Where are all the new social networks?

Where are all the new social networks?

Charles Arthur

AP A screenshot of social networking site Facebook. File Photo

The technology scene has echoes of the post-dotcom exhaustion of 2002 as we wait for mobiles to catch up.

Where have all the social networks gone? Of course, this is exactly the right time to be asking this question. Haven't I noticed that Facebook is now claiming 500 million users, in the manner of Doctor Evil in Mike Myers's Austin Powers movies? Haven't I noticed that Twitter is getting its very own data centre, all the better to spread “unimportant trivia” (Copyright all tabloid papers)?

Well, yes, I have. But my question is actually about the broader subject.

What I'm really asking is where all the new social networks have gone. In the past two years, especially as Twitter has risen over the media horizon like a sunrise, barely a week has passed without a new network culled from the web 2.0 name generator - take a verb ending in -er and remove the “e” - being announced, often with a press release smelling ever so slightly of desperation that another “me-too” product could become the “us-instead” replacement.

To which the response is always: that hardly ever happens. Despite the insistence of web executives everywhere that rivals online are “only a click away”, you actually have to screw up royally to turn a successful service into one that people leave in droves. (So congratulations to the former managers at MySpace and Bebo: you deserve your place in those MBA case studies of the future.)

Look around, though, and sites such as blip.fm haven't taken off. True, services such as FourSquare and Gowalla seem to be on the rise — although people haven't quite grasped the threat that they can pose to users. So we're back at the original questions: where are all the new social networks? I think they're gone. Done, dusted, over. I don't think anyone is going to build a social network from scratch whose only purpose is to connect people. We've got Facebook (personal), LinkedIn (business) and Twitter (SMS-length for mobile).

Today the technology scene has echoes of the post-dotcom boom exhaustion of 2002-4. Then, the ideas which sank on the reefs of too-slow internet connections and too-few internet users had to wait for computers to catch up. Digg in 2004 and Google Maps in 2005 heralded much of the expansion, showing how a mashup of information meant new possibilities, and the whole “Web 2.0” concept began to germinate.

Now we're waiting again for mobiles, and especially smartphones allied to mobile networks, to catch up with what ambitious startup companies want to do. Apple's insistence in 2007 that iPhone users should have unlimited data plans yanked the entire mobile business forward about 10 years, and briefly showed us how everything should be working by 2012. No surprise that in recent months the mobile networks, unable to invest fast enough, have been rowing back on the “unlimited data” commitment, taking us back to 2007.

The next big sites won't be social networks. Of course they'll have social networking built into them; they'll come with an understanding of their importance, just as Facebook and Twitter know that search (an idea Google refined) and breaking news (Yahoo's remaining specialist metier) are de rigueur. Nor will they be existing sites retrofitted to do social networking, despite the efforts of Digg and Spotify.

So what will they be? No idea, I'm afraid. If I knew that, would I be here writing? Hell, no — I'd be off making elevator pitches and vacuuming up venture capital. Which brings us to business models. Facebook makes its money not just by sucking up ad impressions from the rest of the internet, using its remarkably detailed targeting ability; it also gets a cut from virtual transactions using its own virtual currency. LinkedIn, similarly, can precisely target its executive base. Twitter is different again, selling its user-generated content for big money to Google and Microsoft's Bing, as well as experimenting with direct payment for its EarlyBird sales system and “promoted tweets”. The point being that “ad-supported” isn't the only game for startup revenue. The big sites of the future won't necessarily be about ads as a way to make money, and they won't be about social networks. Now, hunker down and wait. Or get out there and build it. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2010

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India's counter-insurgency conundrum

India's counter-insurgency conundrum

Praveen Swami

The Hindu CRPF personnel patrolling the Khunti to Tamar road during the Naxal bandh in Khunti on July 8. Photo: Manob Chowdhury

Ill-trained CRPF was expected to fix a problem ill-trained police forces couldn't deal with. The price of that misplaced optimism has been paid with blood.

Five decades ago, a French Special Forces officer, ruminating on the ruin of his nation's once-powerful empire, set out to understand just why its armed forces had lost in a battle to adversaries armed with little other than determination. Unusually for a participant-chronicler of defeat, Roger Trinquier blamed neither politicians nor the inscrutable workings of history.

