Hope-Driven to Uncertainty-Driven Innovation: Digital Transitions of Newspapers in Nepal

Abstract

The existing literature on the digital transitions of newspapers focuses on fear-driven innovation, disruptive innovation, and crisis to understand the digital transitions of newspapers. This focus often comes from the experiences of industrial or developed countries, where the circulation of newspapers had become saturated and younger readers were less interested in newspapers by the late 1980s, as well as being guided by the discourse of revolutionary capacities of new media technologies. Using a case study of Kantipur Publications, a prominent media organization in Nepal, this chapter argues that current perspectives don't fully account for the digital transitions of daily newspapers in diverse contexts. It shows that to make sense of the digital transitions of newspapers in diverse contexts, any given discourse about innovations needs critical reflection and that transitions should also be understood using other frameworks, including hope-driven and uncertainty-driven innovation.

Full text

Part IV Technological Perspectives
Hope-Driven to Uncertainty-Driven Innovation
Digital Transitions of Newspapers in Nepal
Harsha Man Maharjan
Abstract
The existing literature on the digital transitions of newspapers focuses on fear-driven innovation,
disruptive innovation, and crisis to understand the digital transitions of newspapers. This focus often
comes from the experiences of industrial or developed countries, where the circulation of newspapers
had become saturated and younger readers were less interested in newspapers by the late 1980s, as
well as being guided by the discourse of revolutionary capacities of new media technologies. Using a
case study of Kantipur Publications, a prominent media organization in Nepal, this chapter argues
that current perspectives don’t fully account for the digital transitions of daily newspapers in diverse
contexts. It shows that to make sense of the digital transitions of newspapers in diverse contexts, any
given discourse about innovations needs critical reflection and that transitions should also be
understood using other frameworks, including hope-driven and uncertainty-driven innovation.
Keywords: Digital transition, technological changes, affordance, sociopolitical changes,
media innovation
How to cite this article:
Maharjan, H. M. (2022). Hope-driven to uncertainty-driven innovation digital transitions of
newspapers in Nepal. In B. B. Acharya & S. Sharma (Eds.), Global perspectives on journalism in
Nepal (pp. 229-251). Routledge.

Digital innovation and technological transformation have revolutionized the news industry in the last
20 years across the world. Since the news media began to appear on digital platforms, there has been
a huge paradigm shift in news media production, dissemination, and in the entire news media
business operating system. This paradigm shift has been usually viewed through the lens of
disruption, uncertainty, fear, and such other perspectives. This dominant view, which centers on the
emotion of fear in particular, tends to leave out the different ways in which different societies around
the world have responded to the disruption, calling for new studies based in new contexts around the
world in order to diversify the theoretical perspectives in global scholarship on this issue. The study
and theorizing of newspapers’ transformation from physical to digital platforms in different contexts
is important for three reasons. First, studies of online newspapers and digital journalism with
historical perspectives drawn from different contexts are lacking (Boczkwoski, 2002; Steensen &
Westlund, 2020). Second, most of the past studies are focused on the experiences of industrial and
developed countries. Third, the media economy of these legacy newspapers in the counties in the
global south was different (Boczkowski, 2002; Franklin, 2008; Zelizer, 2015). These points also
indicate that the perspectives and conceptual frameworks based on the experiences of these industrial
countries may be inadequate to make sense of the digital innovations in other countries as raised by
some researchers (Tandoc et al., 2020) in the field of digital journalism. These new frameworks are
needed to make sense of the local context of the news media industry, and the interests of media
managers that are different from that of developed countries.
Let us look at two contrasting cases in order to consider why responses to digital disruption in
different societies/contexts may be different and why it is important to recognize the value of
perspectives drawn from the different experiences. In the 1970–1980s, when some newspapers
started distributing nonprint content in the form of videotex in Britain, France, Germany, and the US,
it caused widespread alarms that print newspapers would be displaced. It was predicted by many at
the time that by 1990, print would not be a primary medium of information distribution to technical,
professional, and business audiences (Mayne, 1982). Newspapers and new media like videotex were
thought “as bloody competitors at worse” in the 1980s (Patten, 1986, p. 108). Similar alarms have
been sounded since the advent of the internet, and in the early 1990s before they moved to
standalone websites, US newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, The
Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times were available on online services, such as American
Online and Prodigy. The focus on fear about disruption has continued in media discourse in the
West, even as most outlets have continued to adapt and serve the public. Of course, bigger venues
have fared better than their smaller counterparts. Still, the mainstream narrative of digital evolution
of news remains predominantly focused on disruption, discontinuation, and even destruction. By
contrast, in developing countries, when some publishers started to make available some of their
newspaper content online, they were responding to new possibilities and pathways as well. For
example, when the platform was provided by the first internet service provider, Mercantile
Communications in 1995, The Kathmandu Post, published by the Kantipur Media Group, started a
new journey where traditional papers found a new digital platform, audience, and opportunities to
promote their content with high hope not fear.
What makes news media motivated to adopt technological transformation even when they
have been going through the right direction in terms of their everyday business? How do they
respond to the transformation? What underlying conditions allow them to tap into the affordances of
new technologies and opportunities in society? What prompts hope and ambition instead of fear and
resistance to change? These are the kinds of questions I would like to discuss in this chapter with
respect to the news media’s motivation for digital transformation. Scholars have observed a number
of factors that motivate them for such technological transitions, which include fear-driven defensive
innovations (Nguyen, 2008), digital disruption (Ashuri, 2013; Mesquita, 2017), and crisis (Zelizer,
2015). All of these factors take into consideration that one aspect due to which newspapers in
industrial countries moved to online was the less interest of younger generation on newspapers,

