Heady days of newspapers over?

By O J George

Today I was flabbergasted to read in Malayala Manorama that its “Sree”, a free booklet given out on Sundays, was extinct on account of financial crisis.Moreover, the number of pages of the main paper has come down. It has no display advertisements on page one. Many of the ads inside are those of Government-related institutions and projects. Recession is not on the door-step, but it has taken over the parlour.

If the condition of Malayala Manorama, the vanguard daily publication in Kerala, is precarious, what would be the fate of others?

Others might be worse than this powerful daily. I know an English daily which has a lot of properties, outwardly looking. But the loans taken from financial institutions for constructing buildings and acquiring assets are all overdue for repayment. The company cannot even pay up the interest on all the loans. Even this firm projects assets worth crores of rupees. But God knows when it would tumble like a pack of cards. Meanwhile, it has been taking fixed deposits from readers. The depositors might have fallen into a trap, for God knows whether the money would be paid back or not.

Print media institutions are essentially flabby. The top-heavy newspapers have to pay hefty salary to a large number of incumbents, the total amount of which would be more than the total pay cheque of the majority of other staff members. But in the name of recession and chopping, the lower rungs would suffer even as the upper echelons manage to flourish. Ultimately, this would ruin the very institutions.

Strategies will have to be fine-tuned to retain the medium. Not that newspapers will vanish, but the very concept of broad-sheets call for urgent revamp that will cut costs.