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

(This piece first appeared at Exchange4Media.com under the Newsmanic Series)

It was some time in 1999. The Internet had just hit the country, sweeping everybody off their feet. Revving up and down that new information highway, everybody was busy announcing the death of the newspaper.

In that period of frenzied crystal ball-gazing, one of Mumbai’s Rotary Clubs decided to hold a memorial service for print media. As Resident Editor of Indian Express, Mumbai, I was the print journalist they would commiserate with.

The question came up repeatedly: Is it over for newspapers?

“With apologies to the ladies in the audience,” I had told the Rotary Clubites, “I will respond with a dirty analogy. Fashion changed from the long flowing gowns to full-length gowns, to skirts, to knee length skirts, to minis to micro-minis; from full pants to capris to shorts to hot pants and what have you. But through all this chopping and changing, one thing never went out of fashion: underwear.”

“Newspapers,” I declared with a flourish, “are the underwear of the news business. Intimate, personal and bare essentials, they will never be out of fashion, will never be discarded.”

I don’t know if the audience was as impressed with my line as I was with myself, but the much-feared invasion was over before it began. The Internet bubble burst all too soon. It had come to war unprepared. Without speed (of download) and penetration (of PCs), it did nothing more than shock, awe and perish in its own exuberance.

Largely because it came away unscathed from that attack, print did not feel compelled to change much and returned to business as usual. All the big players, who poured monies into web editions quickly, sucked them out, maintaining bare-bones operations. The would-be conqueror was condemned to life as a parasite of print. (That situation continues even now, though web editions have been spruced up in recent years.)

The second, and the more serious, invasion of print’s news monopoly came almost immediately in the form of 24×7 TV news. It was widely believed that non-stop news would finish what the web couldn’t start: make newspapers irrelevant and hence, unviable. Just the opposite happened. The period of television news explosion also proved to be the golden period of growth for print. If you stack up the top 10 news channel brands against the top 10 newspaper brands, the latter will run away with all the awards for growth in reach, numbers, revenue and profitability in the last 10 years. New launches, more editions, more colour, more pullouts and more pages – all that at less cost to the consumer – meant that print created multiple-newspaper homes. Circulation and readerships soared like never before. India was bucking worldwide trends of severe pressure on circulations. Print didn’t just survive TV news, it thrived.

News channels had the potential to hurt print big, but print got away with little or no damage. Not all of this happened because print offered a planned response to the onslaught of TV, but because providence played its part yet again in the form of economic boom. The TV onslaught was numbed by a decade of rah-rah growth, which ensured there was enough advertising revenue for everybody. Print did concede larger slices of the advertising pie to TV, but the pie itself became so big that the absolute revenues kept going up (again, at a time when the reverse was happening world over).

Here’s perhaps a better way of saying this: If the TV onslaught had happened without the concomitant eco boom, print would have hurt more. It wouldn’t have been able to afford a fraction of the costs of the huge numbers game it played (more editions, more pages and more circulation). It would have been forced to come up with more content innovations rather than marketing innovations. But the economy, along with the rising literacy levels and the fact that we remained, and remain, one step behind the world on PC penetration, ensured that print’s happy story continued.

Print was second time lucky, too.

Luck is never a reliable war weapon, though. In the euphoria of growing numbers, increasing launches and growing advertising revenues, print may have been fooled into believing that it dealt with TV, but it was essentially at war with itself. This war within the medium, rather than across the medium, meant that print made no ‘shift’ in content to deal with television news. No standout content strategy targeted to deal with the fact that print would forever be 24 hours too late. The last serious directional change in content was forced on the industry by the runaway success of (a dumbed down) The Times of India. Neither before then, nor since then, has there been any discernible or deliberate directional shift in content.

No, I am not grudging print the benefits it got out of a good economy, why shouldn’t it? TV brought with it two distinct dangers to print – flight of advertising and staleness of content. At an existential level, the first was the bigger and more immediate problem. Luckily, this problem was tackled effectively by the economy. The bigger threat having been neutralised, print did not pay much attention to the content challenge thrown by TV.

Thus, a good 10 years after TV, newspapers are still content to fill their front pages with yesterday’s regurgitated news. Rather than play to their strength of incisive and exhaustive reportage, they have confined themselves to filling in the blanks left by last night’s prime time. By its very nature, TV news has annexed substantial print territory, but with its prohibitive cost structure, it has remained just an “event management industry” rather than a news generator. TV hardly reports that which does not happen in public domain, whereas print’s ability to dig up that stuff is widely acknowledged, if completely underused right now.

Yet, print chose only the design-and-presentation route to tackle TV rather than lean on its content superiority. When the going was good, it didn’t matter. But now recession is here. It seems like the industry will take a while to recover from this tough turn of fate. And by the time it deals with recession, a new and bigger challenge will be at hand: the digital age. The threat of generations of youth getting by without holding printed news is very real and can only get worse in the next decade.

Print cannot afford to be blasé about its future anymore, you know, the “romance of print will never die” kind of argument. Romance is a strong reason for print’s survival, but it won’t be enough reason. Does that mean I have changed my mind about the longevity and infallibility of underwear?

Hardly.

I’m saying that print would perhaps have been better prepared for the challenges of the digital age if it had been made to sweat a bit more in the TV age.

I’m saying newspapers cannot play the game in the coming decade the way they played it the last decade.

And I’m saying it’s about time we asked ourselves what kind of underwear the digital generation would want to wear…

(More next week on the importance of underwear.)

(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.)