stagnant or decreased circulation, Similarly, Zelizer (2015) also argues that the use of the term
“crisis” to account for multiple sources of uncertainties is less useful. What the scholarship about
technological transformation, innovation, and disruption needs further are perspectives that
complement current discourse with more constructive and optimistic ones to account for different
local contexts and media ecologies.
Reviewing the experiences of digital disruption in several countries across the world, this
chapter examines the digital transitions of Nepali newspapers in the last 20 years from 2000 to 2020.
Two key issues are important for analyzing the case that this chapter uses to explore the issue of
“disruption” of the media. First, the breakdown of a system may not be a necessary condition of
transformation; in the case I study, there was no uncertainty in the newspaper sector in Nepal for a
long time in terms of media economy (Kantipur Sambaddata, 2017). Second, we should be cautious
while using concepts such as crisis because crisis may be a factor that “helps turn murky and
troublesome challenges into a controllable phenomenon that can be identified, articulated, managed,
and ultimately gotten rid of” (Zelizer, 2015, p. 892). So, I prefer to use the word “uncertainty” rather
than “crisis” in this chapter. This also means that transformation and even crisis may be prompted by
(or lead to) an environment of aspiration and ambition, or fear and anxiety, or a combination of both.
Fear and hope in this context may not be binary opposites but may instead be a productive tension.
This chapter argues that there is a need to understand the digital transformation of
newspapers in certain contexts around the world through the framework of hope-driven and
uncertainty-driven innovation as well; in fact, these perspectives could productively complement and
complicate the discourses about digital transformation in all contexts. Hope-driven innovation is the
change opted when there was no discussion of crisis or uncertainty in terms of media economy and
such changes are more related to sociopolitical context rather than the debate about the grim future of
print media. That means even if there are no economic uncertainties or technological disruptions,
mass media may not lose important impetus for change and improvement as well.
I begin the chapter by discussing concepts and frameworks used by scholars to make sense of
digital transitions. I hope to advance a discourse on the framework of hope-driven innovation and
uncertain-driven innovation. By using a case study of the digital innovation and transformation of
Kantipur Publications, a private newspaper company run by the Kantipur Media Group in the last 20
years, I explore the implications of this case in understanding the transformation of legacy
newspapers in the world.
Hope-Driven and Uncertainty-Driven Innovation
This section discusses the conceptual framework to make sense of the digital transitions of Nepali
newspapers. I will show that before there was uncertainty in newspapers in terms of economic
aspects like decreasing circulation and coming of “powerful” online competitors that challenge the
economy of print media, the innovators had high hopes. So, I will explain two interrelated concepts:
hope-driven and uncertainty-driven innovations. Between two concepts, researchers have used
uncertainty/crisis that drive innovations in news media. Hope-driven is a concept I propose for
discussing dynamics of change where disruption does not necessarily destroy/undermine an
established foundation but instead helps innovate the field, thereby prompting more hope and
aspiration than fear and anxiety. The relative predominance of hope against fear, I argue, seems to be
a function of the pathways in which developing societies are today in terms of technology adoption,
development of journalistic professions, and public social response to mass media.
Current scholarship about disruption and change in journalism foregrounds reactions, such as
fear, anxiety, and generally negative perception. For instance, Boczkowski (2005) has used an
innovation combining reactive, defensive, and pragmatic traits to understand the exploration of

nonprint media content from the early 1980s and the settling with web from early 1990s by US
newspaper companies. By reactive, he means that US newspapers experimented with nonprint
content distribution by reacting to the trends in other countries. By defensive, he means that even
though these companies used new media, they wanted to defend the print franchise and did not use
the technologies to their full potential. Thus, they also became pragmatic and focused on the short
term health of newspapers. He has also mentioned that the newspaper chain Knight-Ridder invested
in its videotex project, Viewtron in 1979 when the actors perceived that this new media could be
“competitive threat” in future but decided to stop it when they found that there was not a clear threat
in 1982 (Boczkowski, 2010). Boczkowski emphasized that scholars have to take account of the
gradual and evolutionary, not revolutionary appropriation of new artifacts.
A few scholars have termed this kind of innovation as fear-driven defensive innovation. They
have linked it with the idea of digital disruption. Presenting the cases from the US and Australia,
Nguyen (2008) has related this innovation with fear-driven defensive innovation. The fear is the fear
of being irrelevant, and so appropriating new technologies but not giving emphasis to developing
new media in its fullest potential because that could disrupt the environment of newspapers. He
highlights that it was this fear due to which newspaper companies experimented with videotex in the
1980s. The fear also encouraged newspapers to migrate to the web in the early 1990s in the first
phase though they did not show an interest to use new media with its full potential, and again moved
to digital in the 2000s when this new media became “news medium” in the society.
The fear-driven innovation in the second phase was triggered also by the debate of disruptive
innovation (Nguyen, 2008). Christensen (1997) argued that established organizations failed to
respond to market and technology changes well as they often focus on profitable business models
while ignoring less profitable ones that might become mainstream technology in the future. He
referred to this concept as the “principles of disruptive innovations” (Christensen, 1997, p. xiii).
Other researchers have discussed disruption and change in terms of crisis. In such research
digital transition is often presented as a strategy used by newspapers to address the crisis of
newspapers (Brüggemann et al., 2016; Chyi et al., 2012; Siles & Boczkowski, 2012) or journalism
(Zelizer, 2015). However, the understanding of the crisis is different among researchers. Some
researchers (Chyi et al., 2012) claimed that the crisis should be understood in terms of media
economy, such as circulation, revenue, and operating cost. In a systematic review on the studies
related to the newspaper crisis, authors (Siles & Boczkowski, 2012) have found that these studies
have focused on economic, social, and technological aspects of the crisis. This review also
highlighted that it was possible that there was no homogeneous crisis if comparative studies were
done. In a comparative study on the discourse about newspaper crises in countries, namely, Finland,
Germany, France, Italy, Britain, and the US, scholars (Brüggemann et al., 2016) pointed out that
actors thought the rise of the internet as one of the causes of the crisis in the newspaper industry.
These scholars found that in Britain and the US, the discourse was about business crises, whereas in
Finland and Germany, the debate was on future crises, and in Italy and France, the discourse was
about the crisis due to decreasing revenue. Likewise some researchers (Thurman et al., 2019) also
presented the existential crisis of newspapers in some highly developed countries as the result of
decreasing circulation, the disinterest of younger people in newspapers that aggravated with the
economic recession.
Yet Zelizer (2015), studying the discourse of crisis in journalism including newspaper crisis,
have argued that instead of the word “crisis,” “uncertainty” could account for this change. She
highlighted that crisis means “combination of perceived suddenness, disruption, urgency, loss and
the need for external assistance in order to offset helplessness and reach recovery… (890).” She
pointed out that “crisis” does not account for the geographical and historical contingencies.

