Media Matters

Five reasons why Manoj Patil became SK Editor

2007-04-07T22:58:00.000-07:00

1. Manoj is on the verge of retirement. Next year he will pack up.

2. He is very close to one of the trustees, G.M.Patil who was hell bent to put his own man on the gaddi.

3. If allowed, Harnahally Ramaswamy would have brought in Brahmin as the editor. So G.M.Patil insisted for Manoj.

4. Manoj is from Hubli. In Hubli SK, the staff is fed up of Bangalorean or Bangalore based journo becoming the editor.

5. Manoj is a weak and doesn't carry any ideology. It becomes very easy to tame him. Moreover he is a 'Yes' man.

Manoj Patil is SK New Editor

2007-03-31T09:25:00.000-07:00

At last it happened in Samyukta Karnataka.

Manoj Kumar Patil has been appointed as the Chief Editor. Ishwar Daitota, who has been the Editor for the last two years is the new Editorial Advisor. It is just a namesake post to ease Daitota's way out smooth.

Krishnamurthy Hegde who was the strong contender for the Editor's post, has been appointed as the Executive Editor in charge of Bangalore, Mangalore and Davanagere editions.

Gururaj Joshi who is working in SK Hubli office has also been promoted as an Executive Editor in charge of Hubli and Gulburga editions.

However Manoj Kumar Patil will function from Hubli though he is the Chief Editor of the paper. April 1 imprint will bear the new names.

The management was very keen to appoint CEO above the Chief Editor. But it defered the decision because it didn't find a right candidate for the post. A few names have been discussed in the trustees meeting held on 17 March but it could not arrive at a consensus.

Sachchidananda Hegde, Editor of Dheyanishtha Patrakarta from Sirsi in Uttara Kannada district, was one of the probables but trustees belonging to Congress affiliations opposed his candidature as he (Hegde) is an active member of Sangha Parivar.

Will the change of gaurd help SK to regain its position? Thats the moot point.

UK’s Daily Mail to publish English-language papers in India

2007-03-30T21:39:00.000-07:00

British media group Daily Mail & General Trust has entered into a partnership with the India Today Group to publish English-language newspapers in India.

"It's a growing part of the world and newspapers are struggling in certain parts of the world and in India they are growing,” said Peter Williams, chief financial officer of Daily Mail & General Trust.

India Today is looking to utilize Daily Mail’s knowledge to publish mainline newspapers. The partnership echoes that of the Wall Street Journal and HT Media Ltd. of India in publishing Mint magazine.

Source: Media Guardian and Reuters

Yes, it's Udayavani !

2007-03-30T10:29:00.000-07:00

In his column "Noorentumaatu" in Vijay Karnataka on 29 March, Vishweshwar Bhat, editor of the newspaper has written about UG Krishnamurthy, a great thinker and philosopher, who is well known as UG world over.

Bhat has mentioned that a leading Kannada daily, in a glaring fax paus, has published the picture of Jiddu Krishnamurthy instead of UG Krishnamurthy in an obit.

Chitragupta was curious to find out that leading Kannada daily which ignorantly published Jiddu's picture. He made a quick survey of all the Kannada dailies and found out that it was none other than Udayavani which carried Jiddu's picture instead of UG.

Perhaps the sub editor who made the page must have thought that both are the same.

Less is more, KP shows the way

2007-03-25T08:20:00.000-07:00

Kannada Prabha is the only Kannada newspaper giving latest news on World Cup cricket.

On the day India lost the match to Sri Lanka, KP’s cover page was excellent. It devoted top half page for this news item.

By the time the match was ended it was close to 3 am. When most of the papers were in the midway of printing, KP packaging all the details of the match in the front page beautifully.

KP would have even covered the results had the match got over at 4 am.

Sometimes it is an advantageous to have miniscule circulation. It can take less than an hour to print a few thousand copies! KP showed the way how to achieve it.

Belagere blogs everyday

2007-03-19T19:36:00.000-07:00

Ravi Belagere is one journo who keeps pace with the time and technology. When he went to Kargil and Afghanistan, he devoutely carried his latest laptop.

He always toys with a latest gadgets whether it may be mobile, computer, camera or for that matter pen. Every day he visits dozens of websites and blogs. He constantly updates his upper chamber unlike many other Kannada journos.

Notable exceptions are S.K.Shamasundar, Prasad Naik,Vishweshwar Bhat, Ravi Hegde, Pratap Simha, Jogi, K.S.Jagannath, Raghunath Cha.Ha., Vishakha etc.

