Newspapers facing extinction due to IT revolution: Kamat

Manipal, Karnataka, Mar 29 (UNI) Eminent journalist and Prasar Bharti Chairman M V Kamat today cautioned that newspapers would go the dinosaur way in the next one decade due to the information technology (IT) explosion.

Delivering his address at the inauguration of the three-day 'Print Congress 2007', an international conference on printing and media technology, he said newspapers would soon lose its relevance.

Circulation of newspapers in the United States, including the New York Times and Washington Post, had dipped, while the London Times in the United Kingdom had become a tabloid, he pointed out.

Mr Kamat opined that even books would become irrelevant as the number of book lovers was drastically coming down. ''A day will come when everything will be heard and nothing will be seen. The IT may change your lifestyle in future so that you may not require paper, just information and not knowledge,'' he added.

Contradicting his views, Heidelberg India General Manager Gunther Keppler, who inaugurated the Congress, said the argument that with the use of IT, there would be paperless offices had been proved false as one could find today more paper in offices than before.

The Congress was organised by the Department of Printing and Media Engineering of the Manipal Institute of Technology (MIT) here.

UNI