Things are looking up at the Time of India. The country’s biggest and richest media house, which rang the alarm bells first with an unprecedented round of blood-letting last year, has just announced the end of recession. Ravi Dhariwal, CEO, wrote an endearing letter to all his staff to inform them that the management has decided to put some money in their pockets ahead of Diwali, a sort of bonus payout.

That is great news, not just for the Times staffers, but all of us in the media because when TOI cut costs, salaries and careers, all with equal remorselessness, that was enough excuse for many lesser mortals to blindly follow suit. So, the TOI retracing its steps is decidedly good news because there’s a chance the others might ape the TOI once again.

Except that this time, too, you definitely don’t want your managements to take the TOI’s cue. To understand why, first read some excerpts from Dhariwal’s letter:

“Dear Friends, Last time I wrote to you, a few months ago, we were in the midst of a perfect storm. On the back of astronomical newsprint prices, and our own expansion, our costs had galloped. As this was happening, Advertising revenues skid on fears of an impending recession. For the first time in many years, we saw a severe margin compression. For a few months we actually lost money. It was clear that we needed to take a serious course correction.

“We took several measures to restore the company back to some semblance of financial health. We cut unnecessary expenditures, postponed some of our future projects, scouted the world for cheaper newsprint and also trimmed our organization. Looking back, it was one of the most difficult periods in my career…

“All-in-all, I feel a lot more optimistic about our future, even in the short and medium term… The way you all rallied forth makes me absolutely sure.

“With this background, I am happy to inform you that our VC (Samir Jain) and our MD (Vineet Jain) have asked me to do something very pleasant. We are going to make an advance pay out of 1/3rd of the TVP (target variable pay) amount planned for the year 2009-10. You will receive this soon, in the next few days. This amount will be adjusted once we complete the year closing in July 2010 and work out the TVP due to us as per company policy. I am sure this money is welcome in our pocket. I also think this is a measure of our combined optimism about our future. I thought I should share this with you before we hit the festive season.”

Let’s understand “the very pleasant” bit a little better. The Times of India, sitting on profits of 150 years plus, cuts staff salaries across the board because the company “actually lost money” for “a few months” and decides to pay out 1/3^rd bonus of the next year in advance, to be adjusted later. Alternatively put, when the Times of India hurts, it takes staff salaries back to previous year’s levels and when it gets generous, it gives them one-third of one-tenth of their future earnings (assuming average variable pay is 10%)!

And the staff is supposed to be ecstatic because the “money is welcome in the pockets” before they “hit the festive season”. Yes, guys, now go and shop till you drop. What a mean trick! It would have achieved nothing more than to open old wounds of the staff. If managements of other media houses will not copy the TOI this time, it must be because such lack of tact and grace must be hard to match. 

Some would argue that this is between the TOI management and their staff so it’s none of our business. But it is. It is our business because the Times of India is the country’s most widely consumed media and what it writes in times of national crises such as recession is critical to us. The media, led by the Times of India, needed to examine how much of the bad times corporate India faced was because of actual recessionary pressures and question how much of it was caused by corporate day-dreaming, mindless expansions and outright greed. It needed to question why it is always that the top screws up, but the bottom pays up.

But none of that happened because the media houses, led by the TOI, were themselves guilty of committing the same grave errors at the top for which the staff at the lowest end paid dearly. For example, it was the Private Treaties that delivered the biggest blow to the TOI’s health. The top thought up the Private Treaties route to riches. We all know who paid when the crisis came.

Similarly, NDTV went into all kinds of unwise expansion plans and sunk in hundreds of crore in bad projects. While it ended up being no where in its new businesses, it became an also ran in every news segment (English, Hindi and Business news) and completely botched up its MetroNation project. And when recession came along, it became a happy excuse to sack dozens of lower staff while not one CEO got the boot. In fact, in the middle of the sacking mayhem, it hired a sort of overall boss for NDTV Profit whose compensation could have equalled the cost of a dozen sacked employees or more elsewhere in the group.

That story repeated itself even in organisations that were not bleeding. AajTak and Zee News, the only two channels at the national level consistently raking in profits, held up hikes and cut back salaries respectively. Both these companies returned handsome profits even during recession but that has meant little good news for the staff (though Zee I know has reversed the 10 to 20 % salary cut). Little wonder then that corporate India’s profligacy and foolishness, that must have contributed in equal measure to their near-death experience of last year, went completely unquestioned by the media as a whole.