Do you know Belagere reads this blog regularly? Yes he does.

Recently he reacted to - Guess Who? - on the ongoing developments in Samyukta Karnataka. Ravi Belagere asks - Where is Munjane Sathya these days?

Any answer?

Tilak Kumar in control

2007-03-19T08:58:00.000-07:00

K.N.Tilak Kumar, new Editor-in-Chief, Prajavani is in full control of men and matters in the newspaper. He has already opened up his mind to his editorial collegues and set the priorities. It is clearly evident from the content of Prajavani, if you closely watch and read it.

Prajavani has never been critical about this government. Especially it was soft peddling about B.S.Yediyurappa, Deputy Chief Minister.

It is because R.P.Jagadeesh, Associate Editor was very close to Yediyurappa. Deputy CM considers him as a trusted confident.Even in the media circle, Jagadeesh is known as a Yediyurappa's political advisor.

All of a sudden the equation has changed. Prajavani was highly critical of State Budget 2007-08 presented by Yediyurappa. Jagadeesh wouldnot have written such a critical editorial on his own unless was asked to do so by Tilak Kumar.

It is beginning and one can see a lot more things to come up.

The Guardian becomes web-first

2007-03-18T10:44:00.000-07:00

The latest memo by The Guardian editor’s Alan Rusbridger says one basic thing: The Guardian is now a web-first publication. Not only is digital important, “all journalists work for the digital platform,” says Rusbridger, according to Jeff Jarvis.

Executives of the Guardian had recently announced that the paper would focus more on digital and carry out a massive investment plan to do so. This memo is the next step, from print-online equity to web-first policy.

“If we don’t update our site continuously readers will go elsewhere.”

Rusbridger make it clear though that speed of news delivery, while increasingly important, has not trumped the importance of trustworthiness. “In any circumstances where speed might compromise trust we should place a greater emphasis on trust.”

Web-first “means publishing more of our news according to the demands of the web rather than the rhythms and expectations of a newspaper.”

It should be interesting to follow up on the newsroom management and changes at the Guardian in the months to come, as “production processes must reflect the needs of the web (e.g. the use of web-friendly headlines as well as newspaper headlines, links, tagging, key wording and so on)” wrote Rusbridger.

The Guardian joins the ranks of major newspapers (Los Angeles Times recently) with web-first policy, publishing content 24/7.

When KP goes in Mandira Bedi way

2007-03-18T01:54:00.000-07:00

Kannada Prabha acted as Herschelle Gibbs. Even he is shy of before it. KP has come up with a "brilliant idea" while presenting the State budget 2007-08.

Cashing in on the world cup cricket fever, the venerated newspaper followed the cricket language in headline and entire lead story. The paper thought it is a unique way of telling story in this style.

However, one cannot brush the opinion aside that how is it fair to resorting to this cheap way of presenting a rather serious matter like State Budget in crickety style. It can be acceptable as an experiment.

But the question - Is budget coverage such a cheap passe to be experimented with. That too in Mandira Bedi style cricket funda!

Prajavani says goodbye to Jayant Kaikini

2007-03-18T00:58:00.000-07:00

It was expected but none was sure that it will happen so soon.

Jayant Kaikini, a well known short story writer in Kannada, was asked to stop his column in Prajavani Saptahika Puravani. With the result, his column is not appearing for the last two weeks. It is very unusual in a paper like Prajavani, where column will not stop abruptly. The paper has not cited any reason for this sudden decision.

Jayant has been writing a column for the last ten weeks in Prajavani. It was quite popular in his fans circles. Though the general readers find it very boring but those who like write up with literary connotations used to admire his columns.

According to inside sources in the Prajavani Saptahika Puravani, Jayant demanded hefty remunerations for his column amounting to Rs.2000 per piece. Kannada newspapers generally give Rs.750 - Rs.1000. The Prajavani management agreed to give him Rs.1500. But Jayant's thirst for more money didn't stop. He started demanding for more.

Meanwhile his column didn't receive very well by its readers as expected. The management, with the feedback from the Saptahika section, decided to show his column the exit.

Anyway Kannadigas lost a good column and a columnist.

Neither do they preach nor practice

2007-03-03T09:57:00.000-08:00

Have you seen any journalism faculty writing for the newspapers in Karnataka these days? The answer is stern -No.

None of them are writing at all, leave alone writing for the newspapers. Niranjan Vanalli, Head, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication in Mysore University was an exception. But when he took over this post last year, surprisingly, he also stopped writing for mainstream newspapers.

