Nieman Journalism Lab |
| Emerging spaces for storytelling: Journalistic lessons from social media in the Delhi gang rape case Posted: 08 Apr 2013 09:55 AM PDT
DELHI — In December, the brutal rape and subsequent death of a 23-year-old female student quickly gained attention in Indian and foreign media. In the days immediately following the woman’s death, protesters staged large demonstrations at Delhi’s India Gate and outside government buildings, including Rashtrapati Bhavan, the official residence of India’s President. During the protests, activists and journalists used social media to follow the protests and to discuss India’s problem of violence against women. This discourse highlighted how social media offer an emerging space for storytelling — remarkable in a country where social media hasn’t had the same impact it has elsewhere. To explore this case, we interviewed Indian and foreign correspondents who covered the protests in Delhi. They told us how journalists used social media during the protests, giving us insight into how a new medium is contributing to hard news coverage. India’s digital divide and the challenge of representationSocial media hasn’t played anything near the role in Indian journalism that it does in, say, the United States. Supporters of social media often point to their inclusive and democratizing aspects — but in India, social media usage remains confined to a small percentage of the population. Nearly 80 percent of Indians now have a mobile phone, but only 11 percent have Internet access, and fewer than 5 percent use social media. In rural areas, these percentages are significantly lower. Information gathered from social media tends to come from a rarified segment of the population: the affluent, educated, English-speaking youth of India’s major cities. When we asked journalists to what extent they use social media for news-gathering, some complained that social media discussions are narrow. As an India-based journalist for the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung told us:
The digital divide thus represents a sociocultural divide: In India, those who use social media are more likely to live in cities, hold a passport, and share values with social media users in the West. By relying too heavily on social media, journalists may find that their coverage skews toward a narrow readership. One Australian journalist told us that the rape protests gained prominence on Twitter “because [social media] is city-based and at the center of the life of the middle class, university students, and mobile professionals.” The journalist from Neue Zürcher Zeitung told us “it is easy to share ideas and read articles of colleagues or see what intellectuals think.” What’s more difficult is to get beyond that narrow demographic and understand the views of Indians whose voices are not heard on social media. According to Rohan Venkataramakrishnan, senior reporter at the Mail Today, social media presents a challenge for nuanced debate: “If I wanted to write about how Indian society needs to change or how patriarchy needs to be dealt with, I cannot say it in 140 characters.” While journalists may have personal affinity with social media users, several of them told us that to get a more representative understanding of issues, they pay attention to television and newspapers. Here’s the journalist from Neue Zürcher Zeitung: “Television, newspapers, and talking to people on the streets were much more important [in newsgathering]. Only a very small part of society has access to social media, but everyone watches television.”
In addition to questions of representation, journalists have another reason to discount social media reporting. As we discussed in an earlier piece, India’s newspaper industry is thriving. With healthy growth in newspaper circulation and advertising, many journalists are skeptical about what social media can do for Indian journalism right now. When we conducted interviews with journalists at The Hindu, we encountered a widespread belief that social media is mostly for soft news. But that was before the Delhi gang rape and protests. The question now is: Will this event change the role of social media in Indian journalism? New spaces, new beats for storytellingIn the past, television networks have been the largest players in Indian news coverage. Social media haven’t changed that, but have instead provided new avenues for news-gathering and story distribution. In the months preceding the events, Indian newspapers and television had covered a number of rape cases. But the December Delhi gang rape proved to be different. The brutality of the attack and the scale of the protests brought international attention to India’s problem of violence against women. Some journalists we spoke to highlighted the role of protest in democratizing India’s media. The Delhi gang rape case prompted many journalists to use Twitter for updates on events and immediate responses from activists. To a greater extent than in previous protests, social media helped journalists keep a finger on the pulse of middle class India and get their immediate feedback on important issues. An Australian reporter said that “Twitter was really helpful to get a sense of the public sentiment and developments.” He followed the #delhigangrape hashtag, the official Twitter account of the Indian government, women’s groups, pressure groups, and Indian media on the subject. Venkataramakrishnan, the journalist who found 140 characters limiting, nonetheless said that the protests have been incubators for social media sophistication in India. “Following