The amazingly rapid strides that the media industry has taken since the first developments in printing and publishing never cease to baffle me. I only have to look around at the style in which we used to work in the press just ten years ago, and see what it is about today to draw back dewildered. How did so much change happen in so short a time?? Broadsheets, tabloids, online news letters, facebook, twitter, every given day, we hit a new method of disseminating the news and developments in our world truly making it a Global Village. When a friend asked me to do a piece for a popular Indian newspaper for the anniversary issue on the beginning of the decade, asking me to mull over the future of the newspaper itself, I actually did pause and plunge in thought........was there a real future of sorts for this wonderful medium, or was it doomed to die a not-so-slow death? For my generation the newspaper is still one of our great loves - a habit so difficult to break, we wont go there - I frequently need to answer arguments at home regarding why I need to subscribe to the newspaper and hold a printed, "hard copy" as they put it, in hand, when I could save that money and read all the news online.....how do you explain your penchant for the written word (not some screen posting that seems as ephemeral as a fleeting rainbow or the smoke trail left by a jet plane? To actually hold the newspaper in your hands, smell the printing ink that is just dry, to leaf through to your favourite sections of the paper, gives it a sense of immediacy, credibility, comfort if you like, which the online media can never take away from it...
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