Most of the universities in the State have Journalism and Mass Communication Departments. Mysore University's Journalism Dept is the oldest one. It was started by none other than Nadig Krishnamurthy who was the author of much acclaimed book - Indian Journalism.

Karnataka, Mangalore, Bangalore and Kuvempu Universities have journalism departments. These depts have been bestowed with good faculty like K.V.Nagaraj, A.S.Balasubramanya, Shreedhara, Ashok Kumar etc.

Unfortunately none of them are writing for the newspapers. These preachers of Journalism are not practising it. In fact most of them have lost contacts with the newspapers. They write to editors once in a year requesting to accommodate their students for internship. Otherwise they never interact with the newspapers. It is really a sad state of Journalism depts and faculty in Karnataka. How can they teach and insist their students on how to write and send articles to newspapers when they are not writing?

Otherwise they are very busy indulging in petty politics. It is the only activity which keeps them active. Caste politics is rampant. There is no professional or academic atmosphere in any one of the University. Unworthies, unprofessionals and even goondas have entered into classrooms who shape the newsrooms.

Maheshchandra Guru reprents all the rots plaguing the dept. Now under suspension, he threatened his own students with dire consequences. He can go to any extent to take revange against those who question his authority.

What can you expect from these people? How can you expect a good crop of journos coming out from these depts? It is a high time newspapers focussed on the sorry and morbid state of affairs in the Journalism dept. where future journos are made.

Guess Who?

2007-02-28T20:31:00.000-08:00

It is now decided to appoint CEO for Samyukta Karnataka. The Board of Trustees (BoT) is of the opinion that such a post is necessary to face the fierce competition.

The editor is always pre-occupied with the content. The administration and new projects are the added areas for the editor who cannot handle them simultaneously. This argument brought the BoT to a logical end to appoint the CEO.

CEO will be above the editor, in the editorial hierarchy

A few names have been in the list. And finally one name will be okayed.

Can you guess, who will be the new CEO of Samyukta Karnataka?

Thumb rule : Rumours rule

2007-02-27T11:34:00.000-08:00

Top ten rumours in Kannada media today has generated a lot of interest among bloggers. In 24 hours, Chitragupta received about 198 comments and finally selected or filtered 74 comments only.

Some of the comments were highly vituperative, caustic, personal and mud-slinging in nature and Chitragupta had his gruesome hours to reject them with no options.

It is unbelivable in the blog world that one post had evoked so much interest and provoked journos to indulging in a heated debate.

Most of the participants are from the Kannada newspapers who are reluctant to reveal their identity for the reasons best known to them.

It is gratifying that Kannada journos have come up for blogging these days enthusiastically.

Rai doesn't don Garva

2007-02-27T10:53:00.000-08:00

Muthappa Rai said enough is enough. He told the editor of Garva to remove his name from the imprint. So in the next issue, his name "Gaurava Sampadaka" will not be there.

However he will write his life story under the name Muthappa 'Rai'tes (Writes) every week.

Rai was very much annoyed by a story pertaining to one Padma Bhat. She approached Rai and expressed her sorrow and anguish. She strongly protested the way in which the entire article has been fabricated to malign her. Rai was also upset about the story.

This prompted him to withdraw from his latest avatar. Yet he will continue to support the paper.

Top ten rumours in Kannada media today

2007-02-26T10:24:00.000-08:00

1. Ashok Kheny, MD, Nandi Corridor is buying Indrajit Lankesh's "Lankesh Patrike" shortly.

2. Rajiv Chandrashekhar, Rajya Sabha member, is relaunching defunct "Suryodaya" shortly.

3. Vishweshwar Bhat, editor, Vijay Karnataka is becoming the editor of Prajavani. He had an interaction with K.N.Tilak Kumar, the new editor-in-chief, on 23 February at PV,DH office.

4. Vishweshwar Bhat is joining Kumaraswamy's "Kannada Kasturi" TV Channel as CEO.

5. Vijay Sankeshwar, former publisher of Vijay Karnataka, is starting a newspaper yet again shortly.

6. CEO will be appointed for Samyukta Karnataka above the editor.

7. If Vishweshwar Bhat declines to join Kumaraswamy's TV channel,Ranganath, editor, Kannada Prabha will opt for it. It is said that Bhat is buying some more time.