the Anna Hazare case and the Delhi gang rape case, social media began to achieve a critical mass,” he told us. Many journalists cited the importance of social media for background information. A journalist from The Hindu told us “I look at tweets by our own editor, editors from other newspapers, well known journalists such as Pritish Nandy [a columnist with The Times of India and the Hindi newspaper Dainik Bhaskar], Abhijit Majumder [editor of the Delhi edition of the Hindustan Times], and Saikat Dutta [a Delhi-based editor of the newspaper DNA]. I also look up tweets by television journalists such as Shiv Aroor [deputy editor at Headlines Today]. You get a mix of opinions from their tweets. Knowing these people’s perspectives helps me during coverage — but only indirectly…I rely on what I see when I am on the ground.” Here we see the emergence of new storytelling beats. Many journalists and activists discussed how they used Twitter to stay informed about the locations of the protests. In this sense, social media has allowed for a new type of beat as well as a new element in storytelling. A foreign correspondent told us: “Last week, one of the accused rapists died in his prison cell, I found out about it on social media. I logged on Twitter, found students, and from there, the media picked up in India and our news organization called sources and confirmed.” Social media also helped journalists learn what coverage audiences wanted to read and see. Zoe Daniel, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Southeast Asia correspondent, told us that in response to demand from members of India’s social media-savvy diaspora, she’s made plans for a documentary on the Delhi gang rape case. A common theme with journalists we spoke to is that social media have enabled wider conversations with audiences. Ruchira Singh, social media editor at Network 18, told us that during the protests
These interactions reveal new interest in social media by both Indian and foreign journalists covering the protests. In India, social media is a nascent enterprise still finding its place in journalism. But in time, we may see the the 2012 Delhi gang rape protests as a watershed moment for social media in news gathering and distribution. This case demonstrates how journalists respond to social media and how social media allows for new spaces for storytelling in India. The future of India’s public sphereSocial media has allowed a small but growing part of the Indian public to join in discussions of soft and hard news. To date, online storytelling has catered to certain demographic groups: the middle and upper classes, the intellectuals, activists, and journalists. Middle class discontent found a place on social media, but marginalized and subaltern groups had minimal representation or participation in social media discussions. The Delhi gang rape case gives us insight into ongoing changes in India’s public sphere. Jürgen Habermas defined the public sphere as “a realm of social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed.” But what kind of public sphere? Today, social media offer (at best) limited access to marginalized groups. Journalists who want to know about those groups cannot rely on social networking sites; they must visit often-remote towns, villages, and slums where most residents remain disconnected from social media. In the Delhi gang rape case and many other stories affecting India, social media is essential in research and reporting. At the same time, perhaps the greatest lesson is the limitation of social media: They offer starting points for news-gathering and distribution, but they haven’t replaced traditional journalism. Valérie Bélair-Gagnon is a Ph.D. candidate at City University London. Her research interests include new media, social media, journalism, public speech, sociology of news, sociology of work and organizations, ethnography and interviews, history of the media and ecology of communication. Smeeta Mishra is an assistant professor at the Centre for Culture, Media & Governance at Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi. Her research interests include new media, research methods, Muslim studies, and gender issues. Colin Agur is a Ph.D. candidate in communications at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and a visiting fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. He is interested in cultural and sociological aspects of mobile phone use in developing countries, and his dissertation research is based on ethnographic fieldwork in India. Photos by Ramesh Lalwani and Biswarup Ganguly used under a Creative Commons license. |
| Getting personal: A Dutch online news platform wants you to subscribe to individual journalists Posted: 08 Apr 2013 07:43 AM PDT “It’s my own little shop, that’s what I like about it. You decide what goes in — like having your own newspaper.” Arnold Karskens has his own channel on Dutch news startup De Nieuwe Pers (The New Press). For €1.79 a month, readers can subscribe to him and read his war reporting and investigations into war criminals. Don’t care about war crimes? Maybe some of the other journalist-driven channels — on subjects from games to France, from the science of sex to environmental sustainability, from Germany to the euro crisis — would be of interest. De Nieuwe Pers recently launched in the Netherlands as an online platform for freelance journalists. Users pay €4.49 a month for access to all content on its app or website. But what stands out is the possibility to subscribe to individual reporters, for €1.79 a month. Think True/Slant, but with paywalls.