So, Mr Dhariwal, if your staff sees nothing “very pleasant” in your Diwali Dhamaka, don’t take it personally. You enjoy your Diwali.

 In 1987 the Times of India set in motion a process of deconstructing the Indian newspaper as we knew it up until then with the launch of the rather wordy Sesquicentennial (150^th birthday) Celebrations. Even though journalism became collateral damage (some would say it was the primary target) in its relentless march to superstardom, the Times of India did much more than just deconstruct the newspaper. It changed the game totally and completely.

It shelved the prevailing trend of periodic cover price increases with invitation pricing. It killed the standard 16/20-page paper forever with the fat infotainment supplements. It created a whole new generation of young readers. It hooked the women on to the newspaper, thus far a male bastion. It expanded the market like never before, made multiple-paper homes a possibility and introduced the concept of marketing and branding to the newspaper industry.

And above all, it changed the revenue model of the newspaper. In an era of tightly controlled circulations, it taught a hesitant industry to let go, pile up the readership numbers and make the advertiser pay up for the expanded reach. Whatever it did to journalism and content, it cannot be denied that more newspapers in India became profitable ventures because the Times of India showed them the way to the bank.

The bedrock of all the change was, of course, Samir Jain’s definition of news as the space between advertisements. That meant news took a severe beating. Style took precedence over substance and as the printed word competed for the attention of the 90’s MTV generation and today’s GenX, news became a collection of bits, bites and nuggets (the assumption being that nobody has time for more than 300 words). Between page 3, PR and pure advertising in the form of Medianet and Private Treaties, news was sent on a long holiday. 

That is why the Crest edition of the Times of India, launched three Saturdays ago, is such a surprise. It is a complete departure from everything that the Times of India has stood for in the last two decades.

Departure 1: News is NOT the space between advertisements. At least, not from the evidence of the first two editions of the Crest. Never before has Times of India given so much acreage for news. I missed the first edition but in the second, almost all ads were right hand full pages and text flowed on the left hand pages unhindered.

Departure 2: All readers are not consumers of knick-knacks. There is such a person as the consumer of long form journalism: The cover story on China spanned three pages and the spotlight story (Up Close) on Naxalism spread over two full pages. Up until now, if you wrote any more than 500 words in the Times of India you went home and emptied the sleeping pills bottle because the Jains would shoot you down the next morning anyway.

Departure 3: There is such a person as the consumer of journalism, full stop. Short or long, didn’t matter. All these years, the Times of India’s mantra was nobody cared for journalism except the journalist.

Departure 4: There is such a person as the consumer willing to pay top dollar for good content. It was the Times of India that increased page-count and decreased cover price so much that the readers could make more money by selling the paper in waste than get value by reading it. At Rs 6 for about 40 pages, Crest can proudly claim to the paper that is worth more than its weight in waste.

 The sum and total of these deviations or the breaking news of the month then is this: the Times of India is once again seeing merit in the power of content, even if only once a week. For a paper that led the revolution in trivialising news and dumbing down the newspaper, that’s no mean reversal, it is almost like reversing time itself or like the Times of India doing to journalism what the US is doing to Iraq: rebuilding the country after bombing it out of shape (and making money either way).

Twenty-two years ago, it was the Times of India that sniffed the restlessness of the upwardly mobile Indian and his exasperation with the politics-obsessed news business and gave the industry two decades of stunning growth. Twenty-two years later, it is again sensing an opportunity. Crest suggests a clear shift in the philosophy of the Times of India. That it is sniffing the future again.

It is too early to talk about the quality of the content of Crest. I definitely did not see sterling writing but quite liked the elegant, under-designed look of the paper and just loved the green of the masthead. Again, it highlights the shift in philosophy: substance over style. To me that is even more stunning because the Crest did not fall into the design dungeon like the Hindustan Times did a few months ago.

The HT decided to redesign an already well-designed paper without any great content upgrade. It’s been dressed up like a Christmas tree and the cherry-picking in the headlines (one or two words in red) is a meaningless exercise in trying to lend gravitas where none exists.

The industry will, of course, watch the progress of Crest with interest. I think we need stylishly delivered substance, long form journalism and brilliant writing more often than once a week, more like every day of the week. That is what will keep the inveterate lover of the printed word wedded to it. That is what will keep newspapers in business in an increasingly wired world.

So, I think: For more papers to believe in the power of content, it is time.