8. Ravi Belagere,editor, Hai Bangalore, is trying to buy FM Radio station.

9. Anand Sankeshwar is starting his TV chennel.

10. Sun TV will launch a Kannada daily shortly.

Ten reasons why Krishna Prasad left Vijay Times

2007-02-25T00:28:00.000-08:00

Why Krishna Prasad left Vijay Times as its editor?

There are 10 reasons which are being discussed.

1. He was not into daily journalism and basically he worked for many years in weekly. He lost touch with the daily news gathering and he felt totally fish out of water.

2. He tried to do his best in VT. But with the kind of staff, he was convinced, that he cannot sail through. He said good bye.

3. He didnot like the kind of journalism being practiced by The Times Group.

4. He hated to be called the editor of tabloid, Bangalore Mirror, would be avatar of Vijay Times.

5. He felt he cannot do much and convinced that his steam has already started leaking.

6. He anticipated the fate of Bangalore Mirror and didnot want to take the blame.

7. He didnot want to repeat the Mumbai Mirror experiment as he hardly gets to do something different from it as The Times Group believes in branding and expects him to just copy Mumbai Mirror which he didnot like.

8. Despite the price slash, VT could not gain much circulation. He thought he may not fit into this kind of journalism.

9. He is not a fighter. He is a cool guy and a piggy rider.

10. He is basically a blogger and he enjoyed the blogging. He feels every journo must have his blog. He thought his freedom of blogging may be curtailed if he takes up a new challenge.

Suddigara in Kannada Prabha

2007-02-24T19:24:00.000-08:00

Suddigara is in news!

Kannada Prabha has devoted more than half a page for this blog. In its Sunday supplement - Saptahika Prabha - dated 25 February 2007, Jogi has written a cover page story - Blog KannaDigara Cauvery KaLakaLi.

He begins the story with the discussions which has been generating in this blog. Also he questions the debate which has been going on in for this post. The whole article is so directionless that it will end up in telling the readers that how to start your own blog, how to take action against bloggers etc. He also interviewed couple of people supporting his views. Jogi has given list of a few good blogs.

Chitragupta comments : Jogi, sensible writer, should understand blog is a wider cyber platform. Here every opinion is respected however critical it is. While appreciating the attempts by the Kannada Prabha to drive home the point in Cauvery dispute coverage, Suddigara said it was not necessary to scream from the roof top when nothing has been happening. That's all.

The article should have been on how to start your own blog instead of one published in KP.

Anyway, I must thank Kannada Prabha for taking this blog very seriously.

Cake Walk in Vijay Times!

2007-02-24T10:20:00.000-08:00

It has written on the wall, Vijay Times will be closed shortly. The Times management waiting for the next bride to be readied.In all probability, the new avatar of VT - Bangalore Mirror - will be launched by the first week of April.

Meanwhile, many journalists are deserting VT in seacrh of better work environs. The job uncertainity is lingering in the minds of VTians. Everyday cake is being cut to send him/her off. It is a sweet gesture on the part of collegues but it has become the order of the day.

It is a sweet time for the management to send those who are unlikely to be retained in the new set up, without resorting to any measures.

Mai Don Nahin, Editor Hoon Editor !!

2007-02-24T09:54:00.000-08:00

Yes, one time underworld don or a reformed underworld kingpin Mutthappa Rai is in a new garb. He is the Honorary Editor of Garva, a weekly tabloid. The latest and relaunched edition is in the market with Rai at the helm. He is assisted by bomb or bombed cop Girish Mattennavar.

In fact the Garva was started by a team of young journalists like Sudheendra Kanchitota, Chakravarthy Soolibele, Sudheendra Kumar and others. But it didnot survive the fierce competition despite the good content.

Later the team sold the masthead to Mutthappa Rai who was looking for some umbrella to hide from the police. Garva has come in handy. He purchased the paper after clearing small dues.

In an interesting development, another reformed don Agni Shreedhar who relinquished the editorship of Agni, a weekly tabloid started by him nine years ago. But the paper will continue under the leadership of one Basavaraj.

Too much court cases which expose him to outer world, must have prompted Shreedhar to take this step, it is believed.

New editor for Vikrama

2007-02-18T09:00:00.000-08:00

Sudheendra Kanchitota has been appointed as the new editor for Vikrama, a weekly tabloid known as the RSS mouthpiece. Before assuming this responsibility he was working as the editor, Garva, a weekly.

Kanchitota has made some bold moves when he was in Garva. It survived for little over six months and later it failed miserably. He didnot get requisite support from his team. Otherwise paper was highly readable.