Following Zelizer, I use uncertainty rather than crisis to explain the innovation of newspapers
from the mid-2010s. While it is not easy to say when uncertainty began, I will focus on decreasing
readership and increasing competition from online media that challenge the media economy of
newspaper publishers. This uncertainty in terms of challenge to the media economy of newspapers
was not there for a long time.
So, there was neither uncertainty nor fear when Nepali newspapers began to have their web
presences in 1995, or when they had their own websites in the 2000s (Maharjan, 2019). The case of
Nepal is different due to the increasing readership of newspapers and a lack of any imminent reason
to be online in the mid-1990s and 2005. The World Bank (2020) data shows that the access to the
internet grew very slowly from 1995 to 2009. In 1995, only 0.001% of its population had access to
the internet, which reached 1.97% in 2009. There was a spike between 2009 and 2010 as it reached
7.9% in 2010. This indicates that the concept of fear-driven innovations or uncertainty-driven
innovations is not an adequate tool to employ when attempting to fully understand the evolution and
development of online newspapers in Nepal. This gap in applicability indicates that we require a
different way of understanding this socio-technological transition.
Though I have presented hope-driven and uncertainty-driven innovation as a dichotomy; in
some aspects their boundary is blurred. I have termed hope-driven innovations as the changes that
actors such as owners, managers, and journalists opted to focus on the growth of online media when
there was no challenge to the media economy of print. During this phase, these actors paid attention
to follow trends in the US, to have access to additional audiences, and to react to political change.
Hope-driven innovation is to appropriate technology with positive feelings such as expectation and
aspiration. Uncertainty-driven innovation mainly means the innovation the actors did when other
online media started to challenge the media economy of newspapers inside Nepal. It is not easy to
pinpoint when this shift began and it did not happen suddenly. The uncertainty-driven innovation
was also intended to follow the trend; as I will show in the next section, the actors in Kantipur
Publications realized risk and uncertainty when they started to research and read the leaked
innovation report of the US newspaper company, New York Times in 2014.
Methodology
This study primarily uses a case study method to get detailed information about news media, the
activities of actors, such as media owners, managers, and journalism in media organizations, social
and technological context of digital transition. And evidence was collected through interviews, and
artifact analysis. As suggested by Yin (2009) such a single case helps us to examine the existing
theory and expand it. The case of Kantipur Publications, which is trendsetter in Nepali news media
sector, becomes helpful to extend the debate of crisis or uncertainty in the sector, by adding the
perspective of hope.
The data and information used in this research were collected for my doctoral study on the
digital transitions of Nepali newspapers (Maharjan, 2019). Interviews were conducted with 18 online
journalists, 10 tech people, and 58 people including print journalists, staff at marketing, media owner
from Kantipur Publications in 2017 and 2018. I also collected information from other newspaper
distributors, market experts/owners, and editors. On average the interviews were one hour long and
some respondents were interviewed more than once. Almost all interviews were oral and recorded;
one was a written interview. These interviews were transcribed and main themes were determined.
Through these themes, the main decisions and their implications on digital journalism were
determined.
I analyzed the websites of Kantipur Publications from 2000 to 2020. I looked at websites
before 2016 using the way back machine, web archive. As web historian Brügger (2010) pointed out,

