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Govt to revise guidelines for regulating online media
21 Mar 2016

  • The government is planning to review the guidelines for accreditation of journalists who work in online media companies, reported Business Standard. The Press Information Bureau (PIB) has sought the views of the public on issues such as the criteria to empanel online media units, the kind of entities that should be covered under online media, how long should an organisation be in existence to be included in the consideration set and so on.

  • The present set of rules for accreditation of journalists working in online media was prepared many years back when that space was still very small. The PIB has designated officers to monitor online media content now.

  • Below are the existing guidelines for accreditation for online media, which the government is now looking to revise. And is applicable to online editors, correspondents, camera-persons.

  • – For a news site at least 1/3rd of its visible content related to news & current affairs originally reported by its own correspondents.
  • – The site should have paid subscribers and must be updated at least 6 times a day, and have at least 10,000 page-views per day for its news portion.
  • – minimum annual revenue of either Rs 20 lakhs from its news portions only OR Rs 2.5 crore from the entire website including its news portion.
  • – The domain name of the site should be registered for at least the next 5 years from the date of application, and the website must be functioning for at least a year.

  • Some of the existing guidelines related to domain age, revenue, page views are absurd. There are online media properties targeting niche communities and for them to meet these conditions in terms of page views and revenue, is difficult. 

  • The questions for which answers are being sought for updating the guidelines by PIB, you can access here.    

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