Uday Shanker, Co-Founder of Bodhi Tree Systems and Vice Chairman of JioStar, addressed a gathering of Journalists at an event organised by the Editors Guild of India at New Delhi.
At the Rajender Mathur Memorial Lecture which was organised by The Editors Guild of India ( EDI ), on Reflection on Journalism, Technology, Business of Media, and the future, Mr Uday Shanker, Co-Founder, Bodhi Tree Systems, and Vice-Chairman Jio Star said that “Journalism as we know it is Dead ”.
At the event media Executive laid down the slow erosion of Journalis’s soul and its business. He said it wasn’t the politicians or the government, the rot ran deeper. It was the Journalist themselves.
“ We kept imagining that we still held the same power, even as the ground shifted beneath our feet,” said Uday Shanker. He also said that race to please advertisers has eroded trust and led to formulaic, diluted storytelling. Even the cost of the newsprint wasn’t being recovered. That is how cheap we sold our value.
“ This distance between editorial and economics has been catastrophic. Advertising has become our lifeline. But advertisers don’t care about content. They care about reach,” he saidMr Uday Shankar said that,” No one listens to anyone in particular anymore, and journalists are no longer the reason people come to a platform. Journalists have lost their uniqueness, and with it, its power. We are not indispensable anymore. And the world won’t wait for us to become relevant again. He also questioned why foreign direct investment in news media remains prohibited.
“ It was a Cabinet resolution from 1948 that blocked FDI in Journalism. It still stands. The sector that opened us has grown. We didn’t, and the irony is that editors who championed FDI in every sector refused to allow it on their own,” he said.He said there is a train coming. It is called Artificial intelligence ( AI ). We either board it or get run over.