the web archive has two important problems in comparison to live web. One, due to technical
problems, text, moving images or graphics might be missing. Two, the archive does not have
dynamism, such as updating. This is true in case of the way back machine as well. Often I felt
difficulty while clicking hyperlinks on the web archive. So I can only see the home pages of these
websites. Even when such pages are available sometimes, photos are missing. Yet, I was able to see
the change in design and affordance of the websites Kantipur Publications used to distribute their
content.
Kantipur Publications’ Case
The trajectory of the digital transition of Kantipur Publications after it had its own website in 2000,
clearly shows three phases (see Table 14.1). The first phase started in April 2000 when Kantipur
Publications made its website www.kantipuronline.com (2000–2005) public. The second phase
began after it had a new website www.ekantipur.com (2006) in January 2006. The third phase started
in 2014, when Kantipur Digital Corp was formed inside Kantipur Media Group that also owned the
publication to focus on digital media. The innovation in the first and second phases was not driven
by uncertainty, but the innovation in the third phase was guided by uncertainty and fear of being
irrelevant in future.
Table 14.1 Trajectories of online of Kantipur Publications
Phase
Start of year
Website name/s
Major change in
website
Affordance
1st
2000
www.kantipuronline.com
New website
Interactivity
Fresh English content
Audio content from
Kantipur FM
2nd
2006
www.ekantipur.com
New website
Interactivity
Fresh English content
Audio content from
Kantipur FM
Video/multimedia
content through
Kantipur TV video
3rd
2015
www.ekantipur.com
Revamp the website,
totally new design
Fresh video included
First Phase
The innovation in the first phase was hope-driven. It means publishers did not need to fear that
newspapers would be irrelevant soon and did not need to give priority to online. It used the content
from existing sources to take advantage of the unique affordances of this technology, as the
organization could use the content of network media it already owned for online audio and visual
content. Figure 14.1 shows that the website, Kantipuronline.com made public in April 2000 had both
content from print and some fresh content. It had few special features and fresh news. Later it also
provided chatroom services and opinion polls (Post Report, 2000). The Kathmandu Post wrote,
“Kantipur Online is a new division of KP that aims to harness the power of the internet to bring
news, information, business links, directories to your living room” (Post Report, 2000). It also
offered content such as few independent stories that were not taken from the print newspapers,
despite the resistance from print journalists that the online edition might break news that could

render the newspapers late or even irrelevant. According to Suman Pradhan, the online editor of
Kantipuronline.com, the compromise was to put short news features online (S. Pradhan, personal
communication, 7 December 2017).
Figure 14.1 Screenshot from Kantipuronline.com in 2000.
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20000816043313/http://www.kantipuronline.com:80/
Repurposed content from Kantipur FM was first posted on Kantipuronline as a subdomain.
When Kantipuronline.com was started in 2000, it contained a page for Kantipur FM as a sub domain
where users could find five recorded programs. Video files were no different. After Kantipur Media
Group started its own television channel in 2003, a few recorded television programs were uploaded
to the website. As there were no platforms such as YouTube that allowed the posting of videos to
monetize visual content, it was the website where those videos were posted.
Starting online was not driven by fear. One of the important historical contingencies to
encourage KP to start an online presence on 13 April 2000 was the return of Suman Pradhan from
the US in December 1999. He insisted that management should establish the online. As a fellow he
got an opportunity to work at the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1999 and there he saw the workings of its
online news operation. Being impressed by the practice in the US, he wanted to bring what we had
learned to Nepal. According to Pradhan he convinced the management that KP could have an
independent online portal and also have digital versions of Kantipur, The Kathmandu Post (TKP),
Saptahik, and Kantipur FM. He even informed the management that it would not cost much for two
to three journalists and a few technical staff members (S. Pradhan, personal communication, 7
December 2017). So, one aim of starting this online media was to follow the trend in the US.
Two events encouraged the actors to innovate. First is the royal massacre on 1 June 2001.
Though it was Kyodo News Agency that broke the news by 10:15 pm, for online users there were
Nepalnews.com and Kantipuronline.com. Nepalnews.com posted the news by 11:00 pm
(Tumbahanghey, 2001). According to the coordinator of www.kantipuronline.com, Rabi Khadka, he
published fresh news related to the massacre, online from home, and worked with his team through
email. He also recalled that the number of daily visitors of this site during the massacre was around
8000 (R. Khadka, personal communication, 23 August 2017). The second important event was the
Maoist movement. Kantipuronline.com had a special section called “Recent News on Maoist Attack”

from December 2001 after the Maoist Communist Party of Nepal increased their attacks. Rabi
Khadka remembered that they sometimes had to update the news related to the Maoist attacks up to
thirty times. It was in 2003 that the website was revamped, as it was very difficult to post news.
Dhiraj Shrestha, junior technical executive with his teacher and a friend redesigned the website
(Nepalnet, 2003). According to Khadka, the number of daily visitors to Kantipuronline.com
increased to 15,000–20,000, due to the promise of Maoist-related news.
Scholars, however, point out that Kantipur Publications gave less priority to Kantipuronline
after a few years (Acharya, 2012; Upadhaya, 2003). Its management did not see economic benefits
from working for the online platform. As there was no existential crisis, it was not needed to have
long term goals.
Second Phase
The second phase, too, was not driven by fear of being irrelevant. The new website,
www.ekantipur.com (see Figure 14.2) was started in 2006 to cater the demands of the diaspora
community and the new internet users in urban Nepal. According to Akhilesh Tripathi, who was the
editor of the new website, one aim of starting this website was to compete with Nepalnews.com and
to earn extra revenue from local advertisers and google ad sense (A. Tripathi, personal
communication, 13 January 2017).
Figure 14.2 Screenshot from eKantipur.com in 2006.
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20061109024309/http://www.ekantipur.com:80/

