Al Ngullie
The progression of the news media in Nagaland from a small cottage industry to a fast-corporatizing enterprise can be quantified at, in industrial taxonomy, approximately 25 years. However, this is 2016.
Since the early ‘90s, the state’s press fraternity has experienced transformations, transformations that demonstrated both intellectual activism and industrial functionality of the Nagaland media. In some way, it has offered the institution a respectable semblance of an industry apposite. The evolution was inspired largely by the open markets especially during 2002-2009. The new direction directed by clear, corporate imperatives created by the emergence of the digital media and globalization. Said imperatives – from heightened responsiveness about rights to the reluctant but definite embracing of the New Digital Media – were no doubt inspired by the remarkable market outflow created by Globalization and data feeder-digital movements of the early millennium.
The change in the character of the local journalistic movement owes its trajectory to the opportunities bestowed by the rejection of post-reformist media movements in the United States and the denouements from demographic debates in Southeast Asia.
In other words, editorial content, personnel functionality and responsibilities, news formation and market analytics, data-news, and most of all Last Line of Editorial Defence, are still largely predominantly and rigidly colonial. Said condition, in turn, is feeding the dependence on Vanity Press; basic and archaic content language; rudimentary editorial control et al.
The slant is not to say that the three characters of muddy-and-pebble journalism i.e., journalistic productivity, industry-class professionalism and the appeasement of trend-fad corporatism, have come to wear on Nagaland’s media.
There is a peculiar tint of rural, bucolic vassalage about the local institution: while the current brand of journalism fulfills the demands of local ‘Naga’ conditions and prejudices, it is also true that the culture of intellectual activism that honours real-world, professional journalism remains years ahead of Nagaland.
In the minds of the urbane reader, the days of subsisting on feudal lamentations from Nagaland’s cantankerous tribes and councils are done. The adoration for the sensational, possible denouements about the wearisome Naga political issue, are their way out the door. This is 2016 – a world that sees itself as village, and a village that sees its citizenry as mere consumers, and consumers that see their-selves as new age reformists who power the markets. Hence, the modern consumer is the one who actually decides what news could be news.
Amid these changes – after-effects of Globalization, one must add – old truths dressed in new questions are confronting the Nagaland media, if one would only take time to open his eyes and take a look outside Nagaland. The state has ignored that opportunity, for decades.
There are intellectual media movements that demand attention:
• In a world powered by search engine and data-journalism, what position of credibility does Nagaland’s appeasement of Vanity Press occupy?
• In a world of that sees human interest stories – conflict resolution, reiteration of visionary leaderships and social welfare movements, and victories of proletarian families and anti-corruption activists – where do small-town glorification of speeches and political rhetoric by local politicians and propagandists stand?
• In a world where sophisticated intellectual manoeuvres and acute literary ideation no longer come from pen-toting veterans but from by KFC-eating-Red Bull-guzzling young but brilliant journalists, is there left any relevance for Nagaland media’s colonial intellectual dislocation as pillars of democracy?
• In a world of Huffington Post and a shrivelling global newspaper industry, is there any place for human frailties and technology to reconcile for the reader?
The time has come for the news media in Nagaland to move on from its bucolic colonial pageantry and pre-conflict pretensions. Amid the pile churned up by commercial targets and anxiety about circulation, journalists, in general, may have forgotten the human stories and the lives of the common citizen. The common man’s stories: his suffering in conflict, his impatience at corruption, and his struggle to survive his own homeland, his growing impatient at how the pillars of democracy and justice have failed to point fingers at corruption and corrupt leaderships, the arrested development, the demystification of the Naga cultural ethos as a farce et al.
These people – ‘circulation’ embodied by the newspaper buyer – and their lives represent the sham that Nagaland has become. Indeed, in the opinion of this writer, it is time for newspapers and news services in the region to recognize that the common man represents a singular visceral space in the consequent formation of justice. The common man symbolizes the very endeavour of journalism as a catalyst for just justice. The common man and the utterances that he cannot utter should be the goal which journalists in Nagaland must aspire to express.
Only angry journalists can truly become successful journalists. The current breed of journalists would certainly grow to find their true purpose should they deliberately embrace a new apperception – that it is not sensational political events or the shallow political speeches of political demagogues that represents what news is important. It is the common man’s stories that the institution of journalism draws essence. It is an epiphany that every reporter in Nagaland must hunger for.
Prejudice has an unbiased way of showing an individual what blindness is like. Indeed, the thicker one’s intellectual hunger, the thinner his biases. There is nothing more undignified for journalists than to be seen as men of clichés, traditions, and mediocre, outdated skills. For instance, this author still renews his Editorial Management, news writing, and copyediting certifications every year. It is exceedingly easy to grow old faster in journalism. Society has come to consider journalists as thinking men–news personalities are persons from whom people the common people, expect solutions, assurances, and answers. Hence, there is an urgent need to reinvent the system to be able to chase the changing world.
Members of the media are required by expectation to be among the best, even if not the best, in areas where there is a demand for conversations. The monotonous cycle of clichés and tradition that the local media feeds on, over the decades, has begun to prove detrimental because journalists form the intellectual temper of a society.
