News Hunger Peaks In Kashmir

As the news hunger peaks in Kashmir, closed for three weeks, the media is consistently exploring options of collecting and disseminating news

- Masood Hussain

Till the militancy led the newsroom of the Radio Kashmir Srinagar to shift to Delhi during the 1990s, there was one basic to all the newspaper newsrooms in Srinagar – a radio set. The reason: at around 4:30 pm, the Radio would broadcast a special news bulletin that the anchor would read slowly as if giving a dictation. These were called item khabreh and this was meant for the Kashmir newsrooms where one person would be specially tasked to pen it down. As the wire services were a luxury and available to quite a few, this news bulletin was a key input for the Srinagar newspapers.

With the technology taking over at a ferocious pace in the last 20 years, the newsrooms would laugh over the “good old days” as telegraphic communication was taken over by the telex and then textel, fax and finally to the modem. The e-mail actually changed the media scene and in almost a decade the IT unleashed countless tools that changed the way societies collected, processed and disseminated news.

One of the key topics, during the routine newsroom meetings in recent years, would surround over the fast-approaching death of the print media and the rise of the digital media! This was primarily because the smartphone and the internet changed the styles and systems of consumption of news. There were, in fact, more people consuming news online than in print.