The problem, Trinquier argued, was that France had persisted “in studying a type of warfare that no longer exists and that we shall never fight again, while we pay only passing attention to the war we lost in Indochina and the one we are about to lose in Algeria. The result of this shortcoming is that the army is not prepared to confront an adversary employing arms and methods the army itself ignores. It has, therefore, no chance of winning.” “Our military machine,” he wryly concluded, “reminds one of a pile-driver attempting to crush a fly.”

Earlier this month, New Delhi laid out new proposals to address the growing Maoist insurgency that is devastating large swatches of India: a unified inter-State command, assisted by a retired Army Major-General. For all the hype, it is unclear just what the new structure is meant to achieve. No retired soldier, no matter how illustrious, has any experience of the ongoing counter-Maoist operations — or even firsthand knowledge of the forces he will be advising. More important, the immediate problem is not that of insurgents escaping pursuit across State lines: it is the growing mass of their forces, and the lethality of attacks.

Behind New Delhi's anodyne response lies a bitter truth the government will not publicly admit: the principal instrument of India's counter-Maoist campaign will not and cannot succeed.

A force in ruins

Back in 2003, a Group of Ministers assigned the Central Reserve Police Force frontline responsibility for counter-insurgency operations, in support of police across the country. Its recommendations, part of the seminal Report of the Group of Ministers on Reforming the National Security System, were widely seen as a well-intentioned effort to end the use of the Army and the Border Security Force in counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism duties.

In 1999, when the expert group on whose basis the Report was issued conducted its work, the CRPF had 1,67,367 personnel. That number went up to 2,60,873 in 2007 — and is believed to have increased to over 2,80,000 now.

Key to the problem is that the CRPF has nowhere to train its recruits. The organisation has six training centres, each of which was designed to process between 150 and 200 personnel at a time through nine-month basic courses. Today those centres cannot even handle recruitment made to redress wastage — men who retire, for example, or who have to be removed for discipline. New battalions are being trained at improvised facilities lacking in basic infrastructure like classrooms, quality firing ranges and combat-simulation facilities — and by officers who will eventually lead them on the field, not professional instructors.

Worse, the CRPF has a crippling shortage of officers at the cutting-edge Assistant Commandant level — the officers responsible for handling forces the size of a company, or about 125 men. Induction has not kept pace with the expansion of the force. So, most battalions have to make do with just half of their sanctioned strength of Assistant Commandants.

Many of the best officers, moreover, are siphoned off by the Special Protection Group and the National Security Guard early in their careers. Few, thus, develop a personal rapport with the men they return to command. Satyawan Yadav, who led the ill-fated 62 Battalion patrol which was wiped out in Dantewada in April this year, had spent 10 years at the SPG. Internal investigators found that Yadav had defied orders to conduct a long-rage patrol through forests, choosing instead to lie about the whereabouts of his force to his commanders. His transition from the air-conditioned environment of the Prime Minister's home to a field camp in Bastar had evidently been difficult.

Poor leadership has meant the CRPF has little institutional ability to learn from its mistakes. Despite repeated warnings from the Intelligence Bureau, 62 Battalion failed to secure its headquarters in Rampur against an attack by the Lashkar-e-Taiba in December 2007. Earlier this year, several personnel were held on charges of selling ammunition to organised crime groups in Uttar Pradesh. Later, Battalion commander Prabhranjan Kumar was relieved of his duties and is now facing internal proceedings related to inappropriate personal behaviour.

No in-house intelligence

It doesn't end there: the CRPF does not have an in-house intelligence organisation. It recruits on a national basis, meaning it has few personnel familiar with the language, culture and terrain of the areas in which it operates. It does not even have a higher-command school dedicated to counter-insurgency tactics. Bluntly, everything that could conceivably be wrong is wrong.

For most of its history, the CRPF served as a resource provider, sending out company-sized forces to assist the police across the country. Few commanders had frontline combat roles until the CRPF was drawn into the Punjab insurgency. Bar a brief commitment in Jammu and Kashmir, the force had no independent counter-insurgency commitments till five years ago — when it was handed a role it was neither prepared nor equipped for.

“We can't teach the CRPF how to walk,” Chhattisgarh Director-General of Police Vishwa Ranjan said of the series of errors in fieldcraft that led to the massacre of 27 personnel in a fire-engagement last month. His words may have been harsh — but their accuracy cannot be disputed.

