Indian media has entered the stone age

To everyone who thinks, I bungled up with the headline, think again.

Indian media is as far from emerging from the stone age as it could possibly be. And I am not just talking about the quality of stories on India TV and Aaj Tak. Really, there’s very little the Indian media seems to be learning from the doom in the West. If I may proclaim so, the recession has hit the traditional media industry the hardest of all. It’s not mere budget cuts that are affecting media persons.

The media in the West is turning over and d.y.i.n.g. Newspapers, TV channels and radio are laying off journalists left, right and center. News spaces are shrinking as advertising disappears.

So what are the smarty pants up to? Hell, they’re moving operations online. Last week, Seattle Post-Intelligencer switched off its printers and moved all editorial to the web. With the PI gone, Seattle is on its way to becoming the first newspaper-less city in the world (of course there are the backyards of Africa and Asia where people have never seen newspapers but who cares about them anyway).

Bearing the Indian cross (aargh, swastik) in Amreeka is hard enough without realizing how far behind all Indian infrastructure is.

My ire stems from the lack of RSS 2.0 feeds on the websites of prominent Indian media websites. Maybe it is and maybe it is not something to rant about but I’m ranting about it anyway.

So this is how it all started..

I am seriously getting involved with Twitter, in a way that I did not think I ever would. I love getting updates about things that interest me. I have always sucked at online research so it’s great that I can rely on other people’s suggestions of the best place to read about things I want to. Apart from everything else, I also want to get my news from Twitter. All of my news. Not just nytimes, not just Indian Express.. I want all the news feeds I like combined into one smart Twitter feed so I can keep up to date with the latest Indian news and not have to go to each website separately.

So I started looking for something like it. What I found was mostly individual news sites’ Twitter accounts, like NDTV’s and IBN’s. Well, that’s really alright. But I wanted something personalized – I don’t particularly look forward to getting all the crap that the Indian media passes off as ‘BREAKING NEWS’ . I am looking for the real stuff.

So I decided to create a twitter feed of my own.. and IndiaNewsaholic was born, circa 2009.  Now, I started visiting the individual news sites to select the content I wanted in my RSS feed. What would you think? The organizations would make it easy for people to get RSS feeds, right? Wrong.

Most sites did not have RSS 2.0 which meant I could not feed them into IndiaNewsaholic. I know they had RSS 1.0 but for heaven’s sake, upgrade! I need you in twitter, not some godforsaken RSS 1.0 tolerant reader!

Stone age, I told ya..

Can you sense my waning interest? BBye.