Disruptive technology development in mobile media will continue to plague print media, writes Nirmalya Sen.

Speakers at Tuesday's first day of the WAN-Ifra Digital Media India 2015 in New Delhi gave English newspapers five years on the outside and local language newspapers about ten years to able to survive before being completely overwhelmed by digital media. This would force media companies to devise effective strategies for digital and mobile content in India, they said.

Keynote speaker Raghav Bahl (left) founder of Network18, India, said, "We are seeing how content is moving to a tiny screen on our mobiles which works almost like a supercomputer."

Bahl said with the advent of smartphones and social media, print engagement has been challenged like never before. "People look for instant gratification," he added. "The device is turned at the cost of all other forms of media.

"It used to be you read the newspaper in the morning, heard the radio while driving to work and watched TV in the evening when you got back home. It's not like that anymore. The mobile medium has created a conversation."

Bahl said the spread of mobile media has created a niche for a native advertising editor.

"Children now know digital media instinctively," he added.

S. Mitra Kalita, executive editor (at-large), quartz.com USA, said engagement is no longer a separate function in a newsroom. Speaking on the session "Content and tools to reach a digital audience", she said the internet expects interaction. "Sometimes engagement is the content. Journalists have to remember that they are not just reporting a story but they are members of a community too, and they should be able to think from that perspective. We at Quartz have accepted the reality and joined the conversation. Machines don't commit journalism, humans do."

Kalita said she pursed one very popular story through her reader engagement drive. "A man wrote to us and said he raised 12 kids to believe that they would have no benefits of entitlement. It turned out to be that I was interviewing this guy to tell me more about his kids and his experience and that happened through engaging with him through our reader connect effort. Soon, it turned out to be a story that was very popular on our website."

Nathalie Malinarich, editor - mobile and news formats, BBC News Online, UK, said. "BBC is all about shooting good videos and they are also mobile-friendly."

"Surveys show that 90 per cent of media consumers watch television. More than 50 percent of YouTube views are on mobiles."

The reader connect is spontaneous in places like Iraq where reporters are in the frontlines with soldiers, she said.

Divya Reddy, president of digital media and IT, Sakshi Daily, India, a Telugu daily from Telangana, said the newspaper's website sakshi.com, uses a lot of user generated content for reader engagement. "The website is an extension of our newspaper and television channel. There is a lot of cross-trafficking."

She said the site's popularity is driven by 18-34-yeard-olds and 80 percent of the website's visitors have a graduate degree or higher.

"We have no restriction on time and space unlike our newspaper and television channel."

On our homepage: Quartz executive editor S. Mitra Kalita