Last week, I posted my article (Newspapers and the importance of underwear – Part I) on Facebook with the status update: What’s the connection between a newspaper and underwear? “They both become stale in a day?” responded my brother.

Pithy as it was, it made me think. That relationship with underwear is in danger of snapping. If newspapers do not undergo a drastic content overhaul, they will not last even a single day, they will be born stale. They are already pretty close to it, peddling stuff that has already been chewed up and spat out by TV/web.

Not just that, TV is beating newspapers to their own stories, showing them what a story is and how to hype it. Here are three recent examples that made ripples in the country:

1. Body search of President Kalam by Continental.
2. The deficient monsoon and threatened drought.
3. Scrapping of CBSE Class X Board exams.

The coverage of all the three stories followed a pattern that shows how print is conceding ground to TV. All the three stories were little single columns in print (Delhi newspapers). News channels lapped them up, played them up through the rest of the day and created quite a stir. Following morning, all newspapers played up these very same stories as lead or second lead.

Does that mean a story becomes big only when it passes through 24 hours of TV? Print is enormously more talented in its sweep, variety and depth of reportage, but has chosen to lean on TV’s weakness for survival rather than its own strengths. (As I have often said, TV is happy to keep print alive because the latter acts like its unpaid wire service.) I have not known of one paper that by design has decided to reduce yesterday’s headlines to just updates and pool all its best stories on Page One to send out a clear message: we are not yesterday’s TV! If this sounds like an outlandish idea, look at the lengths to which Time magazine is going to preserve its base. It has come up with ‘Mine’, a special, customised, experimental edition for about 50,000 readers.

Where are our ideas? Who is doing anything new in print? Remember, the last major churn was forced on the industry by The Times of India. We all complained, but slowly that content formulation found its way into all publications. Design was ramped up, content was dumbed down as we began to service the MTV generation with bits and bytes. The logic was that with the onslaught of 24×7 general entertainment TV, reading habits were changing and people preferred the quickies.

That formula has served print well for 20 years. But 10 years into it (around 2000) came 24×7 news television, which does a better job of the bits-and-bytes presentation of news 24 hours before print.

So, shouldn’t somebody get up and ask if it is time again for a churn? This question assumes significance in another context, too. We all assume, and rightly too, that the romance of reading will never die, so newspapers will be around for a long time. If, at this moment, our only argument for the survival of print is this “romance of reading”, then are we doing right by the “reading romantic” when we supply them the same glib stuff that TV doles out? For example, when a Michael Jackson dies and it has played out on TV, does a reading romantic attain nirvana with a scrappy 200-word wrap up (and a gigantic graphic that contains tidbits) or with brilliant prose that explores the magic and mystery of the man?

If it is correct to assume that the future newspaper reader will come to print for substance and for the pleasure of reading, it follows that the newspapers should be able to deliver substance and the pleasure of a good read. That is why we should ask ourselves if the content plan of the last 20 years has served its time. And if it’s time for us to move from dumbing down to ramping up content.

Mint is the only paper that has dared to be different. A paper that has a good balance between looks and substantial reading, Mint has even tried the unthinkable and come away the better for it. Its Saturday paper comes wrapped within ‘Lounge’, the weekend special, and the cover page of ‘Lounge’ is occupied by their columnists! It works because it gives readers some intellectual stimulation.

As it looks ahead to its future, print can take comfort from the fact that it is the only news content medium with a viable business model. Television and web news companies leak money like sieves. If you count the number of national news channels currently making money, you’ll find you have too many fingers!

Ditto for web news portals.

So, it might seem that as long as these two young mediums are struggling to find their feet, print will be safe in its perch. Wrong approach. The health of individual TV or web news companies should hardly be print’s concern. It is their combined potential to suck advertising away from print that should cause worry. It has taken time, but some western countries are seeing large exodus of the advertising buck to online, and there is no reason why it cannot happen in India sooner than later.

A combination of circumstances is converging to make life tough for print. The country is ready for a technological leapfrog with 3G just around the corner. In one stroke, the biggest impediment to profitable commerce on the web, net-connectivity, will be gone. We still do not have an idea about the affordability of 3G, but considering the competition in that space, it is fair to assume that affordability will not remain an issue for too long. The promise of content in-your-hand, the resurgence of web and the prospect of generations of youngsters going through life without contact with newsprint cannot be great news for print.

That brings us back to my underwear analogy for the last time. Yes, just like underwear, print will survive. But the waist that wears the underwear will shrink dramatically, so print will have to recast and resize. As in everything else, one-size-fits-all underwear is a myth. And, remember, somewhere along the way even underwear transformed into lingerie!

(Venkat, as the author is called, insists the argument is his own and that no one else, such as exchange4media, should be hauled up for blasphemy.)

Also read:

Guest Column Newsmanic: Newspapers and the importance of underwear – Part I

The average TV journalist hates his job or, more precisely, hates what he has to do to keep his job, which is roughly true of any average person in any average job. The dirty, mindless content he dishes out with such passion is not HIM. Much like any average person in any average job, the TV journo, too, has made his peace. He gets by the tough life of the TV newsroom by throwing the protective ring of philosophy around himself.

