ABC of Indian Media-Advertising, Bollywood, Corporate Power

P. Sainath is a firebrand activist, and incidentally a journalist.
But he is understandably a spokesman for journalism and journalist issues these days, for good reasons
1) He is at The Hindu, which likes to discuss media-related issues on its pages, especially those that relate to ethics

2) As a methodical prodder passionate about rural and social issues, Sainath comes from the "development/activist" school of journalism, and is thoroughly disturbed by the trivialisation of many serious issues

3) He writes well, with a strong tendency to marshall facts and use telling phrases which can match any lawyer or public orator.

Here he is, arguing about how the Indian media is almost systematically being held to ransom by the superficial troika of advertising, movie glamour and corporate agenda. Good, essential reading for media watchers.

Is social media a threat to journalism?

Here is a piece from Chris Cramer, a BBC and CNN veteran and current Reuters Global Editor, Multimedia, on what social media and "citizen journalism" means to the media. The bottomline: credibility and integrity matter, and profits follow.
I agree with a lot of what he says, having worked at Reuters-- with its commitment for some basic principles. But there is a chaotic universe out there and we need more innovations -in products, services and business models.

TOI, ET losing circulation in Mumbai: Is the Old Lady of Bori Bunder aging further?

I find this quite interesting.
Could it be true? The venerable Old Lady of Bori Bunder losing hold in her Victorian bastion? Are Hindustan Times and DNA eating into her vitals?
Or is it that thing called TV or Internet which is making readers less interested to pay for it?
I don't know, but it is clear to me that the newspaper business is headed for a real churning. The winners will be those who truly understand readers-- and that's easier said than done.
Here is the story with some details. Data is still pouring in.

Online ad revenues zoom on....

Despite the recession, digital advertising is growing robustly--and in fact more so as advertisers find it sensible in getting the right bang for buck, says Zenith Optimedia. Here is a report.

How Mumbai 26/11 shaped the future of media in India

Mumbai, 26/11/2008

Terrorists carried sat-phones
Eyewitnesses used Twitter feeds
TV cameras rolled live
Social activists attacked them on blogs
Citizens rallied around Facebook pages

That was the world's first instance of "convergence terrorism" or Terrorism 2.0 as I said.
It is clear that media will never be the same again.
Facebook groups sprung up against Barkha Dutt, India's most familiar English TV news anchorette. And pieces by activist writers like Harini Calamur (like this took on the media.
Here are my brief observations.

1)Media will never be the same again, because Internet activism is acting as a countervailing influence on conventional media. Even if they care only for viewership, and claim publicly that only viewers matter, there will be some influence.

2) There are still a huge number of people out there who believe the role of the media as a noble "watchdog" purveying facts, presenting it responsibly. Who is going to PAY for this journalism? Can these activists subsidise the high cost of the publishing business?

3) Increasingly, social bookmarking and e-mail are emerging as powerful drivers of attention.
Gnani Sankaran's piece
questioning the Taj as Mumbai's icon became quite a rage on the Net.

New Media, Old Media? It is all convergence

In the end, it is all media....


New, old media good for each other, Huffington says

US journalists became self-indulgent, says Murdoch

I am not done with the Murdoch visit to India yet. Always looking for telling quotes from the man, whose furrowed forehead and creased smile attracts me as much as his insights into the business.
Here is my takeaway quote from the visit:

Newspapers in America became
monopolistic. Proprietors became lazy, and journalists became self-indulgent because they were writing for each other and lost touch with the public.

Full interview story from CNBC -TV 18 here

Career challenges for journos in the Age of Convergence

Three years ago, I had made a presentation to media students in Bangalore about prospects and challenges in the age of the Internet in a booming economy. I find a lot of it relevant -- in fact more relevant than in 2005, when I made it.



Uploaded on authorSTREAM by madhavan

Time-Warner segregates content from carriage

The message is clear.

Nearly a decade ago, Steve Case was the big man at America On Line, which, like a tail wagging the dog, acquired one of the world's most reputed media content companies, Time -Warner Inc, because AOL owned the Net connections that would carry content to homes.
Then came the dot-com bust...and then Web 2.0 and all that. It is now clear that content and carriage of content need not be, and in fact, better not be, in the same company.
AOL's carriage part is being separated from the content part.
This is the future of the Net - and indeed the media.
A few decades ago, publishers owned presses.
One decade ago, the pipe-wallahs took content.
Not any more.
My next prediction: Ad sales will be increasingly separated from content. It is happening already on the Web with publishers and ad networks working as partners, and not as one entity.
Why can't that happen to old-world old media houses?
I see it happening, though the pace could be painfully slow.

Can you measure journalism? How much is Picasso worth per square inch?