As shown in Figure 14.2, the website featured a global Nepal section that presented news and
articles on Nepal from around the world. The web portal also had new sections, such as Emusic,
model watch, Ebazaar, and city lifestyle. These features clearly show that the website was targeted to
youths in cities and people abroad as there were about 4000 cyber cafes in Kathmandu in 2005
(Luintel, 2005). News updates were only provided in English until 2008 when the website added
fresh Nepali content as well.
Kantipur Publications needed to have better relations with the diaspora community during the
political crisis was another reason to have this website. The Kantipur Media Group was having a
tussle with the royal government formed after 1 February 2005 also because it held cross ownership
of print, radio, and television. The new government brought out the Ordinance Amending Nepal Act
Related to Media on 9 October 2005 to check media concentration. The ordinance barred FM radio
from airing news and did not allow a media house to operate more than two media (ICJ, 2005). To
implement the new law, the government raided Kantipur FM and seized its equipment on 21 October
2005. Many thought the provision about media concentration was targeted at KP (ICJ, 2005).
The political context demanded that the reach of KP be augmented and that was possible
digitally because digital shrinks both time and space. KP needed to establish ties with the diaspora
communities who were agitating against the then regime. About the movement against monarchy,
Shah (2008) wrote that it was private media that played a greater role against the royal government
and helped to sway public opinion. The role of KMG was important as it had a bigger share in the
market. This became clearer because the new government formed after the political movement in
2006 revoked the controversial law, and the Group was able to own more relay stations in different
parts of Nepal and turned Kantipur FM into Radio Kantipur in January 2008 (Maharjan, 2008).
Ekantipur also had a few sections targeted specially to the diaspora community. One is the
Global Nepali section, which has four parts: “Nepali Associations,” “Diaspora Speaks,” “News and
Events,” and “Nepali Media Worldwide.” In the “Nepali Media World Wide” section, it posted a
notice to the media being run by Nepali people elsewhere in the world to send their information. The
section “Diaspora Speaks,” was also aimed to let people write articles on Nepal issues and from
January to December 2006, it only had a few articles focused on human rights issues. The first article
published in “Diaspora Speaks” on 9 January 2006 had the title, “The ICC and Nepali Government,”
which raised the issue that if King Gyanendra, Royal Nepal Army, and Nepal Police resorted to
human rights violence, they would come under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in
the Hague (Seadie, 2006). Similarly in his article, Dinesh Tripathi emphasized that king and
democracy could not go together and there was need of international support, as it was the era of a
global wave of human rights and democracy when democracy and human rights were no longer
domestic issues (Tripathi, 2006). It was also for getting such support that the actors of Ekantipur
used this online. The value of this section decreased after the monarchy stepped down and this
section was not continued after January 2008. Perhaps this section was an experiment to gain support
for KMG. When the design of the website was changed in 2008, this section was not continued.
Perhaps due to the antiestablishment stand Kantipur Media Group took, the visitors of the
online grew during the movement against the monarchy in April 2006. Ekantipur.com mentioned on
April 17 that between April 3–15, 1,280,000 visitors visited the websites, which had 845 million hits
during this period.
Though the website featured new and expanded content, and added both audio and visual
content, commentators have pointed out that the change in Ekantipur was not substantial. Ujjwal
Acharya, who worked for TKP, did not find a big change between the old and new websites
(Acharya, 2006). Even when Ekantipur was divided into Nepali and English sections in 2008, after
the two owners, Kailash Sirohiya and Binod Gywali, split and agreed that the website should be
brought under the umbrella of the newspapers, there was still not a significant change in the

approach of management to online content. After this division, however, online journalists became
part of two bureaus of Nepali and English dailies. In 2010, writer Lal (2010) wrote, “Given
Kantipur’s full-spectrum media dominance, its group site Ekantipur is somewhat lame.” The two
sites he compared with Ekantipur were owned by Binod Gywali and launched in 2008 with a team of
journalists who left KMG.
Third Phase
In the third phase, the innovation gradually became uncertainty-driven defensive around 2014. Then,
Kantipur Publications and Kantipur Media Group started to think about the future of print and took
decisions different from the previous period. Nevertheless, this happened slowly. KMG launched
Kantipur Digital Corp (KDC) on 19 February 2014, which was introduced as the fourth wing of
KMG changed the way Kantipur Media Group was thinking about digital technology. KDC oversaw
all internet-related work of KMG, including KP. On that occasion, KDC also launched mobile apps
for both IOS and Android. Ekantipur announced that KDC would handle the technical aspects of the
online platform, including digital marketing (Ekantipur Report, 2014). This shows that Kantipur
Publications gave comparatively more importance to its online platforms.
However, the new leaders of KDC were unfamiliar with the newspaper industry, which
spurred them on to extensive research and they eventually found The New York Times’ Innovation
report leaked by Buzzfeed, due to which they realized the risk ahead. Sambhav Sirohiya, the person
who headed KDC said, “I studied NY Times strategy. They didn’t know. They had dilemmas as
well. They had a huge document leaked, and I read every word of the document. There were lots of
confusions” (S. Sirohiya; personal interview, 3 May 2018). When comparing the report with
innovations implemented at KP, there are some similarities. Like NY Times’ Innovation report, they
might have realized that they were passive in the digital arena, as the media company was giving less
priority to digital (New York Times Staff, 2014). It was after this extensive research on the
newspaper industry that the actors in the management realized risk lied ahead. Gradually KDC
started to take uncertainty-driven defensive decisions. One of them was to revamp the website of
Kantipur Publication into a very different website in August 2015, after the Gorkha Earthquake.
Figure 14.3 Screenshot from eKantipur.com in 2015.