“Policing a country of over 1.1 billion people,” Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram said in June, “is not an easy task.” He pointed out that in many of the States worst-hit by Maoist violence, “there are police stations where there are no more than eight men; and even these eight or less men do not hold any weapons for fear of the weapons being looted.” He called on the States to “enhance the capacity of training institutes to at least double the present capacity, and to recruit at least double the number of policemen and women being recruited at present.”

Ever since Mr. Chidambaram took office as Home Minister, India has seen a concerted effort to enhance police staffing. In December 2008, the National Crime Records Bureau reported, India had 1.13 million police personnel — about 128 for every 1,00,000 people, just over half the United Nations-recommended norm for peaceful societies facing no major challenges. The government now claims that the public-police ratio has risen to 1,00,000:161.78. The figures have aroused some scepticism, implying that 3,84,000 personnel have been hired in just 18 months — not counting the replacement of those who retired or were otherwise lost.

Leaving aside the statistical dispute, though, it is clear many Maoist-hit States are not the beneficiaries of force expansion. Bihar still has just 85,545 posts, of which 23,889 are vacant. That means there are 74.29 officers for every 1,00,000 population. Orissa still has just 135.8, and West Bengal just 100. Elsewhere, the increases are more marked, but still well short of international norms. Jharkhand, which had just 136 police personnel per 1,00,000 population five years ago, now has 206.98, according to the Union Home Ministry. Chhattisgarh's police-population ratio too has risen from 128 to 226.3: 1,00,000.

Moreover, force expansion is not solving the problem it was intended for. Nagaland, which now has a staggering 1,677.3 police personnel for every 1,00,000 population, Jammu and Kashmir 742.3, and Manipur 669.6 — some of the highest population to force ratios in India — but none has succeeded in relieving the military of counter-insurgency responsibilities. Mizoram, which has no insurgency, has 1,268.6 police personnel per 1,00,000 population, suggesting that the problem in essence is serving employment-generation imperatives.

Even if all States were to expand their forces to these levels, it is far from clear if the facilities and instructors exist to make the recruitment meaningful. The benefits of facilities like Chhattisgarh's school of jungle warfare at Kanker are evident. From January to June this year, the Chhattisgarh police claimed to have killed 37 Maoist insurgents, compared to just 10 by the CRPF, eight of those in joint operations. Notably, the police lost 29 men in combat, as against 117 fatalities suffered by the CRPF. Few governments, though, have followed its lead. In his speech, Mr. Chidambaram announced that nine counter-insurgency and anti-terrorism schools would be up and running this year, each equipped to train 1,000 personnel a year. He made clear, though, that these schools would in no way meet the needs of India's burgeoning forces.

“We hope,” Union Home Secretary G.K. Pillai said in 2009, as the CRPF began to surge deep into Chhattisgarh, “that literally within 30 days of the security forces moving in and dominating the area, we should be able to restore civil administration there.” New Delhi hoped that an ill-trained CRPF would help fix a problem ill-trained police forces weren't able to deal with. The price of that Panglossian optimism has been paid with blood. Both New Delhi and the States need to get down to the hard work needed to build credible counter-insurgency forces — and, meanwhile, consider strategies that are consistent with their capabilities.

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Harsh ground realities could trip RTE vision

Harsh ground realities could trip RTE vision

Poor attendance by teachers and lack of importance given to education by migrating parents main hurdles

Cordelia Jenkins

Lucknow: In an upstairs classroom at a residential school in Mal, near Lucknow, the girls are revising for their exams. As the light starts to fade at the glassless windows, each girl takes a brightly coloured plastic lamp and carries it to her space on the floor. There is no electricity, but the lamps are solar powered. They have been donated jointly by Swedish company Ikea and the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) to Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya (KGBV) schools in Uttar Pradesh, for girls from minority groups and impoverished backgrounds. In the dark, little pools of light gather around each bent head.

That’s an improvement no doubt, yet a challenge; and it is something that would have struck a chord with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who too once struggled similarly in the absence of electricity. On 1 April, Singh spoke in Delhi as the Right to Education (RTE) Act came into force, and said, “In my childhood, I read under the dim light of a kerosene lamp. I am what I am today because of education, and I want every Indian child, girl and boy, to be so touched by the light.”

