Tomorrow, January 29, is Indian Newspaper Day. The day commemorates the birth of the first newspaper in India, a weekly called ‘Hickey’s Bengal Gazette,’ which also went by the name ‘Calcutta General Advertiser.’ It was first published on January 29, 1780.
But why am I writing about Indian Newspaper Day on CXOtoday.com, an online news daily that has nothing to do with the print medium. That’s because I believe that print is no longer the only medium that should be associated with a newspaper. Just because ‘paper’ is part of the word ‘newspaper’ doesn’t mean that all newspapers must be printed on it. Hickey’s Bengal Gazette didn’t have a choice of medium in 1780, but today, newspapers have a far more powerful medium they can leverage–the Internet.
With the advent of the Internet, the same high quality news and analysis that newspapers provided is now made available much faster and in real-time. In fact, as Indian users also jump on the broadband bandwagon, the Internet combines the best of print and the best of television.
In essence, the newspaper of today combines the depth of the written word with the power of the moving visual and is best found on the Internet. I think that describes CXOtoday.com quite well. When it comes to covering enterprise IT end-to-end, we leverage the immediacy of the Web for news, the networking and face-to-face opportunities of events, the expert interaction and power of Webcasts and the highly targeted approach of e-newsletters to create compelling, user-focused media.
Purists may be enraged at our temerity to call ourselves a daily newspaper, but the fact is that it’s the reader who decides. And we know for a fact that even as circulation figures of print publications dip, we’re growing from strength to strength–growing from page views to page views might be a more modern way of putting it.
So, with your permission, on the eve of Indian Newspaper Day, we’d like to claim the mantle of the Indian enterprise IT user’s newspaper of choice and celebrate the spirit of news publishing that started with the printed word, graduated to the moving visual and has now taken residence in that most dynamic of mediums–the Internet.
