How can Journalism instil hope in 2025?

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I am excited to announce that G Ananthakrishnan, a senior journalist with decades of experience (formerly with The Hindu and Indian Express), will be writing for The Chennai Emailer as a contributor. Over the years, I’ve enjoyed reading his articles on civic issues, public policy, governance, transport and urban infra. For TCE, Ananthakrishnan will write about Chennai’s core issues and how to solve them. I’m certain you will enjoy reading his work. Here’s to the first of many!🍻

Who is a journalist? What is journalism? Does journalism have a purpose?

Strange as it may seem, these are real questions in today’s media environment. Role distinctions have blurred, platforms have fragmented and newspapers have suffered terminal declines.

The most recent Pew Research Centre report in the US partly answers the question of who disseminates the news.

1. It estimates that 77% of people who are news influencers online have never been a professional journalist.

2. The report also says that 37% of the audience below age 30 get their news from online influencers.

This is a different world from what I remember.

Days of a rookie reporter in the 80s

To someone like me, who began journalistic life in Chennai, India, as a reporter in 1985 at what was then the undivided Indian Express, and later moved to The Hindu, the technological evolution in just one generation has been greatly disruptive.

I saw how tech created new media ecologies and pushed some media species to extinction. Many journalists will view the 70s and the decades until the advent of Internet-disseminated news as a glorious era. Those years were marked by notebooks, typewriters, hot metal composing, landline phones, cultivating deep sources, keeping paper clippings for reference and having only government-owned broadcasting for comparison. Later came tools like audio recorders, computers and dot matrix printers, besides 24x7 TV.

Frontpage scandals in the 1980s were the high point.

The newspapers were full of scoops that shook the ground under the feet of politicians, exposed corrupt government and brought social evils like bonded labour under the spotlight.

Chief Ministers were forced to resign after a scoop hit home — remember A.R. Antulay’s trust donation and cement scandal?

A lone journalist, Ashwini Sarin exposed trafficking in women by purchasing a woman in a poverty-stricken region of north India for ₹2,300 like a slave and presenting her to a shocked nation.

People woke up to disturbing newspaper investigations such as the blinding of prisoners in Bhagalpur by police.

But today, these would be breaking news events on a social media platform. Thousands of smartphones relay everything online in real-time. Each of these investigations created journalistic heroes, who spurred idealistic youngsters. The compensation was modest or even meagre, but journalists were society’s proud bulwark.

Editors grappled with the dilemma of newspaper owners having to cross swords with powerful politicians. They hardly do it now at big media houses as ownership in India changed over the past 20 years in favour of politicians.

The Internet Revolution

Earlier, newspaper circulations were robust and advertisers paid a premium. But nothing lasts forever as evolution is a constant.

For the press, it was not television but the Internet that arrived as a challenge. It paralysed legacy media, created new publications, transformed the way journalists work and also fragmented the landscape for producers and consumers of news and advertisers.

Today, social media has taken over the public conversation since the late 2000s. Politicians and public figures now ignore the legacy media, choosing SM as a broadcast channel.

The Influence of Influencers & News Avoidance

What must worry career journalists, however, is growing “news avoidance” among readers. This trend of not following the news in the US was flagged by Amanda Ripley in the Washington Post in 2022 (an estimated avoidance rate of 42%). Readers were turned off by constant reporting of catastrophic events producing ‘headline stress’.

A New Hope

On the other hand, stories that tap into the reader’s agency to work for a better world got a welcome. Amanda traces the pathway to such a news renaissance in her article.

What began as tremendous headline fatigue and a feeling of helplessness created by a continuous stream of dismaying reports turned into actionable energy.

There came a realisation that people look for ways to act if they find the media supportive in its framing of the news. 

Thus, journalists can find relevance by returning to their roots.

Dive Deeper

1. I stopped reading the news. Is the problem me — or the product? Read on Washington Post.

2. “We are just focused on being where readers are”: Pan-African weekly The Continent publishes directly on WhatsApp and Signal. Read on Neiman Lab.

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