‘Creating a bridge among digital, TV and print is the real challenge’

At the e4m-DNPA Future of Digital Media conference, leaders from different media houses came together to participate in a panel discussion on ‘digital publishing in India: Challenges & opportunities’.

Jaideep Karnik, Head of Content and Editor, Amar Ujala Web Services Private Limited; Prasad Sanyal, Chief Content Officer, HT Digital;  Sanghamitra Majumdar, Editor, ABP Live, English (Digital); and Nandagopal Rajan, Editor, New Media, Indian  Express, were on the panel. The session was chaired by Deepak Ajwani, Editor, ET Online.

Ajwani opened the discussion asking panellists about the difficulties and opportunities in the era of integrated newsrooms.  Karnik shared, “Currently at Amar Ujala, what we are doing is creating bridges. We have a newspaper legacy which is 75 years old and then we have digital, where we were early movers and have adapted to the new-age technology very fast. But then we always have to create bridges. All the experiments that have happened across the world suggest that you cannot just collapse all the walls and create an integrated newsroom. There is no miracle that can make it happen because the output demands of newspaper, television and the digital homepage and the entire website are very different. So, you will have to train journalists to get accustomed to these needs. It is going to be very challenging where you have to take the legacy of a 75-year-old news brand which is already into print, where there is appointment reading, along with digital where there is less of appointment reading and more of discovery and accidental finding of your content. Creating a bridge between these two is the real challenge.”

Rajan too shared how at the Indian Express, they sat together, and how they owned the responsibility to build an integrated newsroom and actually broke the wall.

Majumdar shared her experience saying, “It is very difficult to have a synergy between digital and TV because storytelling format is different and the information is coming in a different way, so we all have that challenge of making text stories out of videos. But it is helpful in the case of breaking news, live vlogs, videos, and audios.” 

Sanyal feels that a level of integration is necessary in digital operations in any case. He said, “News is format agnostic, it needs to be packaged right for different platforms’’.

On asking about the challenges chatgpt can give to the newsrooms, Sanyal replied, “How do you use AI is a challenge. To my mind, you should use chatgpt as a tool, much like you use a word editor or a spell check. You do have human intervention.”

Ajwani then asked if because of using chatgpt, all newsrooms may end up having the same content.

Said Rajan, “I think chatgpt is a huge opportunity, at least for traditional media houses like us. There can be a logo saying that there is absolutely no AI involved in the creation of this content and that can be a differentiator for us because there will be a lot of people who will have to fall back on AI to create the content. At least we, who have invested in people, will have this opportunity that our content will be different as it will created by humans. The way to use AI would be, where we are really struggling, to bring in personalisation. Content delivery is a huge challenge for us. How do you show the right content to the right person at the right location at the right time? I think that is where AI should really help us.”

Talking about the transitions in news mediums, Sanyal said, “Brevity has always been a key weapon in any journalist’s arsenal.”

Jaideep said that people choose the format of the news content according to their needs and interests, be it a 40- word story or a 300-word story. Same is in the case of audio and video news consumption, he mentioned.