How do you measure journalistic productivity? Can you put numbers on stories executed to judge reporters? What the hell is a good-quality story? Does it involve writing? Balance? Reportage? "Consumer" value? Editing? What is the value of designers/copy-editors? Ideators?
Who should decide the quality? A vice-president with an MBA?
Is this a science? Is this an art?
What is subjective?
What the hell is objective?
No easy answers, but here is an interview with Chicago Tribune editor by Reuters Mediafile, which I am providing as food for thought/grist for mill.

(If I have the answers, I am not going to tell you now:))
And, oh yes! If you read the script below carefully, there is an open acknowledgement that newspapers are in crisis.
That is something that Indian newspapers don't seem to be saying...how interesting!

Here is the interview:

Tribune Co is keeping media reporters and headline writers busy these days with news of how the company is trying to turn around its newspaper business and stay afloat under billions of dollars in debt - all while creating a culture that, as Chicago real estate tycoon and newly minted press baron Sam Zell says, does not take itself too seriously.

That is growing more difficult as the company embarks on another round of job cuts at its papers, sparking fear and loathing among employees, and launches an ambitious plan to redo the papers' sizes and looks. Tribune also set journalism types' tongues a-wagging with its plan to review reporter productivity as a possible condition for staying on board. That might not sound so controversial, except that many people have interpreted that as saying it's not about the quality of your stories, it's about the quantity.

Gerould Kern, Tribune's vice president of editorial and the successor to departing Chicago Tribune editor Ann Marie Lipinski, addressed some of these topics in a phone interview with Reuters.

Q: What is your immediate task as the new editor of the Chicago Tribune?

A: As we report almost daily, the newspaper business is in a crisis. And I want to do everything I can in my power to save it. And you know, the Chicago Tribune has played a huge role in the history of the nation and the city, and I know it and I'm proud of it and I want that history to stretch far into the future. So I'm optimistic that we can solve these economic problems, the economic dislocation that faces us and that we're not only going to survive but thrive in the future.

Q: How do you make the business thrive with fewer people?

A: I think it becomes a lot harder and that's going to force us to be a lot more innovative and entrepreneurial and resourceful than we've ever been before. There's been a lot of misinformation and confusion about productivity as a topic. I think the idea's fairly simple. Let's turn over every stone, let's do every smart thing we can to stretch the resources, to use them to serve people and build our audiences and bring in revenue to support journalism.

It means our full-time professional staff is going to get smaller. And that's been happening to newspapers all over the country. And yet we're having to support more local media channels than ever before. … At the end of the day we still will have the largest newsgathering organization in this city by far. And if we are really smart and resourceful about using them we will be able to a fabulous job for consumers in whatever channel they choose.

Q: What do you say to the reporters who say they're scandalized by the idea of being judged on how many stories they produce, rather than the quality of individual stories?

A: I think it is unfortunate that this has been focused on in this way. I understand it based on some comments that [Tribune Chief Operating Officer] Randy [Michaels] made on the middle of that call. Let me just say this: I talked in a broader sense about productivity, which frankly is the way I'm looking at it. What can the whole organization do that's smart, that's strategic, that's resourceful.

But on bylines: All of our newspapers are looking at all kinds of information to see what is valuable in making some of these tough choices… Some of our newspapers in some departments have been doing byline counts over the years. It's not the first time that anybody's ever done that. From the beginning, we made it clear that this should be viewed as just one data point and, frankly, probably not the most valuable and that it had to be combined with other information. … Everybody knows for instance that you have to evaluate investigative reporters differently than other kinds of reporters. Because reporting takes a long time… And everyone was aware of that.

In the end, the information and the judgment calls [were] left strictly up to editors in the newsroom and that's where it will remain. So, I think much more is being made of it than really is there.

Editor & Publisher mag to offer electronic edition

I remember my days 20 years ago, when I used to visit the American Center library and thumb through a magazine that stood for a vibrant newspaper industry in North America. It is now available in an electronic "same-as-print" edition, thanks to a partnership with Hyderabad-based Pressmart. Pressmart is an amazing company which is putting some of the world's leading newspapers into online editions that look the same.
Here are some details from the media statement:

E&P Publisher Chas McKeown said "the Pressmart state-of-the-art solution will provide our readership access to Editor & Publisher on multiple digital distribution channels including eEditions; Podcasts; Mobile devices and eArchives."


Editor & Publisher is the authoritative journal covering all aspects of the North American newspaper industry, including business, newsroom, advertising, circulation, marketing, technology, online and syndicates.

Based in New York City, the magazine dates back to 1884, when The Journalist, a weekly, was founded. E&P was launched in 1901 and merged with The Journalist in 1907. E&P later acquired Newspaperdom, a trade journal for the newspaper industry that started in 1892. In 1927, E&P merged with another trade paper, The Fourth Estate. In January 2004, E&P switched from weekly to monthly publication, while revamping its Web site to offer more breaking news and content on a daily basis.

