Morning paper, morning phone: the news changed, trust didn’t
- Only 22 in 100 people say they trust news on social media
- A falsehood spreads six times faster than the truth, and humans, not bots, do the spreading
- A newspaper answers to a registrar, a press council, an editors’ guild and the courts; a news portal or YouTube channel answers to no one
- TV news lives for a moment; the newspaper stays on the table all day
- US newspaper circulation halved in twenty years; Indian print is still a Rs 25,900-crore industry
Once the paper, now the phone
There was a time when the first thing at the door every morning was the newspaper. You picked it up, poured a cup of tea and read it from the front page to the last. What happened yesterday, who said what, what was going on in town: all of it in half an hour.
Now the phone lies next to the pillow. The moment your eyes open, the flood begins: WhatsApp forwards, Facebook posts, YouTube Shorts, whatever is trending on X. Before you finish one, ten more arrive. Which is true, which is false, which is half true? There is no time to find out. There is not even the thought of finding out.
This is not just my experience. Millions now live with the same condition. The Reuters Institute at Oxford University asks about a hundred thousand people in 48 countries every year and publishes the results. Its 2026 report says that, for the first time in history, social media and video platforms have overtaken television and news websites as the main way people get their news.
The same report says something else. Only 22 in 100 people say they trust the news they see on social media.
Think about that. The platform most people use is also the platform fewest people trust. We watch, but we do not believe. In other words, we already know that not everything there is true. We keep watching anyway.
Speed is social media’s strength. It is also its weakness.
How a story is born in a newspaper
Having spent more than thirty years inside newspapers, let me tell you something most readers never see: how many hands a story passes through before it reaches yours.
The reporter goes to the spot. Talks to the people there. Asks the officials. Hears both sides. The story comes to the desk. A sub-editor goes through it: are the names right, do the numbers add up, is anyone being defamed for no reason? If something looks doubtful, the reporter gets a phone call. The news editor reads it. If it is a big story, the editor reads it personally. Only then does it go onto the page. From there to the press. The machines start after midnight. The vans leave before dawn. And in the morning, the paper is at your door.
Why all this? One reason. Once a mistake is printed, it cannot be taken back. Lakhs of copies are already in readers’ hands. There is no delete button. There is no edit option. That is why newspapers are so careful. That is why, in our towns, “it was in the paper” still carries weight.
That weight is not my imagination. The same Reuters report has a telling detail about India: even as overall trust in news falls, trust in the established print newspapers remains high. That trust was earned by a paper arriving at the door every morning for decades. It was not built in a day. It does not come from one viral post.
On social media, who is responsible?
Now look at the other side.
A post on social media: you do not know who wrote it. You do not know where it came from. You certainly do not know who is behind it. Take an old video, add new words, send it out, and it reaches lakhs of people in seconds. Before an election, a leader’s words are clipped and twisted and go viral by midnight. When there is an accident, a photo someone took somewhere, sometime, circulates as “just happened”. By the time it is exposed as false, the damage is done. Nobody apologises. You do not even know whom to ask.
This is not a guess; it has been measured. Researchers at MIT in the United States examined ten years of Twitter data, more than a lakh news stories, and published a study in the journal Science. They found that a falsehood reaches 1,500 people six times faster than the truth does. False stories are 70 percent more likely to be shared than true ones.
And here is the strange part. The spreading is not done by machines or bots. It is done by people. A falsehood is novel, surprising, infuriating. The truth is ordinary. So we forward the lie at once, and read the fact and move on.
Do you know how much stands behind a newspaper?
Let me tell you what it takes to start a newspaper. Then the difference will be clear.
First, the name. The Press Registrar General of India (PRGI, formerly the RNI), a central government body, must certify that nobody else is using it. Then registration. Who prints it, who publishes it, who edits it, where the press is: all of it goes into a signed declaration. Every issue must carry the printer’s, publisher’s and editor’s names and the press address by law. Every year, a statement of how many copies were printed must be filed, and it is audited. A new law came in 2024, the Press and Registration of Periodicals Act, 2023, and none of this went away. Every newspaper still has to be registered.
That is the first layer. The second is the Press Council of India, set up under the Press Council Act of 1978 and chaired by a retired Supreme Court judge. Its Norms of Journalistic Conduct spell out accuracy, verification before publication and correction when wrong. A newspaper that errs can be warned, admonished or censured by the Council.
The third is the profession policing itself. After the Emergency, in 1978, the country’s senior editors founded the Editors Guild of India to protect press freedom and set editorial standards. When an editor goes wrong, fellow editors ask questions. That is not law; it is professional honour.
The fourth is the courts. Defamation suits. Print a lie and you can end up in jail.
“A newspaper has a registration, a press council, an editors’ guild and the courts. A YouTube channel needs a phone.
And a news portal? A YouTube channel?
Now ask the same question on the other side. What does it take to start a news portal? A domain name, about a thousand rupees. A YouTube channel? A Gmail ID. That is all.
No registration. No declaration. No obligation to say who runs it. No rule that there must be an editor. No account to anyone of how many people watched. Outside the Press Council’s reach. No membership of any editors’ guild. Call yourself “News” today, shut the channel tomorrow and start again under another name.
Yes, in 2021 the central government brought in rules for digital media under the IT Rules. But whom they apply to, and how they are enforced, is still unclear. Among lakhs of YouTube channels, which ones are “news” and which are not? Who is checking? The result: rules on paper, and nobody afraid of them in practice.
Hence the scene we watch every day. A YouTube channel says whatever it likes about a politician, a film star, an ordinary citizen. Lakhs of views. If it turns out to be false, the video is deleted. The channel carries on as usual. Nobody apologises. Nobody is punished. If a newspaper printed the same thing? A correction must be carried. A Press Council notice arrives. There is a court case. The editor has to answer.