Thus, the television newsroom is a very philosophical place. It is littered with life’s eternal truths. Like for example, this great philosophy of an output head in one Hindi channel: ‘Hum jitna girenge, TRPs utna uthengi!’ The steeper we fall, the higher will the TRPs rise. This relates more or less to the philosophy behind the saying, “greatness lies not in not falling, but rising higher each time we fall”. But it actuality means that the greater the debasement of news, the higher the TRPs!

At Star News, where I was Input Head for a good two years, the philosophy that kept us going was this: We wake up everyday. The maid, the gardener, the cook, the dhobi, the guard and the driver, they all work for us (and we pay them). Suited-booted we go to our fancy office, set up our laptops and start working. For all of them! Though we could never be sure till the following Friday if it was paying us, we stuck to the job because it roughly corresponds to the philosophy of “you pay for your sins in this lifetime itself”! So, there we were paying back our dues on the same day, every day!

At a more personal level now. I live in Gurgaon, so used to do breakfast, drive across three states, sit in my room waiting for lunch time, do lunch and wait another few hours to return home to do dinner! No work. Not a scrap of it. I would drive 40 km one way and 40 km the other, just to do lunch at office, because for the channel the stringer in Bulandshehar, who always landed up in a sundry bedroom just when a sundry wife was about to beat up a sundry husband for dating a sundry woman, was always more important than the sundry editor at office, who had sundry ideas on sundry other problems of life.

Here again, it was the philosophy that kept me going: Nobody is indispensible at work and nothing is impossible in life. Stringers can become editors, editors can become (lunch-eating) furniture. If the poor stringer got paid Rs 1,000 for feeding the channel for three hours and I got a fat salary for eating lunch, serves him right. Who said life was fair? Life, in fact, is a great leveler! Only one thing used to bother me, though: I should have had lunch also at home. The cheque could have come by courier! But then again, nothing comes easy in life. If you’ve got to do 80 km for lunch, you’ve got to do that.

And then there are those who started out as hardboiled journalists. Wanted to change the world etc., but were forced to attend to more pressing matters such as Professor Pyarelal ki prem kahani (the Patna Prof, who lost his heart to a student), IPS officer bana Radha (an IPS officer, who believed he was Lord Krishna’s consort Radha), Ghaas khata aadmi (a man who ate grass), or the riveting story of a naag and naagin of previous birth, separated by fate but reunited in this birth as man and wife! Their agenda may have been hijacked, the goalposts shifted, but they hung in. Reluctantly to begin with, but have now become the high priests of trash, because you got to do what you got to do. Ganda hain par dhanda hain!

Once you’ve fortified yourself with the ‘paapi peth ka sawal hain ’ philosophy, then everything is easy game. Darao, darao. (Scare them, scare them). This philosophy comes in handy when calamitous things are about to happen, such as three eclipses in the space of a month. So, it was that one channel brought in an astrologer for a show designed to scare the wits out of everybody. This astrologer was no philosopher. He said there was no danger, eclipses are very normal, no danger. Cut. Ad break. Astrologer replaced. Philosophy: if you can’t see the wolf, it doesn’t mean it won’t eat up the sheep!

But you don’t get three dangerous eclipses in a month every day. So, what do we have for today? Nothing. Nothing? Kuch nahi hain toh Rakhi hain na? If we don’t have anything, we have Rakhi (Sawant) don’t we? As long as Rakhi is willing to get kissed and get hooked on air, where’s the problem? Why do you need anything else? And if at all you need something else, why is Raju Srivastav recording, re-recording and re-re-recording all his jokes in different backgrounds every day? Jiska koi nahi uska khuda hain yaaron. Rakhi is a TV goddess, ask NDTV Imagine.

What? No Rakhi, no Raju…? Toh phir byte hain? That byte can be anything from a small time priest in a Madhya Pradesh temple saying he is about to die at 4 pm that day to the doctor saying the PM has a prostrate gland problem to Amitabh Bachchan saying just “hain” or Rakhi (oh, that saviour again) saying “aplogise aplogise” (sic ) to Mika. Those 10 seconds are treated as audio-visual gold because the newsroom knows to “make do with all it has”. All the relevant, non-relevant, irrelevant backgrounder is dug out and spread around that single byte for a three-hour feast for the viewer. That is the Ethiopian-finds-a-pea philosophy, higher than the “be content” philosophy, because this guy threw a party for the neighbourhood because he found a pea! Cruel, but again, who said life is easy?

I can go on and on with such examples, but suffice it to say that where such high philosophy rules every twist and turn, how can things be bad? How can channels be accused of debasing news? Must be that “eye of the beholder” thing. Dirty minds always see dirty things. Give them pure kitsch, they will see only the kitsch and forget it’s pure. Dekhne wale ki dil mein khot hain, huzoor.

Get it? It finally comes back to you, the viewer. You are the one who’s debauched.

(Venkat, as the author is called, insists the argument is his own and that no one else, such as exchange4media, should be hauled up for blasphemy.)

