The Government of India's Press Information Bureau (PIB) is looking to rework guidelines for allowing online media journalists to get press accreditation. Among the benefits of being a PIB accredited journalist is that it allows journalists entry into government events (a list here) for reporting on them. Inputs may be sent to the PIB via this form by the 23rd of March 2016. The questions raised by the PIB on who should be given accreditation points towards some interesting issues when it comes to recognizing online media. Among the questions, they're asking whether news aggregators should also be given accreditation; means of identifying how much of the content from a media entity is original news content; whether these media entities are updated daily, and how that may be verified. A list of questions below. Existing accreditation guidelines for online media We've never noticed this before, but apparently there are guidelines for accreditation for online media, which the government is now looking to revise. - Applicable to: online editors, correspondents, camerapersons - What's a news site: For a news site at least 1/3rd of its visible content related to news & current affairs originally reported by its own correspondents. - Qualifying stats: The site should have paid subscribers and must be updated at least 6 times a day, and have at least 10,000 pageviews 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…
