Who needs a book on online or electronic journalism in India when millions still do not have basic telephone services in this and other parts of the world? Indeed, who needs online journalism itself, or journalism of any kind, in a country where millions of people are illiterate to this day? I refer here to written forms of journalism, since illiteracy by definition is not a hindrance to accessing broadcast journalism, at least at a certain level.

The answer to these questions is probably obvious to many of us. To those who share the common, somewhat uncritical type of liberal democratic thinking, journalism's raison d'être is to keep citizens informed about important issues, enabling them to make informed decisions about public affairs and exercise control over the powers that be. The traditional Marxist view, on the other hand, is that in class-divided society, journalism's function is to earn profits and shore up the ideological superstructure that favours and naturalises exploitation. A more sophisticated Marxism-influenced view is that the media are a tool of hegemony. Yet another view, which sounds much like the naive democratic one but in fact is more nuanced, is that the mass media are – or should be – an important component of the public sphere. The public sphere, in the words of Habermas, is “a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed”.