Karthik Subramanian: Assistant Editor - The Hindu

Mr. Subramanian majorly spoke about the competition and collaboration between traditional and social media. Before starting his speech, he shared with the audience an insightful video about the evolution of social media over the years and the likely future of social media.

He then put forward the big question-whether the era of social media would mark the end of traditional media? In his opinion, such a scenario was unlikely to occur in India in the near future. Even as social media is gaining popularity, its reach in India is still limited to 7.1% of the population as compared to the 59% penetration of traditional media like television and print media.

Quoting the example of his own organization, The Hindu, he mentioned how the social media trend had not picked up much. The online version of one of India’s most popular dailies still remains in its skeletal form. He went on to observe that most companies are still quite reluctant to go online. Not only that, they do not perceive social media as a potential threat to their traditional media techniques.

Mr. Subramanian suggested that the importance and potential of social media can be conveyed to skeptics by showing them the benefits of using social media as compared to traditional media in terms of cost of delivery. He spoke about the revolutionary use of mobile phones as a medium of content delivery in remote areas in Africa, where traditional media like televisions and newsletter could not penetrate.

One reason why organizations are not in the favour of using social media is because of the amount of noise they have to deal with. Filtering and moderating prove to be a huge challenge for newsletters which allow comments from readers on their websites.

However, social media is gradually penetrating the realm of journalism. Much to the chagrin of professional photo journalists, National Geographic has started choosing their cover page illustrations from Flickr accounts, paying as little as $100 to the photographers. Many other such examples can be observed.

He concluded by saying that though social media is not likely to overtake tradition media in India in the near future, there is an enormous scope for collaboration between the two, and together the two media can create a gigantic impact in the area of business.