News Media in India : The Impact of Globalization

Globalisation has set in a new trend in Indian news media wherein the once leading news agencies are steadily losing their traditional hold on daily newspapers and slowly getting marginalised in the process. The shrinking presence of news stories from leading news agencies in news dailies is a sure indicator of the ill-effects of globalisation on Indian news media. The role of news agencies, as the main supplier of news, has steadily declined over the past two decades. The present study considers the quantum of news stories from the Indian news agencies to critically examine their position in the overall news coverage, both from temporal and cross-sectional perspective. The study utilises content analysis, a specific research approach used frequently in all areas of the media, to examine the contents of the newspapers to test the validity of the argument that the role of Indian news agencies is shrinking in the wake of globalisation. The study aims at identifying and analysing distinct trends in the world of news agency journalism with the help of data generated after content analysis of five leading dailies -- four in English and one in Hindi. Four English dailies representing four regions of the country are The Times of India from the West, The Tribune from the North, The Statesman from the East, and The Hindu from the South. The Hindi daily is Punjab Kesari. National news agencies covered under the study are PTI, UNI (English) and Hindusthan Samachar (Hindi). Specifically, the study examines the quantum and percentage of news items taken from Indian news agencies both before and after globalisation. The temporal axis analysis covers a period of 20 years beginning with 1985 at a five year gap, i.e. 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000 and 2005 for a period of one week each for content analysis.