Brief stint at Garva must have prompted the RSS top brass to consider Kanchitota for this post. Garva had carried many pro-Hindutva stories close to the hearts of RSS leadership.

Whether Kanchitota would give a new direction to ailing weekly which was vibrant once when B.S.N.Mallya was its editor is to be watched.

Kanchitota began his journalistic venture in Vijay Karnataka as the trainee sub editor and later promoted as the Chief Sub Editor beforing launching his tabloid Garva.

Joke Falls Flat with Readers

2007-02-18T08:32:00.000-08:00

To comment briefly on editorials, call 215-854-5060.
The Editorial Board members will roll their eyes and chuckle at your remarks.

(a parody of the real line accidentally published in the Philadelphia Inquirer)

An Oxymoron?
Bombing ceremony peaceful

(over a story in Bowling Green, Kentucky's Daily News on a ceremony remembering victims of the Oklahoma City bombing)

Cliché Challenged
Two Candidates Throw Hat in Ring, Endorse Dole

(over a Louisiana State University Daily Reveille story about Lamar Alexander and Steve Forbes throwing in their respective towels)

Challenging Times

2007-02-18T08:25:00.000-08:00

Protected by family ownership, the New York Times Co. plots its future without retreating from ambitious journalism at its flagship paper, despite the wailing on Wall Street about the company’s sluggish financial performance. It’s bolstering its digital presence and unleashing its futurist-in-residence in a time of wrenching transformation in the industry writes Rachel Smolkin.

For full article :http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4262

A few changes are imminent in PV, DH

2007-02-18T07:26:00.000-08:00

K.N.Tilak Kumar is a many to be watched at the backdrop of the speed with which he is going in the last five days is any indication.

Soon after taking over as the Editor-in-Chief of Prajavani and Deccan Herald, he has decided to make many changes particularly in the editorial department. He has been handling Circulation and Marketing for many years and he has a total control over the men and matters in these departments. But he is yet to get into the editorial.

Tilak Kumar has already given enough indications in this regard and openly expressed before his close associates in the organisation to bring in some changes in the editorial section.

After Tilak Kumar took over the Circulation and Marketing a few years ago, the results were quite encouraging. But the same has not been replicated in the editorial dept for which he was not responsible.

This is one of the reasons, it is believed, for the sudden change at the helm of PV and DH.

The speculations have already been doing rounds in M.G.Road where the newspapers have been situated, that the top brass will be spruced up to take on the fierce competition.

Only the time will unfold many things in the days to come.

Tilak is the man in need

2007-02-15T19:22:00.000-08:00

G.N.Mohan was in Prajavani before joining his current assignment in ETV. He pens down his association with K.N.Tilak Kumar, the new Editor-in-Chief, Prajavani amd Deccan Herald who replaced his younger brother K.N.Shanta Kumar on 15 February.

I have worked closely with K N Tilak Kumar for almost three years when I was preparing ground for Gulbarga edition of Prajavani and Deccan Herald.

Among Kumar trio many dont know much about Tilak. He is down to earth, has clear knowledge about market games, straight and outspoken.

I have seen him going to knock and corner of Karnataka meeting the paper agents, getting feed back from readers. He is strict desciplinarian and uncompromising.

I feel the change may bring a new direction to the Herald group. Atleast Tilak will not make his paper to sit beside Chief Minister to “mudde OOta’

Tilak whether he wins the race or not he will not surrender his paper to anybody’s “charana’s.

Shanta Kumar, We miss you!

2007-02-14T19:50:00.000-08:00

K.N.Shanta Kumar's sudden exit from the editorship of Prajavani and Deccan Herald has generated intense discussion and speculation in the Bangalore media circle.

Shanta Kumar was known for his soft, humble and rather friendly behaviour. These qualities enabled him to take his staffers into confidence, though he was novice to the written world. He was a good Photo Journalist, who covered national and international sports events including Olympics.

Shanta Kumar was never a journalist. But he is a good human being. He won his staffers and section of readers with this quality.

The management all these years maintained a steady distance from the staffers. But Shanta Kumar bridged the gap between the management and staff.

Shanta Kumar became the darling of his staffers soon after he took over as the editor.

He indeed succeeded in sprucing up the otherwise conservative newspapers hesitatingly. But he has failed to provide leadership in the editorial front. With his all out efforts, he could not take on formidable Vijay Karnataka.

After VK was aquired by the Times Group, the management of PV and DH was scared of fierce competition.

Perhaps this must have led to this development.

