Try merging the mission and the product
Try merging the mission and the product
By a correspondent
WITH THE exception of the Indian government’s despicable witch-hunt against tehelka.com, press freedom in
The threat to press freedom today is not so much from the political establishment (with, it needs to be repeated, the notable exception of tehelka.com) as from the management of the newspaper. Although editors continue to have bloated egos — that understandable self-gratification of sitting in the "Editor’s chair" — they have in fact become pawns in the hands of the management. You are just another employee who can be sacked the moment your boss feels you are not helping him increase his profit.
It would be dishonest to continue talking about the pressure journalists face from the management without mentioning The Times of India’s role. Bennett Coleman & Co., Ltd has changed the definition of newspaper from ‘a mission’ to ‘a product’. Calling a newspaper a mission sounds as old as the Indian freedom struggle. For a detailed history of how the TOI has destroyed good journalism, see "What happened at the copydesk?" by Rahul Goswami on this website.
But if the Times of India is not an example of good journalism, why do people read it? How has TOI managed to become the world’s largest selling English broadsheet daily? Try writing in a harsh critique of their
And most probably the reply will say something like this: The fact that you read us despite disliking us proves what we have always believed—love Delhi Times or hate us, you can’t ignore us.
And he won’t be wrong. Notice that he does not make an effort to defend the paper’s faults pointed out by you. He is too smart to get into an argument. The most that you will be able to get out of Editor saab in defence of the paper is: ‘How does it matter anyway?’ Try pointing out the dumbing down, the lack of quality writing, the selling of the supplement not because of "sexy stories" but sexy models — try doing all these things and all that Editor saab will say is: ‘Well, we are still the market leader.’ It almost sounds cunning, but is it factually incorrect?
What is worrying is that the Times of India’s success has DIVided newspapers into two: the minority (led by The Hindu and to an extent The Indian Express) which stands by journalistic values; and the majority which had to be heavily market-savvy to remain in business. The TOI’s example has been replicated all over the country, even in the language press.
And it’s not just about dumbing down. Coming back to how press freedom is restricted by the management, here is an example. The editor of an education supplement of a national daily had to eulogise a certain college in print because the college was a valuable advertiser. The editor protested that the college had recently been de-recognised by the UGC (University Grants Commission)! Shut up, said the advertising boss. The editor had to choose between his job and ethics. No prizes for guessing which one he compromised.
When press freedom is trampled upon by a repressive government, it is usually censorship: you cannot publish what the rulers don’t want people to know. The newspaper management, together with the advertising and marketing departments, have gone a step further: they decide not just what you CANNOT publish but also what you HAVE TO publish. The management couldn’t care less whether a student takes the story on the de-recognised college seriously, and destroys his career by taking admission there.
The Times of India is often contrasted with The Hindu. The Page Three-ism of papers like HT and TOI is contrasted with the brilliant The Hindu Sunday Magazine. (See "Speak for yourself" by Namitha Dipak.) But has anyone wondered why The Hindu Sunday Magazine continues to become thinner and thinner? Its Literary Review has come down to once a month from being a fortnightly feature. Obviously, they’re finding it difficult to sustain it.
And if The Hindu is such a great paper, why does it sell far less than The Times of
Contrast this with the US or UK where papers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Observer and The Financial Times, provide better content than any Indian publication. Go to the websites of these papers and search for stories on the Indian subcontinent and you will find that they’re much better than what you get in Indian papers. Some of these beautifully written stories in the foreign press are from Delhi-based Indian journalists. These countries do have tabloids thriving on sensationalism, but few take these tabloids more seriously than the mainstream press.
So why is it that quality journalism sells abroad but not in
We must ponder over this question even at the risk of angering nationalists. It could well be possible that the average Indian reading in English does not have a reading taste as high as British or American readers. We are, to borrow from VS Naipaul, a "half-made" society. Most journalists, when they start out in the profession, face noisy relatives wanting them to pursue engineering, medicine, management or law. The man on the street does not have a high regard for creatively inclined people: artists, musicians, writers. Our ‘best-selling’ authors cannot make a fortune out of their writing unless they publish abroad. So is it any wonder that the average Indian reader is happy reading crass journalism? Now we
know what The Times of India means by giving readers what they want.
But come to think of it: if Indian English readers are dumbos and morons, why is India Today, and not, say, Society, the largest-selling English magazine, followed closely by Reader’s Digest? Why is Outlook, which is far more readable than the Times of India, such a phenomenal success? Why does quality become profit making in magazines but not in newspapers? What accounts for this dichotomy between newspapers and magazines?
The answer, I think, lies in the faults with the ilk of The Hindu. Keep the Sunday Magazine apart and look at the main paper. Look at its page making, its newsprint, its queer smell — it gives you an old-world feel, refusing to change with the times. Until a couple of years ago, The Hindu used to print its Page One pictures in black-and-white!
There is another very "intellectual" publication whose editor told me that he is not interested in printing coloured pages, and that he is not looking for a mass readership! In this age of live reporting and the glitz and glamour of news on the small screen, it should be considered outright stupid for a publication not to want coloured pages! One could say that looking for a mass readership renders it inevitable to make compromises. Perhaps. But to declare ‘I don’t want a mass readership’ also reeks of intellectual arrogance. With an editor who thinks this way, the publication can never hope to come out of the trap of being a ‘struggling magazine’.
And this I believe is the problem. Newspapers like The Hindu just don’t want to face the reality that we live in a market economy where marketing is not a sin. This should not be surprising because even editorially, The Hindu is considered very Leftist, some say it’s a Communist sympathiser. I know a senior correspondent of The Hindu who does not feel the need to attend the Chief Minister’s press conferences. He just puts on the television, reads the evening papers and files a two-paragraph report to which the editors add another para and publish it — his byline intact. The complacent correspondent knows he is not going to be sacked — Communists hire but not fire.
Look at the
Why can’t we have something like this in
To a limited extent, The Asian Age tries to follow this. They can be credited with attempting to be a truly complete daily. But you tend to get weary of it after some time when you find that they consider it necessary to print one scantily-clad woman on every colour page they get, or when an advertisement for a travel agency is turned into a weekly column (‘By Our Correspondent’) on page three of The Age on Sunday. (What also becomes disappointing is that half their readable content is from the foreign press — resulting in very few op-ed articles by Indian columnists. The literary supplement has each and every review from foreign newspapers, as if Indian writers can’t write book reviews.)
In the fifth anniversary issue of Outlook (
This gives readers a choice, but The Hindu and The Times of India do not — the former is too serious and the latter is a chronicle of frivolousness.
Conclusion: Quality can be marketed, provided you shed your intellectual arrogance and recognise the importance of the market; you realise that you have to cater to all types of readers.
I may be wrong but the purpose of this article is to encourage a debate: does the fault lie only with the ilk of TOI or are the likes of The Hindu also to be blamed?
References:
"First person reporting on rape: What happened at the copydesk" by Rahul Goswami in The Hoot.
http://thehoot.org/story.asp?storyid=webhoothootL1K0930024&pn=1§ion=s6
"Speak for yourself: A response to Outlook`s cover story on dumbing down" by Namitha Dipak in The Hoot.