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20150822103939/http://www.ekantipur.com:80/
Figure 14.3 shows that the look and design of the revamped website was very different from
the previous design. Perhaps this is why it was called a futuristic website (Post Report, 2015). The
home page of Ekantipur was an aggregator, which automatically showed all the content from seven
media products: Kantipur, TKP, Saptahik, Nepal, Nari, Radio Kantipur, and Kantipur Television.
Every piece of content from the sub domains appeared on the home page of this website and the
users could scroll and scroll until the end. It allowed users to personalize its media products they
wanted to see and not see. Ekantipur also started to use its own video from 7 August 2014. By this
time, KDC had been established and the videos from its television channel were uploaded on
YouTube and embedded as a link on www.ekantipur.com. After KDC was established, Kantipur
gradually started to invest in video journalists. In 2017, the website of Kantipur had space for
multimedia content and employed a photojournalist to make videos, later recruiting a second
journalist to work on those videos.
As suggested by The New York Times’s Innovation report, digital disruption became the new
mantra of KMG—the mantra that, in the monopolistic natures of media companies, if there is not a
disrupter, then one must think as a disrupter. According to Ananta Saurab, who worked with
Shirohiya in KDC, this mantra was also behind the move of KDC when it began work on the website
and app editions of Kantipur daily in December 2017 (A. Saurab, personal communication, 16 July
2018). Shirohiya said that he did not know what would succeed in the future, so he wanted to keep
open all possibilities and had launched an aggregator like Ekantipur, with different websites, and
mobile apps of different products. So, lately innovations in KP were also guided by the fear of the
uncertainty in the newspaper industry in future. According to Sanoj Pandey, who worked in KDC, it
also started to pay attention to aggressive digital marketing monetizing its content on the website and
social media (S. Pandey, personal communication, 18 April 2017).
The uncertainty-driven defensive innovations have been guided also by the present situation
of the newspaper industry, as more readers are moving towards digital. The change in 2014 was an
initiation in coping with growing competition in the Nepali digital market. A small survey among
4021 people in 2014 shows that 85% had mobile but only 5% had the internet in their household.
The survey also shows that the main use of the internet was social media (92%), followed by
communication with friends (43%). 26% of them used the internet for news (Internews and
Interdisciplinary Analysts, 2014) but as the users of the internet gradually increased, it also made the
online market competitive. The surveys done by Sharecast Initiative in 2017 and 2018 (see Table
14.2) show that Ekantipur and Onlinekhabar are two online media which users read more. It also
highlights how Ekantipur is facing competition from Onlinekhabar, which was established in 2008,
and even by Setopati, which was started in 2013 by a team of editors who left the Nagarik and
Republica dailies. These surveys have very small sample sizes and might have biases, but there is no
other way to know about the popularity of news portals inside Nepal.
Table 14.2 Popularity of online media in Nepal
Online media
2017 (total
1884)
2018 (total
1373)
Onlinekhabar.com
38% (1st)
16.8% (2nd)
Ekantipur.com
28.7% (2nd)
22% (1st)
Setopati.com
11.3% (3rd)
4.4% (4th)
Ratopati.com
11% (4th)
5.2% (3rd)
Ujjyaloonline.com
8.4% (5th)
2.3% (6th)
Nagariknews.com
6.6% (6th)
1.9% (7th)
Annapurnapost.com
-
2.5% (5th)
Source: Sharecast Initiative (2017) and Infogram (2018).

Nepali newspapers too are economically in a better position than newspapers in the West as it
was still growing till 2019. In 2017, the chair of the Kantipur Publication Kailash Sirohiya said that
both print and online were growing and there was a future of newspapers for still 25 years (Kantipur
Sambaddata, 2017). Though the websites of Kantipur Publications show steady growth in its
circulation of its newspapers especially Kantipur (see Figure 14.4), insiders and distributors reported
that even circulation of this publication started to decrease after 2015 (a market expert; personal
interview, 7 May 2018; a newspaper distributor, personal interview, 17 April 2018).
Yet the print was not the business of loss. Many media owners especially Kunda Dixit,
publisher and editor of Nepali Times and Ameet Dhakal, editor of www.setopati.com thought that
although users have moved online, advertisers have not and this has created a dilemma (K. Dixit,
personal communication, 15 May 2018; A. Dhakal, personal communication, 15 May 2018). Pushkar
Lal Shrestha, the editor of Nepal Samacharpatra informed that the rate of online advertisement is
very cheap, and the difference in rate is such that if advertisers can publish one advertisement for one
month online, in the case of print, that amount would allow advertisement for only one day (P.
Shrestha, personal communication, 24 January 2017). Sambhav Sirohiya from KDC also thought that
online would never be like print as the rate of online advertisement is relatively cheap.
Figure 14.4 Self-Reported Circulation of Daily Newspapers on Websites.
Source: Websites www. Kantipuronline.com and www.ekantipur.com
When Coronavirus hit Nepali media in March 2020, it was newspapers that were hard
affected by it. Not even five years after Kailash Sirohiya pronounced that both print and online
would go together for many years in Nepal, Kantipur Publications ceased the publishing of
newspapers for a week from 28 March to 3 April 2020. In its publishers’ note it highlighted that
there was strong digital media when print media were temporarily suspended (The Kathmandu Post,
2020). It also stopped publishing epapers, unlike The Himalayan Times which did (Maharjan, 2020).
Discussion
This chapter has shown that the hope-driven and uncertainty-driven innovations can account for the
overall digital transition of Nepali daily newspapers in general and Kantipur Publications in
particular. Hope-driven innovation is the innovation that is done with the interest to expand when
newspapers’ readers and the revenue are growing. It was also to follow trends in the US, to move
according to sociopolitical events. Uncertainty-driven innovations are changing with the feeling of

