NEW DELHI: In a bid to address the “disproportionate imbalance” in the news industry, Union minister of state for electronics and information technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar called upon Big Tech aggregators to support digital news creators and help the latter with a fair share of the acquired revenue.
“It is clear that if the traditional news industry continues to be negatively impacted, the future of journalism, our fourth pillar, is also hit. Thus, this is a question of journalism and credible content as well. It leaves the small guy at a disadvantage which is not the right thing for a country like India where we potentially have hundreds and thousands of content creators,” he said at the Digital News Publishers Association’s ‘Future of Digital Media Conference 2023’ on Friday.
It is clear that at some inflection point, the consumption of news in particular and content, in general, will swing sharply to the internet, he added.
Acknowledging the challenges that tagged along as India embarked on an era of digitisation, he said: “As millions of consumers use internet and consumer products and services, time accountability to the consumer is also something that needs to be built and legislated. For many decades, regulation and law-making or government and societal scrutiny and oversight about digital platforms lagged innovation because it was seen that these were all innovation platforms and they did not represent any threat or criminality. With digital media and digital brands proliferating, we have seen that those old values of media have been challenged or put to test.”
