Are blogs an alternative for conventional media?

Shocked by the unusual length of the post on my blog? So am I :) Well, this post is an article written specifically for the Bloggers Park contest, IRIS, IIM Indore, the topic being "Are blogs an alternative for conventional media?". I, for one, love the way their website has been designed and oh yeah! The new button that appears on my blog is that of the IRIS blog. Do check it out.

In today’s ‘IT era' as it is called, there has been a palpable flurry of activity on the cyber front. This has ensured that the action in this field hogs a fair share of the media glare. News headlines splashed with news such as IT-giants’ mergers, release of new IT-related products, stock prices of IT companies plunging or soaring etc are on the rise. One notable trend that is slowly but surely rocketing in step with this burgeoning growth of IT, is the trend of blogging. Delving deeper into this trend reveals a number of interesting facts, some of which bolster the claim that blogs can indeed be a potential alternative for conventional media and some others which trash the claim. However, before we examine the facts in greater detail, it would be appropriate to take a quick peek at conventional media per se.

For the scope of this post, conventional media may broadly be classified into two categories: (1) Mass media such as radio, television, print media etc. which are meant to target the masses (2) Other conventional media such as telephone, snail mail, public address systems, pamphlets etc. which are meant to target a specific person or a select group of people. How do the purposes that a blog serves, score vis-à-vis conventional media? Consider the main purposes that conventional media serves: They inform, entertain and act as a means to promote products, services, events, people or places through advertising.

Let us see how blogs fare in comparison:
(1) The purpose of informing: Most socially, politically or economically relevant issues, receive extensive coverage, threadbare analysis and exchange of opinion by fellow-bloggers in the blogsphere, thereby keeping their readers well-informed just like conventional media does.
(2) The purpose of entertaining: Many bloggers maintain blogs that are purely entertaining or humorous. Scott Adams of the Dilbert fame has one such blog.
Some blogs entertain not just by using the written word, comic strips and word games as it happens in the print media, but also by way of providing hyperlinks to some entertaining audio and video strips available on other websites.
(3) The purpose of marketing: Online advertising is picking up speed in India. The total spending for 2004-2005 was about 18 million dollars, but the Indian Online Association (IOA), predicts that this figure will touch 34 million dollars in the next financial year and will cross 57 million in 2006-2007. More on this trend here.Publishers, for instance, have begun to resort to bloggers to write reviews about books that they want to market. They bank on the fact that a prospective buyer often goes by the reviews posted by a credible blogger whose judgement they trust to be good.


Blogs not just match up to, but far surpass the conventional media in the following aspects:
Meteoric growth: The rate at which millions of new blogs are springing up and smothering the World Wide Web is mind boggling. If the growth trends and statistics released by clickz.com of Jupitermedia fame are anything to go by, there are as many as 15,000 new blogs being created everyday i.e 1 new weblog is being created every 5.8 seconds. No conventional media in India has been experiencing such a phenomenal growth rate in the past few years.

The biggies are into it: IT giants such as Microsoft with MSN Spaces, Rediff with Rediffblogs, Google with its take over of Blogger and Six Apart with its relatively recent acquisition of Live Journal are investing big bucks and vying with one another to host blogs. Blogging is serious business for the biggies now. New tools tailored to suit their use in blogs are being developed – RSS feeds, ATOM feeds, hit counters, blogrolls to mention a few.

Popularity check: Weblogs have become quite popular on the international scene in the last 12 months. Om Malik , senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine, reports that about 27% of internet users say they read blogs.

Communities and crisis aids: Blogs help people with similar interests, exchange ideas and form interest groups. There are also a number of groups that are formed on the fly in times of crisis. Dina Mehta was one such lady who shot into fame during the recent Tsunami and Katrina cyclone crises, thanks to the initiative she took, to set up blog groups in order to help victims communicate and mobilize essential resources to the affected areas.

They tell it as it is: In case of Indian conventional media, free and blatant journalism often falls prey to dirty politics. The denouement of this public secret is that journalists are often forced to present a slightly twisted version of the truth. However, in case of blogging, the blogger can tell it as it is, since a blog, reflects after all, a person’s personal account/opinion of a reported event. Moreover, unlike a journalist, a blogger faces no issues of complying with editorial policies, space constraints etc.

As seen from the above discussion, blogs not only serve most of the purposes that conventional media do, but also serve a plethora of other purposes that conventional media do not. Although these facts paint a very promising picture of blogging soon being used as an alternative for conventional media, it is essential to examine in detail, the other side of the coin before conclusively settling the claim.

