Print journalism & the internet world

How was it before the internet became popular? Very simple, people read newspapers and magazines, watched the limited news on television and listened to radio. Then came the internet bomb. Why bomb? Because it almost bombed out several running establishments that were based on the old print formula! Was that good or bad? No idea, to tell you frankly. Till the early nineties and even well into the dawn of the 21^st century, print based magazines and newspapers followed a principled pattern. It’s like having a good breakfast, a balanced diet for lunch and dinner. What happens when you disturb the pattern with a double dose of fast food? It merely leads to the birth of an aggressive society and a fresh set of cases of all kinds of ailments from rheumatism to heart attacks. I am sure you did not understand that statement. In the days of yore, when internet speeds were terribly slow (500kb of data download would hang your computer for hours together!!) there was a way journalists in newspapers and magazines performed. Young journalists would join a magazine or a newspaper, get trained over years under the professional guidance of a senior journalist and then learn his or her way up, guided by the strict and disciplined rules of journalism.

Television journalism, until it became a 24 hours drama, never really impacted print journalism in any way. It only spawned the growth of journalism and resulted in new jobs being created. It was only when internet speeds started increasing and the access to internet became easy, that things started changing big time.  It was both good and bad. Good because anything you wanted to know was available at the click of a mouse (no, not the small little animal!). Suddenly the fat dictionaries and encyclopaedias you consulted became redundant. The books you bought and read could now be read on the net. Any information under the sun (well almost any!) could be found on the net. Who was first President of India? How do you spell the word aphrodisiacal ? Who are the Red Indians? Where did the Aryans come from? What is God particle? Anything you wanted to know you could find through a search engine. When the internet was evolving in the early 1990s, search engines were the likes of excite, alta vista, yahoo, hot bot, bing and google. Google then simply began to get popular by the day and today it’s everyone’s best friend. You have a doubt, a simple headache, a heart ache, a tooth ache, a need to connect with someone somewhere in the world, well Uncle Google helps you big time.

Thus, as the internet started evolving at a great speed in came interesting things like social media networking sites. But before that, came in your postman, yes sites that helped you send your mails. We may all have heard of things like Yahoo mails, Rediff mails, hotmail, etc. Then came in the big daddy of mail service--Gmail. That took our mail service to a new orbit. Social media networking sites too grew alongside. Mouthshut, linkedin, orkut, bebo, flickr, ibibo, instagram, myspace, pinterest, twitter, facebook etc became popular with twitter and facebook dominating the scene. Alongside came in another term known as blogging. Blogs are simple thoughts written on a website. It’s like a column or a piece of views one shares with the world around them through the internet. For example, what you are reading right now is simply a blog....my thoughts expressed through www. Got it?