Media bigwigs unravel the road ahead for content creators

The general sentiment around technology is that of fear, given the disruption happening around us. Around journalism, it is that of despair. It is hard to agree on what’s news anymore. We believe we all have access to the ‘truth’, thanks to technology. People base their opinion on their ‘real facts’, and everyone wants to prove that they are correct, especially on social media.

However, veteran journalist Rohit Saran asserts that the best days of storytelling in journalism are ahead of us. “No matter how sad you feel when you see a bad piece of journalism, as a profession it is getting better,” he reassures.

Currently working as Advisor at India Today Group, Saran was speaking at the ‘Education Tomorrow’ conclave organised by UPES to discuss the future of education.

“The shallower work sometimes gets good publicity. But do not confuse that with the fact that fundamentally, the craft in journalism, the technology to deliver stories, and audience reach is improving. And with that, the work that journalists do is also getting better,” he says.

Saran, who has spent a good part of his career in print journalism, points out that till a few years ago journalists had a vague clarity on user engagement once the story was printed. “There was a very unguided intuition that went into making the product. Today, you can know everything about every story you do,” he says.

In addition, digital offers the massive advantage of reaching a wider audience – almost the entire world – as everything gets distributed universally, especially with the English language content.

Content across different languages, formats and geographies

Besides the reach, technology has also made it easier to cut across different languages, formats, and geographies. As per Ranjeet Pratap Singh, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Pratilipi, India’s largest user-generated storytelling platform, it is an exciting time for content creators.

“If there is a great story in Kannada or Tamil, why shouldn’t that story be created in other languages? Can we increase the catalogue multiple times without having more people to do that?

If a journalist has written a news report or a writer has written a story, technology should be able to convert that story into audio, video, or any other format,” he says.

For Shaili Chopra, founder of SheThePeople, India’s first and biggest storytelling platform for trailblazing women, format is an “overhang of the past”, and the real challenge lies in telling a great story. “You can tell the same story in different ways. But how do you get the maximum number of people (to read it)?” she asks.

In 2014, Chopra used her phone as her studio and started focussing on stories about women. Seven years later, her platform has 20 million views a month and over 3.2 million social media followers.

Her mantra? People. “In the rut of keeping up with technology, we often forget that stories are about people. This has not changed in centuries, and it will not change,” the Ram Nath Goenka Awardee says and adds, “Content is no more about consuming alone; it is also about engaging. The longevity of the content is important; how long can people come back and interact with it.”

The economics of content creation

With an increase in the ways content is generated, the avenues for monetisation of content have soared. Berges Malu, Senior Director of Public Policy at Sharechat, says that creators have now found more ways to monetise across platforms “through subscriptions, and with readers donating money to their favourite creators”. Given that more and more content is getting visual, he advises creators to make the first five seconds of the video interesting enough to capture the viewers’ imagination.

Digital: The kitchen of content creation

Sharing his insights from a survey conducted recently at the UPES School of Modern Media (SoMM), Professor Nalin Mehta, Dean, SoMM, says, “We asked the students which media platform they wanted to work for. All of them started with the word digital. Those who want to be journalists, said they want to work in the digital space.”

Saran endorses the view that digital gives an infinite creative space, where content creators can experiment with audio, video, text, gifs and various other formats.

Will technology replace the need for human skills?

Despite the disruption, media experts believe that technology will remain a facilitator for telling stories, but never be able to replace human skills. SheThePeople founder Shaili Chopra says, “You need feet on the ground for various reasons. To get a deeper lens into the story and understand the nuances of languages because every language in the Indian context has an element that needs to come alive in that language. A story has layers of complexity. Technology cannot replace feet on the ground. You need to have people who can tell a good story.”

Note: The views expressed in this article are that of UPES and do not reflect/represent those of Shiksha