That fear and that responsibility keep a newspaper careful. A news portal, a YouTube channel, a WhatsApp forward have neither. No address. No editor. No law.
Abuse is the battle, the abuser is the hero
Politicians, for their part, float in a social-media dream. They believe it sways voters decisively. So they spend crores setting up social-media wings, which attack rival parties, spread the good their own side has done and the bad the other side has done. So far, fair enough. Every party has the right to campaign.
But lately, social media has become a torrent of abuse. From party handles down to film-star fan clubs, people vomit whatever comes to their mouths. There is no dignity anywhere. Nobody answers the other side’s argument; they abuse the other side’s family instead. The one who hurls the most abuse gets a title: social media warrior.
“The one who hurls the most abuse gets a title: social media warrior.
Could you print those words in a newspaper? Out of the question. A paper that printed abuse would be before the Press Council the next day, facing a defamation suit in court, and losing readers who put the paper down for good. That is why, however harsh a newspaper’s criticism of an opponent, its language has a limit. That limit is dignity. On social media there is no limit, and nobody to set one.
What social media wants is not the truth
Here is the part nobody says out loud. Social media platforms do not sell news. They sell our time. The longer we scroll, the more they earn. The more ads we see, the more revenue they make.
So the algorithm that decides what to show us asks only one question: what makes us stop? Anger makes us stop. Fear makes us stop. Shock makes us stop. Those posts come first, and keep coming. The calm, balanced, both-sides story stops nobody, so it sinks to the bottom where nobody sees it.
A newspaper page has no such pressure. What goes on the front page is decided by people, on the news value of the story, not on clicks. A story can be dull and still make the front page if it matters. That is the difference.
TV flashes, the paper glows
A word about television. TV carries news too, and channels are licensed. But a TV story exists only for the moment it airs. Miss that moment and it is gone. Mishear one sentence and there is no replay. There is no time to think; the anchor has already moved to the next story.
A newspaper is different. The morning paper stays on the table all day. The front page with morning tea. The editorial after lunch. District news when you get home in the evening. Whenever you like, for as long as you like. Read a sentence again if it was not clear. Stop and think if you disagree with an opinion. The paper is still there tomorrow.
The same is true of advertising. A TV commercial lasts ten seconds: a jingle, a face, a name. What does it cost? Where is it sold? You have no idea. A newspaper advertisement carries the full details: price, address, phone number, terms. You can sit with it. You can cut it out. Think about why property listings, job notices, matrimonial columns and tender notices still appear in the newspaper. There is one reason. There, they stay.
TV shows. The newspaper makes you think. What lasts is in print; what flashes is on the screen.
Are newspapers finished?
After all this, someone will ask: “Fine, but newspapers are closing down, aren’t they?” Let us see how much of that is true.
In the United States, it is true. Daily newspaper circulation there was about 55 million copies in 2000 and fell to about 24 million by 2020, a drop of more than half. Two local papers close every week. There, “newspapers are finished” is not far wrong.
India is a different story. According to the FICCI-EY 2026 report, Indian print held almost steady at about Rs 25,900 crore in 2025. Advertising revenue grew 2 percent. Luxury brands, real estate and government advertisers still trust the newspaper, for its credibility and its reach. Japan and India are the only two countries in the world still sustaining newspapers with circulations in the lakhs.
In fairness, the same report has another line: circulation revenue fell 1 percent. The young are not buying the paper; they read on the phone. Oddly enough, the last time anyone counted readers by age nationwide, in the 2017 Indian Readership Survey, half of all 16-to-19-year-olds read a newspaper, the highest of any age group. Competitive exams, job notices, current affairs: they needed the paper. Nobody has repeated that count in seven years. How much of that half survived the arrival of the smartphone, we can only guess.
So “newspapers are finished” is American news, not Indian news, at least not yet. The Indian newspaper is alive, though it is not growing. Whether it stays alive is in the newspapers’ own hands. If they try to compete with social media on speed and virality, they will lose everything. If they remember that their real strength is trust, and guard it, they will last.
So is social media unnecessary?
Do not read all this as a claim that social media is useless. It is necessary. Absolutely.
What the newspaper tells you tomorrow morning, social media tells you now. When there is an accident, a flood, when something starts somewhere, the first information comes from there. Voices the newspapers ignore, the problems of small towns, find space there. The reader can respond, question, have a say. None of this a newspaper can offer. This blog itself was born that way.
But that first information is exactly that: the first information. Verifying it, giving the full picture, telling the story after hearing both sides: that work still belongs to the newspaper. Where do we find out whether what social media said was true? In the next morning’s paper.
Readers already behave this way. The Reuters report finds that people find social-media news creators entertaining, yet also say they cannot fully trust them. Only three in a hundred rely entirely on social media for all their news. In other words, people treat social media as a companion to the newspaper, not a replacement for it.
Not rivals, but companions
The real mistake is treating social media as a substitute for the newspaper. It sits in the remark “Why buy a paper? It’s all on the phone.” It is not a substitute. It is a companion.
Social media should carry the newspaper’s story to places the paper cannot reach; there is a phone even where the paper does not arrive. The newspaper should examine what circulates on social media and say what is true. One is speed, the other is trust. One is the first word, the other is the last word. Only together do they do the reader justice.
“One is speed, the other is trust. One is the first word, the other the last. Social media will never replace the newspaper; it can only accompany it.
A last word
It is not that newspapers make no mistakes. They do, sometimes big ones. But when they do, they print a correction, they apologise, they answer for it. That accountability is what trust is made of. Not never being wrong, but owning it when you are.
I believe one thing. If you want to know whether a story is true, don’t look at your phone. Look at the paper.
