India: News Press
India is socially and politically diverse: there are over twenty-two languages spoken in the country, but Hindi and English are the two major languages spoken by many. Additionally, the country is steeply divided along economic lines: there is a rich India and a poor India, an educated India and an uneducated India, and an urban India as well as a rural India. With the advent of the Internet, there is now also a connected India and an unconnected India.
Read the CNN News feature to get a sense of the disparities between various social classes in the country.
After India gained independence from British Rule on August 15, 1947, the political leadership focused on social development of the country. The Indian news media—comprising English and other vernacular language newspapers—not only supported the government but also freely criticized its governing policies in their editorial pages (Sonwalkar, 2002). Thus, the Indian press has historically worked in tandem with the national government, even as it did its job of holding the government and other authority figures accountable with its reportage.
These newspapers were primarily owned by Indian business people; in general, the mainstream and popular press are privately owned (Sonwalkar, 2002). In the early 1990s, however, when the government allowed foreign investment in the country’s various industries, including the news press, the number of private news channels increased (K. Chadha, 2017). The Indian news industry is a vibrant one, with more than one hundred news channels, over 94,000 newspapers, and a growing digital audience, with about 34 percent of the population accessing the Internet through mobile devices and computers (World Internet Statistics, 2017).
These divisions are reflected in the news industry: English-language newspapers primarily employ journalists who are usually urban, educated, and English-speaking middle-class citizens (Parameswaran, 1997). English newspapers also do well in the developed metropolitan cities. In recent years, however, vernacular language newspapers have seen tremendous growth in smaller cities, towns and rural areas of the country. In fact, vernacular language media have overtaken English readership/viewership by a large margin (KPMG, 2017) and the fourth largest newspaper across the world is the Dainik Bhaskar, a Hindi-language newspaper. (For additional information about this growing market, read this feature by a leading Indian business newspaper, The Economic Times.)
In fact, India is the one market across the world where newspapers still continue to prosper, contrary to newspaper markets in other countries, where revenue losses have resulted in job losses, scaling back on news production services, and in extreme instances, closure of the newspaper company.
Read this article by Indian author Shashi Tharoor to understand why the newspaper industry continues to do so well.
As for audience trust, a study by the BBC World News Channel in India revealed that the majority of people referred to traditional, established brands to get news they trusted (ET Brand Equity, 2017).
The majority of the respondents also said they found it difficult to distinguish between fake and real news. The issue that has arisen, in recent times, is that even traditional news media outlets often broadcast information that is not contextualized and has not been proven credible nor verified, such as in this instance where digital news site Scroll.in wrote about how certain media sources were targeting a Muslim student without providing factual information to back their claims and in this report published by another digital news site, The Quint, that clarified how the Indian president acquired three million followers within an hour of his joining Twitter. The story also highlighted how several other news sites did not provide factual information, nor verified the claim.