fear and uncertainty as other online media start to put pressure on the economy of newspapers. This
is also so because the audiences inside Nepal started to move online fast. And, even the pandemic
has increased the uncertainty-driven innovations.
Following the trend is an important aspect which has been discussed in the literature of
digital transitions of newspapers. Thakur (1999, p. 132) mentioned that Indian newspapers moved
online due to “‘me-too’ syndrome” and the market of nonresident Indian. He has not discussed this
syndrome in detail. However, the case of Kantipur Publication shows that this syndrome is also
related to following trends. In Arabian case, Alshehri (2001) points out that in 1995 December after a
newspaper made available its content on the web and other Arabian newspapers followed the trend.
Uncertainty-driven innovation manifested in the decision taken by Kantipur Publications after
2013. Such uncertainty may have evolved in different geographies in different times and due to
different reasons. In the case of India, the economic recession had adverse effects in the newspaper
sector as its revenue dropped but it recovered later (Parthasarathi & Srinivas, 2012). After this minor
dip in 2008, there was another dip in 2011 and since then newspapers did not recover. In this context,
Hindustan Times Media started Project Butterfly, a massive project aiming at the digital
transformation of its newsroom in 2013(Jyoti & Subramanian, 2021). A study showed that the
circulation of newspapers decreased in China after 2013 and researchers wondered whether it was a
short term trend (Sparks et al., 2016). In the case of Japan, newspapers did not give priority to online
due to the interest of powerful newspaper distribution mechanisms (Villi & Hayashi, 2015).
Yet studies show that the newspapers in India were in better position as their circulation and
revenue were increasing before the pandemic. The readers of newspapers in India increased from 407
million in 2017 to 425 million in 2019 (Munsi, 2020). This was so before COVID-19 hit the world.
Even in India newspapers stopped publishing during the pandemic.
Scholars have also discussed the fear of newspapers being irrelevant in the newspaper
industry in industrial countries. It is easy to understand why. The debate of fear that new media
would kill old media was dominant in the West for a long time (Fidler, 1997; Martin, 2003). The
newspaper industries in Japan, Northern Europe, and Northern America had saturated in the 1980s
(Dunnett, 1988). One of reasons newspapers in the West began implementing videotex, an early
form of online newspaper technology in the 1980s, was the fear that this new technology might
replace their core business (Carey & Pavlik, 1993; and Chyi & Tenenboim, 2019, p. 158). For
example, Patten (1986) mentioned that one of newspaper companies’ primary concerns was whether
videotex would substitute print media. Scholars informed that Knight-Ridder in the US discontinued
its videotex service after it was clear that this new media was no longer a plausible threat to
newspapers (Boczkowski, 2005; Herndon, 2012).
The hype about the communication revolution and dotcom boom, and the process of
declining readers triggered the first phase of rush in the 1990s. US trade publications promoted the
debate about the reinvention of newspapers. In his article, “Reinventing the Media,” published in
Columbia Journalism Review in 1992, Underwood (1992) pointed out that some people thought that
newspapers would be paperless in the future. Likewise, Fidler (1997), director of New Media
Technology at Knight-Ridder, urged newspaper companies to harness electronic publishing.
Newspapers in the US went online in 1992. The Chicago Tribune was one of early newspapers to be
online in the 1990s, which was established in May 1992 on a consumer online service of AOL. By
1992, 150 newspapers were providing their content through vendors, such as Nexix and Dialog
(Sheddon, 2004a). According to Carlson (2003), US newspapers were available on the web as early
as 1994. By 1997, 2600 newspapers were online in the US (Sheddon, 2004b). Researchers
(Boczkowski, 2005; Nguyen, 2008) have mentioned that though these newspapers had migrated to
online, they defended the print by not using the web’s capacity to continuously update multimedia
content.