One story that news channels should have grabbed and played up was the investigative report of BBC’s Richard Watson on the Mumbai 26/11 attacks. India’s news channels have unfairly been carrying the stigma of helping the terrorists in their mission. Watson pointed out that there was something elementarily wrong about the Government’s accusation and I expected some pick and play to this story even though Michael Jackson was ruling the airwaves.

Watson quoted an Indian intelligence intercept of a terrorist conversation:

Terrorist in Nariman House: Is there anyone in our building? Pak handler: Look at the terrace at the back, the police are there. There’s a building under construction, they’re on top of that building and there’s a lot of police on the main road. You know Merchant House? They are sitting behind the protruding rear wall and firing shells…”

Watson argued that the detailing those in Pakistan had about the position and deployment of police in Mumbai and the precision with which the war was being directed from there meant two things: one, that it was impossible for them to have got this information by just watching live TV, and two, that this kind of minute military intelligence gathering can happen only with hands-on work from ground zero. Meaning that the terrorists had local Lashkar units feeding Pakistan precise details from all three spots of engagement.

This was an unexpected lifeline for the Indian channels to rid themselves of the sad slur of acting to aid the enemy in times of war (in normal parlance that is called treason). BBC is not gospel, though we often treat it that way, but there was merit in Watson’s argument. I don’t recall any channel consciously or unconsciously showing or talking about “the Merchant House or the protruding rear wall” from where shells were being fired. As I recall it, all the 60 hours of live coverage were marked by little coherent reportage and yielded little intelligible information to the viewing public, forget about military intelligence to the enemy.

The most serious charge against the channels’ indiscretion was also the most absurd. They were damned for exposing the NSG commandoes to risk by telecasting the chopper-dropping at Nariman House live. It was said that the Pakistani handlers instantly Blackberried the information to their wards in Mumbai. (I can imagine the message: “There’s a chopper on your heads. Look up, you idiots….Sent from my Blackberry!”)

Were they choppers or B52 Stealth Bombers? What about the racket they would have raised from miles away? They were hanging over for a good 10 minutes, damn it! You think the terrorists mistook the noise for a marriage band on the terrace? If they were as well trained as we all agree they were, they would have known exactly how many commandoes dropped down by just noting the time the chopper was hovering over. (Anyway, if this was going to be such a deadly surprise assault – I can’t see how, with all that noise – why didn’t the Government advise the channels just before to suspend live telecast for a while?)

There is another big hole in this TV-helped-the-terrorists theory. It presumes that the terrorists left the crucial job of intelligence gathering at ground zero to India’s news channels! Which in turn presumes the terrorists were cocksure the Indian security establishment would goof up its most elementary job of securing the war zone and keeping the media at bay.

The Mumbai police instantly rubbished Watson’s investigation. At the same time, the Government has not tired of telling us how meticulously well-planned this operation was and how it had ISI and the Pakistan Army written all over it. If that be the case, as indeed it seems logical, how is it that they left the most critical part of the war (intelligence-gathering) entirely to chance? What if the Indian Government had disallowed live coverage? Once the terrorists entered the premises, would they have conducted the rest of the operation blindly, without a script? Knowing the ISI and its operations, that’s hardly likely. Isn’t it incredulous to think that they planned only as far as getting the teams inside the premises and it was just by a happy accident that they decided to work a little harder because TV was anyway giving them precise real-time intelligence?

As we can see, the News Broadcasters Association (NBA), a representative body of major news channels, had solid grounds to debunk the Government’s theory. Instead, the NBA chose the path of self-indictment by rushing into a Code of Conduct for Emergencies back then in December. If that was bad enough, the channels only surpassed themselves by completely ignoring Watson’s report. The newspapers briefly played it, but the channels blanked it out.

This reticence to take on the Government confounds me. Not just because this was a golden opportunity to revisit the Mumbai 26/11 attacks and redeem themselves, but because it was an equally good chance to turn the heat on the Government and the security establishment. By accusing the media of helping the terrorists, the Government had deftly deflected the debate from uncomfortable questions about the quality of our response. God knows the Government has a lot of explaining to do, but by pinning the media down with absurd charges of complicity with the enemy, it ensured the media was on the defensive and did not raise any questions about the efficiency of the 60-hour operation.

News channels riled the viewers in many ways during Mumbai 26/11. But helping the terrorists, even if unconsciously, is not one of them. Desperate bits and pieces, which was what live reporting was, do not make for solid, actionable military intelligence. The Government knows it, it just needed to be told off by the NBA. But as you can see, when it comes to standing up for their rights, the collective power of television news industry is still a myth.

Tailpiece: Addition to the Dumb List

Last week’s ‘Top 10 list of dumb lines on TV’ evoked quite a response. One friend, a senior print journo, wrote: Loved your TV piece. Upset that you didn’t mention how they tell the weather person “thank you sooo much”, as if she’s paid their home loan EMI!

(Venkat, as the author is called, thinks TV channels do not stand up to government-bullying because they have squandered the power of public opinion, which they enjoyed during the heydays, because news has been replaced by nuisance.)