Also Read Previous stories under India Agenda campaign

Thanks to RTE, all children aged 6-14 now have the constitutional right to receive a good quality education. The plan includes proposals to upgrade existing schools and open new ones; train thousands of new teachers for a mandated 1:30 teacher-pupil ratio, and institute a 25% reservation in private schools for minority students.

It is one of many efforts to boost school attendance in India. Census data shows a countrywide increase in literacy from 52.2% to 64.8% between 1991 and 2001, and since then, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) programme claims to have placed a primary school within 1km of nearly every child in the country.

But there is much to be done.

The challenge

Official estimates say 8-10 million children are still out of school (other sources claim the figure is much higher, up to 40 million), and child labour numbers and dropout rates are high.

According to a 2010 report from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco), nearly four out of 10 children who enrol in first grade don’t reach the 12th; and many students are unable to pursue their education consistently, and are forced to take breaks depending on the seasonal migration between cities and villages by their parents in search of jobs.

Predictably, children from the scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and other backward castes have lower enrolment rates, as do girls, who are disabled or from minority communities.

Concerns such as these prompt doubts on the feasibility of the Act. Ashish Rajpal, chief executive of iDiscoveri, a social enterprise that works to transform teaching methods in India, is one of those with reservations.

“Every right-thinking person in the country has to welcome this Act,” he says. “It’s been overdue for 50 years. But having forward-thinking documents doesn’t necessarily mean that change will occur. In terms of form, there is almost nothing missing at the moment. We have the schools, we have the complete system, but where is the substance?”

In Uttar Pradesh (UP), a state with one of the lowest literacy rates (56% in 2001), the problem is particularly pressing. Yet, the state director of SSA, Lalita Pradeep, is confident that progress is being made. “RTE is the best thing that ever happened to our country,” she says. “UP is the largest state so it has a big challenge before it; we are totally ready.”

India reported a fall of almost 15 million in out-of-school numbers in the two years following SSA’s 2001 launch, according to the Unesco report. Now, the country faces the challenge of maintaining those results and pushing harder in the state’s major cities.

Urbanization in UP has flooded cities with the children of migrant workers and heightened competition for real estate. In Lucknow, much school space is rented and, with high rents and scarce space, SSA struggles to renovate and extend its existing buildings, says Pradeep. Because of the temporary nature of their housing and jobs, immigrants are often slow to enrol their children in school and quick to pull them out. In Lucknow, the pressure on urban schools to keep up with this erratic enrolment means that the required materials, registration documents and funds often come too late or not at all.

At the Chandganj Primary School, teachers voice their frustrations over the delays in acquiring these documents. Rekha Yadav says that the parents of most students are migrant workers—labourers, rickshaw drivers and vegetable sellers—who are less interested in the quality of their children’s education than in the material benefits (uniforms, free meals and the Rs300 incentive fee) that come with it. “I have to make the children understand the importance of learning,” she says, “I have to persuade them to study.”

“They don’t come regularly,” agrees headmistress Maya Dixit. “In the harvest season, the kids go back to the villages to work. It’s very frustrating, we can’t teach them properly.”

Dixit says that most parents are below the poverty line and consider education to be of secondary importance. “First comes food, then education,” she says.

It is more difficult to measure and enforce enrolment in city schools, but rural schools find it harder to attract trained teachers. Pradeep estimates that the state will need to train 300,000 new teachers and retrain some existing ones, as the RTE Act doesn’t permit untrained teachers to work. “Quality has been the biggest challenge for many decades, and it still is,” she says. “We have recruited good teachers with good backgrounds and training, but sometimes that doesn’t translate when they are in the school.”

In fact, teaching standards vary greatly, and private schools can seem like a better option to parents, says Vinobajee Gautam, an education specialist with Unicef in Lucknow. “There is a widely held perception among the urban poor that government schools are inefficient,” he says. “Some people’s perception is so bad that they prefer to take their children out of education altogether if they can’t afford the private option.”

Accusations of teachers playing truant and working on the side during school hours are frequently made, and Uma Bisht, the UP director of the National Literacy Mission, says this is due to a lack of regulation. “Even today, especially in rural areas, the teachers don’t attend regularly,” she says. “If the teachers aren’t behaving responsibly, we cannot motivate the parents, we cannot motivate the children. We have to blacklist these teachers.”

