In a letter to The Times on Tuesday a reader made a plea for the setting up of a Maltese 24-hour news channel.
The Libyan crisis spurred Joseph Mercieca from Paola to come up with this idea. It stemmed from his need to keep himself constantly updated on the unfolding events. Despite having access to Sky, CNN and whatnot, it was the local angle he was interested in, he wrote, and to get that he “had to continuously log on to the internet”.
I, for one, would be very curious to see what a 24-hour Maltese news channel would transmit. Sure, we believe ourselves to be the centre of the world and all that, but (whisper) in truth it’s not every day that we are involved in international crises. Most often, car accidents hog the headlines.
Take a moment to imagine a channel churning out breaking news story after breaking news story about, say, the divorce saga. We’d have to make do with reels and reels of footage of Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando filling in the camera and an occasional peek of Evarist Bartolo.
Do we, hand on heart, really want that?
The other problem with television news channels is that sometimes they latch on to anything as long as the airtime is filled. Look at Al-Jazeera; they ended up interviewing Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici last week, giving me a serious case of cringe-induced twitches.
So, I suggest to Mr Mercieca that he get used to ‘continuously logging on to the internet’, because that’s the future.
Actually, what am I saying? Online news is the present. Is there anyone out there still waiting for television news to get an update? No. By the time the television news is out, it’s already outdated.
The Arabic revolts have been an eye-opener. They added to our technical dictionary the term ‘e-revolution’, referring a revolution sparked off through social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, through blogs, and through social media sites such as Youtube.
Such was their effect that, according to the Egyptian paper Al-Ahram, an Egyptian father named his daughter, who was born days after the revolution, ‘Facebook’.
Compared with online immediacy, others forms of news casting have limitations. Social network sites with their direct status and updates are pivotal not only in reporting the current situation but also in their actual choreography.
Demonstrators around the world are able to document the events on video with their mobiles and share them with the world. We know what is really happening out there before news camera crews are dispatched.
Television is now definitely the old grandmother of technology. It is slowly retiring to the armchair.
The box as we know it is increasingly becoming a mere mini-cinema. The enormous plasma screens hanging off our walls are used for watching DVDs, but not news – not really.
TVM news – the most watched news in Malta – gets an average audience of about 50,000 according to the Broadcasting Authority’s audience survey last Spring.
At the height of the Libyan crisis, timesofmalta.com registered almost 118,000 visitors, with 1.5 million pageviews. The numbers speak for themselves.
Will there be any local television channels left by the next decade? The number of households opting to do away with television is on the increase.
It’s not just the news business. It’s about the rest of the stuff spewed on television: why on earth would anyone still want to watch through the agonising chit-chat of presenters, when with just one click you can get all the information you need about anything you want?
And let us not make the mistake that it’s just the 20-something generation that makes use of the online world. My mother, who’s in her late 50s, up to four years ago had never touched a computer, but now sends e-mails from her laptop, shops, Skypes, Googles and regularly checks the news online.
The new media are bridging all the generation gaps, and the amazing thing is that they are giving power back to the people.
It is incredibly reassuring to see that the real power no longer lies in the hands of the handful of people in government. If something is amiss with a country’s authorities, then the people – without the need to take up arms – have the tools to put things to right, and fight for justice.
I have written in the past about my concerns that social networking sites might be making of us isolated human beings.
But in truth, history in the making is showing us that the online world is making us more and more ‘citizens of the world’.
So yes, this is a U-turn: I now want to be logged on at all times.
Mr Mercieca, forget about the news channel, get yourself an iPad instead!
krischetcuti@gmail.com