“News has become more personal,” Alain van der Horst, editor in chief of De Nieuwe Pers, told me. “People are interested in the opinions, the beliefs, the revelations of a certain journalist they know and trust, much more than an anonymous person who writes for a large publication.” Karskens concurs, stressing that a personal brand is key in this business model. “People read my stuff because I have a clear, crystalized opinion based on over 32 years of war correspondence,” he said. “This really works well for journalists with a distinctive character. It’s not for the average desk slave.” Van der Horst also thinks paying per journalist is fairer to the readers than subscribing to a publication as a whole. “When you subscribe to a newspaper, you’ll get the full package. Even if you always throw out the sports section, you’ll still get it. With this model you decide: ‘This is what I want to read, so I’ll pay for it — what I don’t read, I don’t pay for.’” The metaphor isn’t perfect — rather than paying for content on a specific subject, De Nieuwe Pers invites readers to pay by the journalist. Authors have full editorial control over their own channel (“as long as it’s legal,” van der Horst says). Though of all them state a thematic or geographic specialism, those aren’t binding and there are no posting quotas. With this freedom comes unpredictability for the readers — the bang they get for their buck depends on which journalists they subscribe to. “I do investigative journalism, so sometimes I won’t be able to publish something for a week, sometimes two weeks,” Karskens says. “By subscribing to me personally, people support this type of investigation.” Until the end of 2013, journalists will receive the full revenue generated by their channels, which includes in-app purchases through Apple’s App Store. Next year, De Nieuwe Pers will start collecting a 25 percent commission. They already take a quarter from the collective subscriptions, with the rest of the money divided among the individual contributors. In its first few weeks, De Nieuwe Pers has sold about 2,000 subscriptions — about 40 percent of them for channels, the rest for the full collection. (The balance was 20/80 in the very beginning after launch.) The platform wasn’t building its following from scratch, strictly. It’s the descendant of De Pers, a free print newspaper that went out of business in March 2012. Much of De Nieuwe Pers’ editorial staff came from De Pers.
“After we shut down, we got a lot of attention, and readers were telling us they’d be willing to pay for us,” van der Horst said. “It’s encouraging to know that people will pay for digital journalistic work. People often still doubt that, and in many places it’s not yet customary. But it works. People do it as long as they get value for money.” Though director Jan-Jaap Heij says 2,000 subscribers has De Nieuwe Pers meeting internal targets for 2013, it doesn’t take mathematical genius to figure out it’s not enough to support 17 journalists and a small editorial staff. (At current rates and revenue split, those 2,000 subscribers would generate somewhere north of $100,000 a year.) In the short term, Heij isn’t worried about the money; the company managed to sell some of the technology they developed, and because of its low costs, the bills are covered until late 2014. The authors themselves are free to publish their work elsewhere. “Maybe one or two contributors will get a reasonable income out of this in a year, but for the near future, that’s not our ambition,” said Heij. For now, Heij’s main goal is further product development. De Nieuwe Pers is set to introduce thematic bundles and a bundle of bundles — the platform’s version of a full newspaper. They’re also expanding their pool of journalists, to cover more themes. Karskens is the only author who chose to write exclusively for De Nieuwe Pers, and enjoys the freedom of maintaining his channel. “You can be much more personal to your readers,” he said. “They’ve become like friends.” But he says there is one drawback: “Never being able to take a holiday. There’s always the pressure of having to give something to my subscribers.” |
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