Tilak Kumar for Prajavani, Deccan Herald

2007-02-14T10:52:00.000-08:00

K.N.Tilak Kumar will succeed K.N.Shanta Kumar as the Editor-in-Chief, Prajavani and Deccan Herald from 15 February.

In a swift move, the management of Mysore Printers Limited which owns these two dailies, has decided to install Tilak Kumar as the new editor.

Known for his dynamism, Tilak Kumar was hitherto handling the Circulation of both the newspapers. He was responsible for the growth of Prajavani in some rural pockets. But he couldnot make a substantial inroads into the much vibrant Vijay Karnataka, the No.1 Kannada daily.

For the last three and half years, Shanta Kumar had made significant changes in both the newspapers with regard to content and design. But he could not pose any serious challenge to the competitors.

The sudden change of gaurd at the helm of PV and DH has raised many eyebrows in the industry including in the Times Group.

When Kannada Prabha goes hysterical

2007-02-12T21:01:00.000-08:00

Are you reading Kannada Prabha for the last one week, especially after the Cauvery Water Tribul gave the final verdict? It is really shocking to see its coverage.

Kannada Prabha is coming up with lead story everyday with exaggerated and make belief moods of the Kannadigas. What is the necessity to play up the story when the people of the State maintaining absolute peace. Kannada Prabha has been provoking the readers with headlines - Kudiyuttide, Sididedda Kannadigaru.

Eventually the newspaper became the laughing stock before its own readers. On the next day of the verdict (6 February 2007), the newspaper's half page was covered with screaming headline _ Anyaaya.

It was a general feeling that it was not necessary to go in such a big way about it. Why KP is going hysterical about Cauvery? Does it give the same coverage for Krishna, Tungabhadra, Karanja or Malaprabha?

Other newspapers have been surprisingly maintaining the steady balance in its reportage on Cauvery.

Interestingly the venerable Prajavani is in its deep somber!

Lost Innocence

2007-02-12T09:35:00.000-08:00

The media have a right and a duty to investigate into and comment on the integrity and efficiency of police investigation of crime. They have no right to usurp the functions of the court and pronounce on the suspect's guilt. That is contempt of court and a violation of his right to a free trial; a competing, but overriding, right and public interest says A.G.Noorani.

For full article read :http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1729104,00120001.htm

English Journos, Please Listen

2007-02-12T09:34:00.000-08:00

Martin Cutts, Research Director of the UK's Plain Language Commission,is of the view that Indian journalists have a key role in improving the use of English in the country "because newspaper and broadcast English sets the standard for most of the population.

"In his foreword to Jyoti Sanyal's latest book - Indlish, Cutts gives piece of his mind to Indian English journalists.

He insists that our journalists should do four things: One, dump the Victorian verbosity.

Two, "Regularly write about the incoherent language of the law, government officials and companies, and show how it damages the interests of consumers and businesses." How will that help? "Public derision is a powerful weapon," Cutts reminds the doubters.

Three, "Spend at least an hour a week reading quality dailies of the UK, imbibing their often fresh phrasing and clarity of expression." This must be easy, more frequently than Cutts suggests, with the help of the Net.

Lastly, abandon your love of cliché and "tap into those sources of vivid, precise description that exist in the creative writing of India's regional languages."

Why We Still Need Serious Journalism

2007-02-11T23:15:00.000-08:00

Phillip Knightley

I tried for years to get on to Fleet Street and nearly gave up. Then, with one of those strokes of luck which all journalists need, in 1965 I wiggled my way on to the Sunday Times. I'd done one story for it as a freelance and had been given a spare desk and a telephone.

The next week I went in and sat at the vacant desk. After a day or two, someone noticed me and gave me another story to do. One week led to another and bang, there I was, a reporter on one of the world's great newspapers as it entered its finest years. The Sunday Times had 350 editorial staff to produce a 48- or 64-page two-section quality broadsheet every week. It was so overstaffed that some journalists went weeks without getting anything published in the paper.

In fact, some of them were not even SEEN for weeks. It spent money like water on investigative journalism - two million pounds on legal costs alone fighting for its right to publish the story about the thalidomide scandal. It was scared of no one. It averaged a libel writ a week.

The editor, Harold Evans, was unhappy if a libel writ had not arrived by Tuesday, because he felt that the paper had not been doing its job - defending people without power from those who wielded it unfairly, exposing corruption, making a difference to the lives of ordinary citizens. Here was a paper that believed in something, which took enormous pains to get things right, and which fought for its editorial integrity.