E&P Online (www.editorandpublisher.com) offers breaking news free to all visitors in our Top Stories section. Each week, selected proprietary stories from E&P staff are made available free to all visitors, but the majority of our analysis, industry news, features, columns, and trends are restricted to E&P subscribers.

Wisdom on the Sun Valley: Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one

At Sun Valley, Idaho, global media moguls are meeting this week for the annual retreat that is fabled to generate mega deals. Now, will moguls be spelt as Mughals this week? In other words, how important is India for the likes of Google, Yahoo, Newscorp et al?
No doubt this is an interesting market, but, as the Reuters report observes, the US economy is the prime concern, and issues like the Microsoft-Yahoo saga dominate.
Now, while that happens and we look for the signals, here is some sobering insight. When the likes of Murdoch, Eric Schmidt (Google) and others confabulate, where are the journos?
They are busy reporting it all. Is any of the moguls/Mughals in question a former entertainer or journalist? Very few, if at all.
In the end, this is about business.
All those who have woolly ideas about the power of the media must remember my friend Srini's e-mail drop-line: The freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.
That saying, I believe, is credited to A.J. Liebling of The New Yorker magazine

Ethnic Indians arrive in global media scene (Adventures through the glass ceiling?)

First, a bit of tom-tomming. This post is the 100th since this media blog kicked off about three years ago, when I started this to illustrate the then-largely-unknown concept of the blog to a bunch of media students I was lecturing at COMMITS, a media school in Bangalore..
It is fitting that I should hit this landmark number with a story in Mint on how Indians are rising to new highs in global (read Western) media giant labels such as Time and Wall Street Journal. The story links these appointments to the rise of the "India story" which kind of devalues the merit of the people in question-- as if to say that these people are making it big because they are Indian and not solely because they are capable of running global set-ups. I am not sure if that is the correct way to look at it.
Some of the dudes in question are my former colleagues who left Indian shores for greener pastures. and have worked hard to get where they are. There is plenty of Indian talent both at home and abroad, though some of the people in question have swapped native Indian wisdom and depth for US-ishtyle reportage which has its own charms and balancing qualities.
When I left myself for Reuters, there were those who cautioned me about the perceived glass ceiling in international media companies. I did not find any significant problem, except with occasional individuals or their worldviews that concealed unconscious biases.
I will not say there are no biases at all in Western media organisations, but I will add that Indian companies have their own biases. There was certainly a period in both information technology and media when Indians had to work harder to get to the same spot but that has changed a lot. It is an evolving world in which professional values are being increasingly recognised, though there is some way to go both in Indian and international organisations.
Some look at everything through the looking glass of self-loving mirrors and others through imagined glass ceilings. In the end, the details differ from case to case, person to person.
Now for the big question: These are big labels they work for, but will they stay big? In the "World is Flat" globe of level-playing fields, is the media industry an exception?
Bring on a guitar. I'll sing "the answer is blowing in the wind."

Some useful advice for young/budding/aspiring journos

I found these focused points from Aniruddha Bahal (famous for Tehelka exposes and the Bad Sex writing award for his novel) highly commendable to journos who still believe in looking for something beyond raises and bylines.

To Wiki or not to Wiki, that is the question...

It is out. A few years ago, my friend Sanjit used to mock at newspaper features that ended with an impressive byline that went "So-and-so, with Internet reports"...those were the days when the Internet itself had an authoritative ring to it whereas the case was simply one of a harried writer in a hurry hacking a dubious source.
Now, the Internet is understood to be less-than-excellent, but its latter-day user-generated encyclopaedia, Wikipedia is often used by journalists, including yours truly. I confess that I use it, though it is a dubious source, but also add that I trust my own intuition, experience and cross-checking to know when to use it. Of course, I have never thus far "cited" it as a source.
Now comes an interesting article in American Journalism Review that discusses the issue threadbare.
As long as publishers don't want to spend (enough) on reportage and research, and as long as editors are not willing to cross-examine reporters and as long as reporters -- either out of laziness, ignorance or indifference -- use Wiki to meet deadlines faster or easier, the threat of information pollution is real.
Which brings me back to my favourite theme: Loser Generated Content.
Few people care to acknowledge that good journalism is both capital and labour intensive. If you are short of time or funds, reportage will tend to suffer. Somebody has to pay for it. Usually it is the reader.
Activists, well-intentioned citizens and affected parties cry foul about bad reportage, but few are ready to pay for good stuff.
I once asked a bunch of complaining folks: Will you pay 10 rupees to buy your paper?
The answer was silence, or some kind of fudging.
I used to like a lot an old VIP suitcase ad. Its punchline, based on an old Arab saying, was just right: You can't get a camel for the price of a goat!