Let us now look into a few facts on the other side of the coin, that trash the claim that blogging can be an alternative for conventional media in the Indian scenario:
Current Penetration: Blogging, although a boon for the urban literati, is way out of reach of those without electricity, PCs or the ability to read and write (mostly in English); they will therefore continue to depend for many years to come on the radio, TV and newspapers - in that order. As seen from the dismal statistics reported by the 2001 census of India, PC penetration in India is less than 1%. The number of internet users is a more disappointing 5.5 million out of a total population of 1.06 billion. The percentage version of this figure is best left uncalculated! TV, which had penetrated as many as 85.1 million households in India in 2003, still remains far ahead in terms of penetration as seen from this report. There are innumerable situations like, say election campaign speeches, where blogs as a substitute for conventional media are absolutely absurd and impractical.
The Indian scenario is thus diametrically opposite to that in USA where blogging is a rage, thanks to great penetration levels of the internet.
Projected reach: It was reported recently, that as per the Broadband Policy issued by the Government in October 2004, a target subscribers' base of 3 million for Broadband was to be achieved by all the service providers together by the end of year 2005. As per the progress reports submitted by the various service providers, a subscribers’ base of just 0.61 million for Broadband has been achieved by the end of September 2005. Hence, the actual achievement by various operators together is much below the policy target of 3.0 million for December, 2005, which is likely to be missed.

Limited interaction: Unlike in a TV or radio show where you can have dial-in programs or shows with an invited set of audience, the interaction between the blogger and the visitor in a blog is limited to just the ‘comments’ section. Live interaction is not possible and this greatly mitigates the effectiveness of the interaction.

Legal aspects: There are legally recognized bodies such as Press Council of India, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting etc which are accountable for the ethical operation and content published in the print media or telecasted on TV and Radio. There is no such legal body that is completely accountable for the content that a blogger publishes in his blog. Such expressions of one’s personal opinion could have serious implications such as defamation of people due to personal vengeance, rumour mills that churn out erroneous information on burning issues, misleading the masses etc. If a defamatory post is written against a person or an institution, this post will do the rounds through chain emails and the damage caused is too vast.

Clipped freedom of expression: The recent incident that saw Gaurav Sabnis and IIPM cudgeling it out, harshly rocked the Indian blogsphere. Another case similar to that of Gaurav Sabnis is that of Mediaah, wherein Pradyuman Maheswari was forced to close shop due to a messy tussle involving the Time Group and Bennett Coleman & Co. Cases like the two mentioned above pose a big question mark over freedom of expression in blogs.

Unmanageable numbers: When a new radio or TV channel is floated, there is considerable enthusiasm during the launch. In contrast, a new blog that is floated is just one amongst million others and hardly evokes any enthusiasm about its launch unless the blogger is either a celebrity or has publicized his blog well before the launch. Infact, the sheer number of blogs plays spoilsport even much after the launch phase. It is relatively easier for a viewer to sift through about 100 odd channels and pick a few that he likes. Expecting a reader to sift through millions of blogs and pick a few that he likes would be ridiculous! There is a good chance that an excellent blog may never be visited by an interested surfer.

Establishing credibility: A new blogger will have to establish, through consistently good posts that it’s a credible source of information whereas unless main stream media mucks up something big time, it is generally taken to be reliable.

Serious bloggers: Serious bloggers who update their blogs frequently are not too many in number. As per this report quoted earlier in this post, there are only 200 blogs with a monthly traffic of 1 million pageviews per month. Only 20 of those receive over 10 million pageviews per month.

The menace of personal journals: Online diarists who maintain a journal of personal experiences and memories are on the rise. Many of them often describe it as an easier alternative than email and telephone to keep in touch with their loved ones when they are facing a time crunch. Strctly speaking, these do not qualify as blogs as has been rightly analyzed here. Such personal journals which sadly pass by the name of ‘blogs’ dilute the interest of blog surfers who come looking for interesting stuff, only to bump into the details of someone’s mundane daily routine or threadbare descriptions of events in one’s personal life.

Spamming and Virus threats: There are many fake blogs setup by robots, which affect the blog visitors’ computers with viruses as soon as the blog is accessed. Such robots are even used to insert spam comments into blogs. The latter problem, however, has been successfully tackled by developing the word verification system to authenticate human users before commenting.

Summarizing the above discussion, it can be concluded that although blogs do match up to the main stream media to some extent in terms of the basic functionality, they remain crippled by many factors detailed above. Blogging undoubtedly, is still at its infancy in India. It needs to mature and be more regulated before it can be considered as an alternative, or even as a formidable competitor to the conventional media, particularly the print media. As pointed out rightly in this discussion, given the current scenario and rate of progress that prevails in India, it would be too tall an order to expect blogging to be an alternative for conventional media. As long as illiteracy and poverty reign the scene, blogging can, at best, be an effective supplement but not really an alternative for conventional media.