One day, the owner of the paper, a Canadian called Lord Thomson, knocked on the editor's door while the morning news conference was in progress, said "hello", and then rather tentatively asked: "Say boys, would it be possible to squeeze in the Canadian ice hockey results each Sunday?" There was a moment of shocked silence. Then the deputy editor, Hugo Young, said, "Lord Thomson, this is an editorial news conference to which you've not been invited. If you'd like to put your suggestion in writing, I'm sure that the sports editor will be willing to consider it." And next morning there was a note to the editor from Lord Thomson apologising for attempting to influence the paper's editorial policy. So this is my benchmark. It's against this golden age that I plan to measure the performance of the media today, especially newspapers - because I know more about them - and especially in the field of investigative reporting. Now, everybody who has anything to do with newspapers - either as a producer or a consumer - has been aware for years now that something big has been going on in the industry, a sea change as deep and as radical as the arrival of the new technology in the 1980s. Newspaper circulations are declining all over the Western world. I emphasise "Western".

In India, for example, they are soaring. Again, in the West, viewing figures for news and current affairs are down. There is general public contempt for journalists. In the last five years half a million AB readers - educated top income group readers - have deserted the British quality press. OK, so they just changed papers, found the tabloids a quicker juicer read. I'm afraid not. They disappeared. It is an extraordinary fact that of the 11 million AB adults in Britain, the 11 million educated high-earners, about one-third do not read any daily newspaper whatsoever. All over the English-speaking world, many young people in all socio-economic classes have got out of the habit of reading newspapers. I

n any other industry, if customers were vanishing at this rate there would be panic. But in the media industry it is only recently that hard questions are at last being asked. Le Monde, announcing an English-language version of Le Monde Diplomatique, turned on its own. "We all know that the media can no longer be trusted, that their performance is incompetent ... that they broadcast blatant lies as if they were manifest truths." Is the media, particularly TV, in the business of "the mass production of ignorance"? Is it possible that the more TV news we watch, the less we know? There is a case to answer on both counts. If it is the media's job to interpret the world for us, why has the total output of factual programs on developing countries dropped by 50% in the past ten years - 50%!

Perhaps this has been due to the death of the old-fashioned foreign correspondent. You remember them, the expert in his or her area who had the language, knowledge and background not only to report on what was happening, but to explain why it was happening. Professor Virgil Hawkins of Osaka University suggests that technology has killed them off.

He says that the process goes like this: greater competition among media giants leads to budget cuts, so resources for newsgathering are diverted to buying and maintaining hi-tech equipment. This means foreign correspondents are expected to cover larger areas of the globe, and in the process lose their specialist expertise. "They race from one humanitarian disaster to another, with little time or background knowledge to grasp the issues behind the conflicts they cover". This tends to produce highly emotional firsthand accounts, described by Claudio Monteiro of Leicester University in her analysis of the Portuguese media coverage of East Timor, as "good cause journalism ... journalism of affection", with the journalist as the hero of his or her own story. Now, while all this has been happening, government interest in the media has intensified. It is as if governments realised, even before the TV and newspaper bosses, that the power, reach and influence of the modern media are enormous. The CNN News group is available to 800 million people across the globe, BBC World can be viewed in more than 167 million homes across 200 countries, al-Jazeera reaches at least 75 million viewers in the Muslim world alone. For any political party, the ability to 'handle the media' is these days seen as an essential element in gaining power and then, once in government, in maintaining it and carrying out policy.

The old-fashioned government 'press officer' has gone. Governments now have a 'director of communications and strategy', whose job it is to manage the media and manipulate public perception of government actions. The United States underpins its "hard" power - its awe-inspiring military capacity - with "soft" power - its ability to achieve its goals through the media; and its practitioners speak of a different world of journalism in which "global media strategy" and "international perception management" use journalists as pawns in the new "great game". In its updated foreign policy, Washington talks of "full-spectrum dominance": the US should aim to be top dog in all spheres - military, economic production, business, culture and, significantly, information. In an ideal world, a free press and a curious, sceptical army of campaigning journalists should keep democracies and their leaders in line, especially today.

And, almost as important, it should act as a check to the increasing power of corporations, especially international ones. So what's stopping these journalists? What's gone wrong? The list is lengthy. Government propaganda and pressure. Pressure from corporations, including those which own newspapers and television stations. (Why didn't we realise earlier that the corporate world, so often the target for journalists, would one day find ways of fighting back.) Legal pressure. Social pressure. And professional self-pressure, for journalists themselves are not entirely without blame for the state of the media today. Let's deal with these pressures one by one.