The RTE promises to set up school management committees (SMCs) to address such problems. At Unicef, Gautam is working to spread awareness about the new rules. “With this Act, the government has managed to transmit the sense of responsibility to the communities themselves,” he says. “When we hand over the school to them, we’ll see the results.”

SMCs will be made up of local community leaders and parents, acting as watchdogs for their local schools, responsible for everything from admissions to fund allocation. “I think it’s ownership that will make a difference in these areas,” Pradeep says. “Once 75% of the SMC is made up of parents, things will look different; we can ensure good results and there will be a lot of transparency of these funds.”

The final hurdle will be empowering those who remain marginalized. Belonging to a scheduled caste or tribe or being a girl still lowers a child’s chance of getting an education in India. The girls at the school in Mal come from these backgrounds and SSA’s KGBV schools, basic as their infrastructure might be, offer what is often the only chance for pupils such as these to realize Singh’s dream.

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Kashmir and the poverty of politics

Kashmir and the poverty of politics

Happymon Jacob

AP Protesters shout slogans in Pampore, on the outskirts of Srinagar, on Wednesday. Kashmir's latest unrest needs to be seen in context, wherein the politics of New Delhi and Srinagar has lost favour with the Kashmiris.

It is easy to blame Pakistan, the Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the Opposition for the troubles in Kashmir. But the fact remains that it is the National Conference-led government's deplorable poverty of politics that has set the State alight again.

The ongoing unrest in Kashmir is the result of a failure of politics, political courage, conviction and empathy. If Kashmir burns time and again, it is because politicians in New Delhi and Srinagar have failed to extend a powerful and convincing political argument to the Kashmiris. Gone are the days when a nation state could demand the undiluted loyalty of its citizens by force and coercion; today, a modern multinational state such as India can command the legitimacy of its citizens only by the power, persuasiveness and attraction of its political arguments.

Kashmir's latest unrest needs to be seen in context, wherein the politics of New Delhi and Srinagar has lost favour with the Kashmiris. It is easy and convenient to blame Pakistan, the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), dissident parties in Kashmir and the Opposition People's Democratic Party for the troubles. Indeed, they might have even committed their own acts to fuel the unrest. However, the fact remains that it is the National Conference-led Jammu and Kashmir government's deplorable poverty of politics that has set Kashmir alight again.

Forgotten promises

The historic election of 2008 saw Omar Abdullah elected Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir with a remarkable voter turnout of 61 per cent, despite the vote coming in the wake of the Amarnath land dispute. It was hoped by many that the young and dynamic Mr. Abdullah would lead the State towards peace and prosperity. However, the NC-Congress administration in Jammu and Kashmir has failed to accomplish anything more than the preceding governments and has been equally unable to prevent the State from sliding into further turmoil. Mr. Abdullah also appeared to falter on many occasions in the last two years, including recently when he attempted to blame the unrest on the LeT and anti-national elements. This is a sentiment, of course, shared by the NC's coalition partner, Congress. The Chief Minister has said on a number of occasions that Kashmir is a political issue, first and foremost, and rightly so; what then, one wonders, has prevented him from addressing it as such?

The new government in Jammu and Kashmir came to power pledging zero tolerance to human rights violations. But this is observed more in the breach. The Chief Minister also briefly flirted with the idea of setting up a ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission' of sorts; however, it remains one of his pet grand ideas and has never materialised. The process to amend various draconian provisions of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) is yet to get under way in a serious manner. The five working groups established by the Prime Minister to resolve State issues at the end of the second round table conference in 2006 have not been given adequate attention, despite the encouraging suggestions proffered by many of them.

In 2000, the NC pushed a resolution through the State Assembly demanding autonomy that was rejected in totality by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance government in New Delhi, which termed it “anti-national.” One wonders why the NC has not renewed this demand, given that it is now a coalition partner in the UPA government at the Centre. All the NC and Mr. Abdullah have done in this regard, though, has been to make occasional references to it. It is one thing to orchestrate a litany of promises; it is an entirely different thing to have the political will and courage to pursue them.

