Maintaining that outsourcing of views of experts by media houses with the advent of electronic media has led to "deskilling", noted journalist A S Panneerselvan today said the traditional media houses should try to reclaim the space for in-house domain expertise.
"The newspaper have no in-house experts on range of issues, a challenge which needs to be addressed," The Hindu's Readers' Editor said at Pandit Jhabarmal Sharma memorial lecture and award ceremony organised by Rajasthan Patrika newspaper here.
"Earlier, newspapers had resident domain experts before the advent of TV news channels. The impact of the electronic media is that experts have been removed from the media houses. They outsource experts. The entire system of outsourcing and getting (experts) from establishment partly deskilled us," he said.
"The biggest impact of television is that we have partly deskilled ourselves and it has led to the fact that experts are institutional experts or political experts. There is no in-house macroeconomic, strategic affairs or a science expert," Panneerselvan said.
He said the trend initially started with sports where former cricketers became cricket correspondents and the neutral space has been conceded to respective domains.
"We have very limited people in the print media to deal with the overall impact of lack of in-house experts which we need to address.
"Partly, what we are trying to do in some of the legacy media houses is to recover the space for domain expertise in-house," he added.
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