Urban youth between the ages of 15 and 30 years are the main market for India’s mobile service providers. Youth in India are also the largest consumers of mobile VAS.

Virgin Mobile India has signed a deal with Nimbuzz to provide instant messaging features to their mobile phone customers. Through Vchatter, customers will be able to log on to multiple instant messaging services with a single login.

This article reports that Hindustan Times, a major Indian newspaper is changing it’s look and reporting style to cater to India’s youth population.

Sanjoy Narayan, editor-in-chief, HT, “Relationship and the people’s approach to consumption of news has changed. They get news faster from television, Internet, mobile phones (through SMS alerts), social media networks and newsletters. The reader wakes up in the morning not to know ‘what’ but ‘why’. While we deal with this ‘why’, it has lead to the overall restaging of the product.”

Interesting….is it only HT or other newspapers are taking the similar route???

LG has launched three new multimedia mobile phones for youth in India. The KS360 almost sounds like an iPhone clone with touchscreen display. The features in these new mobile phones such as Yahoo search, NDTV viewer etc. make them sound like a mini-computer plus TV. I think these new phones signal an indication that mobile internet is soon going to be a reality in India and Indian youth are certainly going to lead this revolution. I am looking for any good examples of how this may be actually happening.

Motorola is set to launch new mobile phones with music rich features and wi-fi capability.

Spice Mobile launches S-590, an affordable cell phone with video camera capability, POPAT (talking phone), and other VAS features.

Agency faqs reported how RK Misra won the lead India contest by Times of India by using MyToday SMS service:

MyToday is a free SMS subscription service started by digital evangelist Rajesh Jain in India, which sends out daily message alerts on news, cricket, the sensex, jokes, religion, Bollywood and astrology to its three million subscribers.

Are there any other SMS based news service or cell phone news alerts services in India?

Internet is redefining the news media. In this article, Ronald A. Yaros, assistant professor of journalism at UMD and director of the Lab for Communicating Complexity with Multimedia, writes about the complexity facing the journalists in this digital world in Nieman Reports, published by Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. 

The evolution of internet has changed the way young people receive and process news. He writes that, ”The technologies (that deliver news) and the news audience of 2019, will be very different than what they are today”. Therefore, it is imperative that we understand “how digital natives now use media for entertainment, information, education and social networking.”

According to him, there are three phases of how technology is adopted:

1. Awareness and exploration of the new technological tools
2. Learning how to use the new tools
3. Applying these new tools to daily life.

Digital Natives (the young people) who blog and social network are in third phase of adoption, whereas the news organizations are in the second phase. This gap, presents a challenge to the traditional media journalists and the news organizations, about how to communicate with an audience, who is tech-savvy and ”values shorter, fact-driven multimedia.”

He proposes a PICK model for future journalism, which when combined with traditional journalistic values may be effective in engaging audience. 

PICK stands for:

1. Personalization

2. Involvement

3. Contiguity (or coherence)

4. Minimal distractions (cognitive kick-outs)

PICK defines multimedia as an environment (i.e. a full page or entire Web site) where multiple elements—hypertext, video, slideshows, blogs, forums, graphics and animation—are presented with text and personalized to the user.

1. Personalizing the News:

Personalization in news means, “the extent to which a user can choose content congruent with his or her interests.” “NewsSEEN” is a prototype in research phase, which not only provides news, but also priortizes news by level of interest. The basic purpose of NewsSEEN is to see ”how professionally produced, personalized content (or PPP) can be combined with, yet differentiated from, citizen-produced content.” Although interactivity is very important in digital news, too much of it can kill the reader’s interest, therefore, it is important to have right amount of interactivity.

2. Involvement:

It is “the degree to which users input choices and/or content.” The level of involvement may vary, “for example, Clicking a “play” button for a one-minute video represents much less involvement than reading a few sentences, choosing steps in a related animation, selecting a 10-second video, and then posting comments about the story. “

3. Contiguity:

“Contiguity in multimedia is how the elements of hypertext, photos, animation, slides, links, blogs, video and audio, all combine to communicate one coherent message.” It only takes 50 milliseconds for a reader to form an opinion, and if there is no coherency in the content, the readers terminate their engagement which he calls “kick - outs.”

4.  Kick – outs: It is basically the termination of engagement with the content. There are many reasons why an audience may lose interest in the content, and some of these can be controllable. For example,

“The most obvious kick-out is a broken link, but others include too much text, lengthy video, pop-up windows, unfamiliar terms, confusing graphics, or interactive animation that’s too complex.”

So the challenge is to enhance how news is presented and recogninze how to prevent kick-outs.

Adopting the PICK news model, does not mean abandoning traditional journalism values, but the challenge he says, is to combine effectively

“techniques of personalization, involvement, contiguity and minimal kick-outs with clear, accurate, ethical journalism.”

PICK model in my opinion, outlines some of the key points to consider when delivering news via digital media. For some time now, since I started this blog, I have been using twitter, both for social networking and to receive news and the concepts of PICK model apply to the form in which news is delivered on Twitter. However, I also think that it would be important to understand the “expectations” with which digital audience come to the digital platform to receive news.

I have been glued to the internet watching the mumbai attacks since yesterday. I learned about it around 1 pm US eastern time from a friend on yahoo messenger. She was outraged. I opened the NDTV live and watched in shock the burning TAJ. For about an hour, I just sat watching transfixed. I couldn’t believe, how could such an event happen in the middle of a busy city like Mumbai.

My first reaction, to know how my family and friends were. Some of my family stays very closeby to where the incident was taking place. I prayed and gathered enough courage to call them. Thankfully they are all fine.

I was hoping that it will all be over soon. But the night turned into day and day turned into night again and the terror still continues. Sitting in my room watching the live coverage of attack and reading live updates on twitter, I feel helpless. My thoughts turning into my head, and several questions emerging..why and how could something like this happen and the world watches. We are just watching and reading and listening while the terrorists are taking innocent lives…..we can speculate and we can reason….but when will this end…when 9/11 happened, we thought this was the big thing, and now we must get ready to fight terror, since then we had the Iraq war but the terrorist attacks continued – we saw the bombings in London, Delhi, and elsewhere and now Mumbai terror attacks…what are we going to do – prepare to fight another one like this….

We are getting reports from all over internet – from news media through live TV, from social media through twitter, first hand accounts from bloggers, we are so well-connected as the world, technology has brought us together like never before. I read anger, angst, pain all kinds of emotions from viewers from all over the world. The world watches in horror about what is happening in Mumbai, and tomorrow it can happen anywhere..we are connected but we are not safe. Somewhere we have gone wrong, somewhere we have failed…till yesterday, it was hijackings which made news and we were horrified with such incidents and today we are hit at right in the middle of a city, where we would think we are safest….

My thoughts and prayers are with all those who are dead or injured, who have lost their loved ones…or are awaiting them…may God (if there is one) create a miracle for everyone involved. May this event makes the world work towards peaceful solutions…