote areas. There's also a
language barrier, with 18 different official languages and many more
dialects. English was brought to the subcontinent during British rule, and
remains a language mainly of the middle and upper class.

"Because India has so many languages, English is seen as the link language,"
said print and online freelance journalist Jyothi Kiran, who has taught new
media at the Indian Institute for Journalism and New Media.

"But only the educated class prefers the English media," he wrote via
e-mail. "This is a very small percentage though, as most of India is still
illiterate and even less English-educated. The circulation of regional
newspapers [is] far ahead than that of the English press .... It is the
regional language [press] that still drives India, whatever the elite few
have to say."

Subhash Rai has been working in online media in India for the past six
years, and started an e-mail discussion group and Web site focused on Indian
online journalism. He says that if the Indian media wants to make its mark
on the online world, it needs to keep one eye focused on the basics, and the
other on the changing times.

"India presence online is very marginal," Rai told me via e-mail. "The
quality of information is not up to the mark. We need to change that. It can
essentially be done by news organizations. The challenge is to get the big
names in the business to get a better understanding of why we need to be
online in full force. The turf will otherwise be overun by the Murdochs of
the world."

The ritual of reading the news

One advantage that Indian online operations have is the rabid interest
Indians abroad have in following news from back home. Sevanti Ninan, who
runs TheHoot.org, an Indian media watchdog, emphasized just how news-hungry
Indians abroad can be.

"Indians tend to be one of the more homesick expatriate communities in the
U.S.," he told me via e-mail. "The Web helps specific ethnic or geographic
communities abroad keep in touch with their state and city and people back
home. There are sites for people in Bihar, Bengal, Tamil Nadu, etc. The fact
that Google now offers search in at least five Indian languages ensures that
journalists and others writing in regional languages use the Net a lot."

S. Mitra Kalita, president of the South Asian Journalists Association in the
U.S., wrote a book called "Suburban Sahibs" looking at families that
emigrated from India to the U.S. She talked to me about the ritual of
reading the news for the Net generation in India.

"A lot of people turn to the Internet cafe, and log into Rediff, they'll go
to their local Web site," she said. "It's part of their ritual of logging
in. It's mainly among twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings. A family in
my book was high-tech workers who came over [to the U.S.]. That same ritual
they had in India is something they brought here. So when they log on, they
go to the Times of India Web site and their regional newspaper site, and
they're on all these listservs and e-mail groups."

While logging on is still a relatively middle-class phenomenon, the spread
of cyber cafes, an increasingly wired youth culture, and an improved Indian
infrastructure -- at least in urban areas -- have the potential of
delivering an audience of hundreds of millions for Indian news sites.

Source:
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/glaser/1067999286.php