The concept of Digital Newsroom is no longer a novelty: Pradeep Dwivedi

Pradeep Dwivedi, CEO, Sakal Media Group, writes about how digital is impacting the news landscape in India and the measures regional print players need to undertake to maintain relevance in an increasingly digitised scenario.

Digital is having a significant impact on the entire news value chain, right from sourcing, capturing and transmitting a story to reader-friendly presentation of same. In the age of social media dominating breaking news, it is increasingly becoming important for all our journalists to be digitally savvy, in terms of their own social media handles as well as picking up stories and insights that are relevant to the readers. Many leading publications such as ours are supplementing our own portals and apps on Android and iOS with dedicated FaceBook page and live feeds on Twitter handles to garner audience attention. 

The concept of Digital Newsroom is no longer a novelty, as all stories are typically brought into such editorial units, and thereafter re-purposed for content, clarity and visual appeal basis destination – viz. print, website or app. While this is new to many who are used to legacy ways or reporting, it is pretty much an adopt-or-perish scenario in which progressive organisations such as ours are leveraging training to build new capabilities. 

The road ahead for regional print players 

With the advent of digital, especially manifested through social media, most print businesses have seen a clear shift in their reader profile and demographics. While the revenue opportunity for publishers in this space may still not be very large even now, the ‘audience opportunity’ in building a sustainable brand recall in our current and ever expanding reader base, and hence future revenue sources, remains high on the radar of all print majors such as ourselves. 

Most publishers will continue to work very hard in building the supply side economics with Content from traditional print sources and marketing of ad-inventory on portals and apps to cover as many users as possible, while building some revenues. However, the demand side ecosystem remains dominated by the search majors and RTB (Real-Time-Buying) Engines, and transformation of selling model, metrics and mind-set, all set to change rapidly. At Sakal, we are working to ensure that our traditional reader base gets enhanced with next generation of readers of our digital publications and we are able to add new discerning audience in parallel that wants credible news from Maharashtra abd Goa, both domestically and internationally. 

Pradeep Dwivedi is part of the esteemed Jury panel for the inaugural edition of DIGIXX Awards. Brought by Adgully in association with ad:tech, DIGIXX Awards is powered by Adobe, while C1X, PivotRoots and Kantar TNS have come aboard as partners. The Awards ceremony, to be attended by the who’s who of the digital, advertising, marketing and media fraternity, is scheduled for the evening of March 10, 2017 at The Leela Ambience, Gurugram. 

The final round of the Jury process commenced yesterday, February 22, 2017, following which the Gold, Silver and Bronze winners will be unveiled.