Premature triumphalism

The previous two years of mainstream politics in Jammu and Kashmir have been marked by a post-2008 election euphoria that has led to a misplaced sense of triumphalism in Srinagar and New Delhi regarding the victory of democracy and the defeat of dissent in the Valley. The politics of indifference and complacency took root in place of a realisation that this sense of relative stability could be used to usher in a programme of political reconciliation and peace. Mainstream politicians in the Valley forget what has always been true in the case of Kashmir: peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of justice, as famously pointed out by Martin Luther King Jr. The politicians of Jammu and Kashmir and New Delhi should have had the wisdom to capitalise on the positive post-2008 atmosphere by promoting substantive conflict resolution processes in the State. The absence of a political reconciliation process has convinced the people, especially the youth, that their trust has been betrayed by the elected leadership.

Meaning of violence

There is also a widespread tendency among officials and those who write on Kashmir to assert that in a purely statistical sense, examining (for example) indices of poverty and other socio-economic indicators, Kashmir is doing far better than most other Indian States: so what are the Kashmiris complaining about? On the other hand, there are those who argue that the way to resolve the Kashmir issue is simply to pump ever more money into the State. Both these positions are half-truths, if not outright absurdities. Those who defend such arguments fail to understand the meaning of violence in its more nuanced sense. Peace and normalcy cannot be measured by poverty levels, or by other well-cited numbers such as the number of deaths by police fire. These statistics cannot capture the extent of political alienation and the severe psychological trauma experienced, especially by the post-1989 generation that has grown up in the shadow of guns and bloodshed. No amount of economic largesse will tempt this generation to buy unconvincing political arguments. When disillusioned youth fight for a meaning to their political existence, the political parties of Jammu and Kashmir ought to pay attention, for it is these youths who will decide their fate.

Pakistan factor

In this context, the argument that peace building and conflict resolution in Kashmir could not progress due to the post-26/11 acrimony between India and Pakistan falls flat. The fact is the governments in New Delhi and Srinagar need not wait to get the green signal from Islamabad to talk to their own people. Non-interference by Islamabad may well reduce violence and keep Kashmir militancy-free. However, the reality is that the current eruption of violence is marginally affected by Pakistan. Ironically, one could even argue that less interference by Islamabad could even prompt the Indian government to become complacent on Kashmir. In truth, it has certainly appeared thus since 2008.

Why should Pakistan dictate our Kashmir policy when we are certain that for the majority of Kashmiris, Pakistan does not even figure in their minds when they take to the streets protesting against injustice? Indeed, barring the marginal Hurriyat faction of Syed Ali Shah Geelani, no other political leader talks about going to Pakistan. Neither does the majority among them demand a complete separation from India.

Many of those in New Delhi and Srinagar who swear by the argument that Kashmir should be resolved “politically” because it is a “political issue” fail to comprehend what this really entails. Simply put, it means that we can win Kashmir back only by making a convincing political argument, by devising a politically conscious reconciliation process, and by being sensitive to the many injustices the Kashmiris have suffered.

(Happymon Jacob teaches at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.)

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Migration in progress: from print to the web

Migration in progress: from print to the web

Pranay Gupte

The online ad business, excluding mobile ads, is set to expand to $34.4 billion in 2014 from $24.2 billion in 2009. Newspapers continue to suffer from a decline in advertising revenue.

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A prominent example of a print paper opting to transform itself entirely into a Web publication is the venerable Christian Science Monitor

With the galloping fortunes of high-technology driven portable gadgets, media organisations see the advantage of pushing content through telephony

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I was dining with John Seeley in the Grill Room of The Four Seasons Restaurant, the one place in New York where the city's elite habitually congregate for their “power lunch” five days a week. Mr. Seeley, like others in the wood-panelled, Philip Johnson-designed room, is a player — which is to say that, as founding editor of The Wall Street Journal's new “Greater New York” daily supplement, he's someone whose presence is immediately noticed and whose attention is sought, even by other influential figures in a power obsessed metropolis like New York.

Mr. Seeley, a trim, bespectacled man in his early 40's, wears his power lightly; he's an old friend, and one of the finest editors I've worked with. He takes his work very seriously, not the least because his new section is competing head-on with The New York Times' formidable local report, both in print and on the Web.

One of the topics we discussed was the decline of print publications and the question of whether major newspapers should put up a “pay wall” for the content they offered on the Web. The proprietor of Mr. Seeley's paper, Rupert Murdoch, is an enthusiast of the pay-for-content concept; The New York Times has announced that it will start charging visitors to its popular Web site for much of its content.

