Sevanti Ninan, a media critic, says her book, Headlines from the Heartland: Reinventing the Hindi Public Sphere, supports the idea that localization helps readership.

A particularly interesting example used by the author: “I encountered village store-keepers both on the road to Jagdalpur (in Chhattisgarh) as well as in Udaipur and Banswara districts in Rajasthan who called themselves news agencies.”

Ninan went on to explain that these “news agencies” would seek news from local people about functions, felicitations and events.  These “news agencies” would then affix their stamp and send them on to newspapers, which would publish these “articles” leaving them largely unchanged.

With this activity Indian newspapers are specializing in local news and publishing user-generated content. Although using different means, what localities and newspapers in India are doing is almost identical in nature to what American or British papers are doing with the Internet and blogs with regards to user-generated content.

Source: newKerla.com through ifra Executive News Service