Nguyen showed that 2005 was a notable year in the examination of these fears, as he believed
that newspapers in the US began to assign more priority to online formats, as exemplified by The
New York Times’ purchase of about.com (Nguyen, 2008). He showed that this innovation also began
as the internet was established as a “news medium” by 2005 (Nguyen, 2008). In this regard, Meyer
(2004) declared that there would be no newspaper by 2045.
The fear-driven innovation in the second phase was triggered also by the debate of digital
disruption. Nguyen discussed a report published by The American Press Institute titled “Newspaper
Next: The Transformation Project,” which was advised by the proponents of disruptive innovation,
such as Clayton M. Christensen and Clark Gilbert. This report employed Christensen’s ideas of
digital disruption (American Press Institute, 2006). It was the result of a joint work between the
American Press Institute and Innosight, the company founded by Christensen in 2000 to help
companies grow through innovations. In 1995, Bower and Christensen (1995) argued that small
companies hurt leading companies because the former emphasized majority customers and ignored
the interest of minority customers, whose interests were often intertwined with changes in markets
and technology. Christensen elaborated on this concept further and argued that established
organizations failed to respond to market and technology changes well as they often focus on
profitable business models while ignoring less profitable ones that might become mainstream in the
future. He referred to this concept as the “principles of disruptive innovations” (Christensen, 1997, p.
xiii). The report published in 2006 highlighted that newspapers must think like disruptors such as
Yahoo and Google, each of which came up with new business models. It also urged newspapers to
set up noncore autonomous operations to succeed in disruption, focus on the core business, and build
an audience beyond news (American Press Institute, 2006). The Next Newspaper project was
important as the next report mentioned that 4000 people from hundreds of newspapers participated in
workshops and many attended conferences (Chyi, 2013; Gray, 2008).
The situation of the global north is also uneven. A study on the relationship between online
newspapers and newspapers’ circulation found that the circulation of newspapers in general started
to decrease from 1991 to 2000 (Cao & Li, 2006). The longitudinal study (1990–2014) of Flemish
newspapers has shown that there was a decline after 2008 (van der & van den, 2017). In these
countries it was the economic crisis of 2008, which made the narrative of the crisis popular. When
the economic recession hit the debate of the crisis of the newspaper industry augmented in the US,
which also increased the fear-driven innovation. Then the circulation and advertising revenue
decreased further creating fear and uncertainties compelling newspapers to cut human resources from
print (Chyi, 2013; Chyi & Tenenboim, 2019). Publishers took online as the future of journalism
(Ryfe, 2012). Some newspaper publishers such as The Rocky Mountain News stopped printing in the
US and went digital only from 2006 (Thurman & Fletcher, 2018). Such discourse in the US and
Britain also triggered similar debates in Germany and Finland, where there was no crisis in the
newspaper sector (Brüggemann et al., 2015).
However, though newspapers have moved to digital, many newspapers are earning more
revenue from print then digital operation. It is estimated that in the UK newspapers collected about
80% of their revenue from print and the rest from online in 2017 and globally this was about 90% in
print and 10% in 2019 (Nielsen, 2020). Analyzing annual reports of three legacy newspaper
publishers in the US from 2002 to 2016, Cawley (2018) found that newspapers could not give
evidence that the news they distributed in digital platforms could commercially sustain.
Like the newspaper sector in the global south, the newspaper sector in the global north also
suffered during the pandemic. The UK Guardian announced cuts in its staff as it expected that its
revenue would be down by more than £25m (Waterson, 2020). A study has shown that the
advertising and circulation revenues of US newspapers have dropped by 42% and 8% (Barthel et al.,
2020).

Conclusion
In this study, I have presented a conceptual framework to understand the digital transition of
newspapers in countries where there was no debate about the “crisis” of the sector. For this I have
proposed that we have to use two concepts: hope-driven and uncertainty-driven innovations. The first
concept helps to make sense of the local context where there was no “crisis” for a long time. This
concept is important to differentiate the context in global south with global north. I am aware that
since Kantipur is not listed in the stock exchange, we could not know the details of the changes in
revenue. In such a context, we have to depend on the perception of owners, market experts and
distributors. Since Nepal doesn’t still have an independent Audit Bureau of Circulation, the
circulation of newspapers could not be known. So, scholars have to base their analysis on the
discourse and narrative of media personnel and market experts.
The conceptual framework of hope-driven and uncertainty-driven innovations is useful to
understand the local contexts. Even when there was no uncertainty inside the newspaper sector in
terms of media economy, newspapers opted for innovations. For a long time, actors innovated to
seize the opportunities created by sociopolitical changes like the information appetite of the diaspora
during the Maoist movement, and regime change. Lately it was the mounting press from many online
media and fear of being irrelevant in the near future that actors in newspaper companies continued
their innovation. Whether the innovation would be hope-driven or uncertainty-driven depends on the
socio-technological contexts and the perception of actors about the opportunities, challenges, doubts,
and fear related to transitions.
Further studies need to test this conceptual framework by having multiple case studies. One
possibility is to compare the pathway of the digital transition of a “public” publisher, Gorkhapatra
Corporation. This will be useful because the data and information of these publishers could give a
different picture than that of Kantipur. Being a public media, it does not need to give priority to
profit as Kantipur Publications does. Similarly the case of another private newspaper company,
Kamana Prakashan can be studied as it had its website newsofnepal.com in 2003 (Shrestha, 2014).
Another possibility is to check if this conceptual framework could be applied in Indian cases.
Another possibility is to compare the digital transitions of Hindustan Times Media and Kantipur
Publications as has been discussed, it was after 2013 that the Indian media gave more emphasis on its
digital operation.
Conflict of Interest Statement
The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

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Contributor
Harsha Man Maharjan, PhD is a senior researcher at Martin Chautari, Nepal, and a lecturer in
Polygon College of Purbanchal University (Nepal). He has published several articles on media
practices, development communication, media policy, and media history in different international
and national journals and books. Some of the publications he has co-authored/co-edited include:
Civil Society in a Loktantrik Polity: Re-assessing 25 Years of Experiences (2020), 25 Years of Nepali
Magazines (2013), and Media Training: Evaluation of Nepali Practices (2010). He is an editor of
Society Studies (in Nepali), formerly known as Media Studies. His research interests include
journalism, communication, mass media, and information technology. He can be reached at
harsha.maharjan@gmail.com.