Moa Jamir
“A well-functioning democracy requires free and diverse news media capable of keeping people informed, holding powerful actors to account, and enabling public discussion of public affairs,” stated a Council of Europe Report in 2016.
However, if the news media is constantly being confronted by various external and internal challenges, including financial and professional aspects of the field, how do they serve the purpose?
The media in Nagaland is at this juncture. This is the inference from The Morung Express’ report today, published after consultation with a cross-section of media professionals on the eve of National Press Day (November 16). While new frontiers are opening up in terms of ‘new media,’ the existing challenges put the predominant print media at the crossroad, perhaps existential crisis.
Among others, the internal financial sustainability and professionalism challenges and various external factors, collectively put the media in a vicious circle and hinder its vibrant progress.
With the lack of a corporate eco-system, one most important sources of revenue for any media entities elsewhere, the dependency of media on government’s advertisements is high in Nagaland. However, while the State Government has a standing advertisement policy, it is seldom followed at best, and completely ignored at worst. A general lack of support or cooperation from the government is also perceptible.
Consequently, the publisher struggles to make ends meet, eventually affecting the remuneration of those associated with a media establishment.
“What is common about the media of the entire Northeast is that in all the States journalists are terribly underpaid,” veteran Assamese Journalist Dhirendra Nath Bezboruah and founder of the Guwahati-based The Sentinel wrote a decade back in Dialogue.
“One talks about the commissions set up by the government to fix the salaries of journalists... By the time these commissions make their reports to the government, the inflation rate has already made the salary hikes quite meaningless. What is worse, however, is that many newspapers never pay the recommended wages,” he continued.
Over a decade later, the situation, at least in Nagaland, has not improved much. The crucial collateral damage of such a scenario is that the retention or attraction of talents becomes a daunting task, as reflected in the current report.
Such circumstance affects professional output, including reportage, having various critical implications, including financial sustainability and credibility, taking them to the circle again.
The advent of ‘new media’ while opening up a new frontier, has also added a new challenge. The immediate impact is loss of circulation while the danger of news saturation and de-bunking of unconfirmed reports increase with the mushrooming of social media platforms as well as online portals.
But this is an inevitable development. And as a senior journalist noted in the report, it is imperative that the journalist as well as the media house adapt to new technology and be ahead of it or else face inevitable marginalisation and decline.
The proliferation of new media raises many issues about the way news is gathered, presented and disseminated to the general public or transparency. While the new addition adds diversity to the current scenario, it is pertinent that concerned the general public have well-informed knowledge about the concerned news organisation, as well as, how news is gathered and delivered. Just as the media demands transparency externally, it should also measure itself with the same yardstick.
The proliferation also provided the existing media with an outlet to break out of the vicious circle via vertical integration. For Nagaland media to serve the purpose of enabling well functioning progressive and conscientious democracy, not just procedural democracy in the State, both internal reorientation and external support are imperative.
For any media related insight, drop a line to jamir.moa@gmail.com
