Media students muse over issues facing newspapers at Banjara Hills

Banjara Hills: In times when national and international news is available at the fingertips, who reads Newspapers? On the occasion of Indian Newspaper Day which fell on January 29, the alumni of Bhavan's College of Communication and Management (BCCM) organised an open house session at Lamakaan, Banjara Hills, to find out the existential crisis of print media. The day commemorates the birth of the first Weekly Newspaper in India, called 'Hickey's Bengal Gazette,' which also went by the name 'Calcutta General Advertiser.' It was first published on January 29, 1780.

240 years later, the BCCM alumni were keen to elicit feedback and learn the latest in print media ever since the dawn of the new millennium two decades ago. Making the programme interactive, the media students put together a 20-minute film on the topic which included visuals of a newspaper printing press, a voice-over on the state of Indian print media and statistics on the industry available on the RNI website. Video footages of interviews with a pan-Indian audience were also shown. Details about the Hyderabad print media scenario since the 1970s, the multi-lingual market and the readership survey results of IRS 2019 were shared with the audience.

A niche gathering of young professionals drawn from the media and curious members of the public were addressed by the alumni and media professionals, who actively participated in the interactive session which lasted for more than an hour. A unique 'Spot the Stat' programme was held in which the audience were given a set of statistics and copies of Newspapers and were asked to find out where it had appeared in the daily that they were holding. In all, the young crowd felt that the print media, already facing a multitude of challenges would continue to survive. A few of them decided to spend 10 minutes at least on a daily basis to read about current affairs offline from the newspapers.