Progress from one page to 8/10 pages : The silent 'revolution'
- Sangai Express Editorial :: May 08, 2013 -
It is a silent revolution. No raising of the war cries, no blood-letting, but the changes are discernable. Gilt edged competition too. All welcome developments, if one may add.
A far cry from the days of yore (that is if two decades can qualify as the days of yore), when the choice of the people was limited to three or four options, that too with little to choose from one over the other.
From the days of the one paged, letter press, the newspapers in Manipur have leapfrogged and have today come to embrace all that modern technologies have to offer.
And so it is that today almost all the major newspapers in Manipur, maybe Imphal may be a more suitable term here, have graduated from the one paged newspaper to eight/ten with multi-colour to boot.
Not surprising that the new developments have come in tandem with the rapid progress made in the field of Information Technology, computers, the internet, the various social media and when information can be had with the click of the mouse.
Truly the understanding of the global village cannot get more succinct than this. As things stand today, there must be around thirty publications in Imphal alone, including the daily morningers, the daily eveningers, the bi-monthly publications and the monthly publications.
Take the newspapers scenario in Churachandpur town, easily the second capital of the State, when it comes to newspapers, and indeed Manipur is on the verge of coming to age, as far as the print media is concerned.
The quality of reporting, the wide array of issues covered, the professionalism too have improved, in line with the rapid stride made in the field of information dissemination but of course, there are still miles to go before Manipur can really say that they have arrived.
At the turn of the new millennium, there were four English daily newspapers published from Imphal. Some may have fallen off the way but fast forward a couple of years and today there are five English news dailies. It is more or less the same with the vernacular dailies.
Some sort of a silent revolution at the print media level and if this trend is taken to a higher plane, then Manipur may well see the same thing or something similar in the sky too.
At the moment, there is only one major television news channel operating in Imphal. There are others too in the district headquarters such as Churachandpur and at some other places.
But the competition that one sees at the print media level is nowhere to be seen at the sky level. Things may however change, and hopefully it should be for the better.
All the newspapers that are in circulation at the moment, stepped into this field with a mission, a pledge to usher in something new, including The Sangai Express.
The test continues and it is the readers who have been delivering their verdict year on year.
It will not be surprising if more follows, for rooms for newspapers, which have transcended the role of just being messengers have immense elastic properties.
However the harsh reality is, journalism is never, not now, not before and not a sign that it will be in the future, on the career priority of a majority of the young students in Manipur.
When the supply line is meagre, the end product cannot be expected to be excellent.
But then again, majority of the best known faces in the world of journalism (at least in India) have never been trained journalists, though the trend has started to change.
Not yet ready to read the crystal ball at the moment but an important point, that could be decisively indicative in the near future.
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