This topic may not have dominated conversation at every table of The Four Seasons Restaurant. But it would be safe to assume that it was lodged in the minds of the media tycoons there. On this day, the restaurant's other diners included a variety of top media figures, including Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, and host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS; he was lunching with Henry Kissinger, the former U.S. Secretary of State, who privately advises media companies. ( Newsweek has put itself up for sale, and the prospects of a financially viable future seem grim.)

Mortimer Zuckerman, publisher of The New York Daily News was there, too; his paper's print circulation has been steadily declining, as is that of its Murdoch-owned tabloid rival, The New York Post. In another corner, the former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was eating with Vernon Jordan, arguably the closest friend of former President Bill Clinton, and a former member of the board of Dow Jones, which publishes The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Rubin is co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, a prestigious think tank whose Web publications have been winning awards as well as more and more visitors. Still another diner was a top executive of Condé Nast, which recently shut down the bible of the food industry, the monthly magazine Gourmet, and is reviving it as a Web offering.

Upturned in the U.S.

“Print versus Web” is a topic that has upturned the media industry in the United States, and in many other countries, resulting in significant job losses for print journalists. In 2007, there were 6,580 daily newspaper around the world, including nearly 1,500 in the U.S.; by mid 2010, the overall figure is down by 500, while newspaper revenues have declined by a fifth on account of an advertising fall precipitated by the global recession, as well as a migration of many advertisers to the Web.

A prominent example of a print paper opting to transform itself entirely into a Web publication is the venerable Christian Science Monitor, the Boston-based newspaper that was founded in 1908 by Mary Baker Eddy. It shut down its daily print edition on March 27, 2009, citing losses of $18.9 million per year versus $12.5 million in annual revenue. It now offers content online on its Web site and via e-mail. John Yemma, the paper's editor, says that the move to go digital was made because the management recognised that the Christian Science Monitor's reach would be greater online than in print. He says that in the next five years the Monitor will aim to increase its online readership to 25 million page-views, from the current figure of five million.

In the United Arab Emirates, the daily business daily, Emirates 24/7 — which is owned by the Dubai Government company, DMI — announced a few days ago that it, too, would terminate its print edition. Like the Christian Science Monitor, Emirates 24/7 will be published daily solely as a Web newspaper.

While newspapers generally are suffering from a decline in advertising and subscription revenues, rising newsprint costs simultaneously besets them. U.S. East Coast prices — the barometer of global rates for newsprint — rose to nearly $600 a tonne in January 2010, compared to $464 in August 2009. Moreover, new contracts concluded after March 2010 include an additional $50 a tonne. (Indian publishers for whom newsprint constitutes the single largest cost element — accounting for 40 to 60 per cent of total cost, are bracing themselves for this rise, even though newsprint is current exempt from customs duty; publishers import 50 per cent of the 1.8 million tonnes of newsprint used annually.)

Here's another set of statistics that should be sobering for the print industry: The online ad business, excluding mobile ads, is set to expand to $34.4 billion in 2014 from $24.2 billion in 2009, according to a report released last week by PricewaterhouseCoopers. The same report says that newspapers continue to suffer from a decline in advertising revenue. According to the Newspaper Association of America, print advertising revenue dropped 28.6 per cent in 2009 to $24.82 billion. The PricewaterhouseCoopers report estimates that print advertising in newspapers will drop to $22.3 billion by 2014. It also estimates that mobile advertising in North America will quadruple from $414 million in 2009 to $1.6 billion in 2014.

With the galloping fortunes of high-technology driven portable gadgets such as Apple's iPad and the new iPhone4, media organisations clearly see the advantage of pushing content through telephony. This doesn't augur well for the print industry, although, of course, its decline may not suggest imminent demise.

Still, as The Wall Street Journal's John Seeley told me, smart media organisations are revving up their digital technology. “You need to be where the readers are,” he said. The Journal is in the comfortable position of having a daily print circulation of 2.09 million, compared to 952,000 for The New York Times. Neither paper is taking its relatively high print circulation for granted — both are spending fresh sums of money on boosting print circulation through ads and provocative marketing. But both are also accelerating their Web operations.

(Pranay Gupte is a veteran international journalist and author. His next book is on India and the Middle East.)