New Delhi, Sept. 12 -- Fifteen years ago, when I first started writing a regular column for a newspaper, the most poetic response came from the filmmaker Sudhir Mishra. He told me he was looking forward to reading me every week, which surprised me, since I had already been a film critic for years, my opinions published online for the world to read. I told him this. "The difference is that first I had to go looking for you," Mishra had said in his signature drawl, "but now you'll come straight home."

Today, no newspaper comes straight to my home. Like many of my generation, I get my journalistic fix from a self-curated mix of online and streaming sources, nudged by my social media feeds. The appeal of the newspaper is at an all-time low, ...