Those in power who think about these things, have always been puzzled by this question: "If we can so successfully manage the media in wartime, why can't we do the same in peacetime?" There is no trouble doing so in autocratic regimes. The media tells the public what the government wants it to know. End of story. Newspapers and broadcasting stations that do not toe the line lose their licences, or their editors go to jail, or - in some extreme cases - are shot. This does not happen in democratic countries, but there are nevertheless ways open to governments to exercise some control of the media.

The first and most often used is an appeal to 'the national interest'. In the United States, the events of September 11 have been used as an argument to deter journalists who dared to criticise or question their home country. When three times in July 2002 the New York Times printed excerpts of secret Pentagon plans to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration accused the newspaper of "reckless reporting", "putting American lives at risk" and even "treason".

But the distinguished journalist academic, our colleague Bill Kovach, says that it is precisely at times like these that journalists need to be even more diligent in the pursuit of truth: "A journalist is never more true to democracy, is never more engaged as a citizen, is never more patriotic than when aggressively doing the job of independently verifying the news of the day". At other times, the media has been willing to censor itself at the government's request. In 1986 the Washington Post editor, Benjamin C Bradlee, announced that in the first five months of that year the Post had, at the government's request, withheld information from stories a dozen times on the grounds of a risk to national security. There are other ways of managing the media without using the "risk to national security" approach.

The government of India adopts a carrot and stick tactic. The carrot can include subsidised housing in so-called "journalists' colonies", a government-paid trip abroad, a seat on an important government or semi-government committee, and even a posting as an ambassador. As the Pioneer newspaper of New Delhi says, "With rewards like these, who would want to needlessly antagonise the government?" Those who do find that the income tax inspector is suddenly paying close attention to the journalist's tax returns and taxation officers may even raid their homes and offices. All this is calculated to intimidate them.

Now the battle between government and the media is not new - it has gone on since the late 19th century when a rise in literacy created millions of new readers for newspapers and magazines, and made those in power worry whether this could cost them control of the electorate. What is new and worrying is the rise of legal pressure on the media to desist from subjecting both governments and corporations to investigation and public scrutiny.

High defamation damages have a knock-on effect in the way they inhibit investigative reporting. Chuck Lewis has told us the battle that the Center for Public Integrity and the ICIJ has to obtain libel insurance and fight off threat of what could be crippling libel actions. Just to remind you, many American insurance companies have a rule that if the insured media organisation has three libel actions pending against it - irrespective of the merit of those actions - its insurance policy becomes void. Without defamation insurance, the Center could not risk continuing its function - its insurance company has already paid out over US$1m in legal fees defending one case, which its lawyers say will eventually be thrown out of court. Lawyers, of course, know the 'three libel writs and you're out' rule. If they want to stop a story, one of the first things they do is to see how many writs a media organisation has outstanding, and if it is two, then they launch another one themselves knowing that, frivolous or not, this will effectively shut down the story.

American law firms, always keen to push the law to the limits to deter investigative journalists, have come up with new ploys that many consider even more effective than an action for defamation. They offer corporations and individuals 'pre-emptive strikes' against troublesome media. Their advice is along these lines: "when you learn that journalists are making enquiries about you, or when journalists approach you, do not wait until the news item is published or broadcast and then sue for defamation. The damage is already done. Hit back immediately and stop the item before it is published. We know ways of doing this." The "ways" include examining the financial structure of the media organisation to see if pressure can be applied through a parent or associated company, analysing the advertising revenue of the company to see if a major advertiser can be persuaded to apply pressure, and compiling a dossier on the personal background of the investigating reporter to see if he or she can be intimidated into dropping the story.

Let's move on to professional self-pressure. The new technology drew attention to the cost of gathering news - as distinct from the cost of producing a newspaper or running a TV programme. The accountants - the people who now really run the media industry - moved to slash news-gathering budgets. All over the world, overseas news bureaux were closed, foreign correspondents called home.

All over the Western world, journalists, who should have been up in arms about the downgrading of foreign news, were seduced. Some became highly-paid columnists, celebrities in their own right, pushing their opinions rather than gathering facts. Or writers about lifestyle, relationships, gossip, travel, beauty, fashion, gardening and do-it-yourself which, although sometimes interesting in themselves, can hardly compare in importance with examining the human condition at the beginning of the 21st century, which is what serious journalists try to do. One British proprietor has gone so far as to say he doesn't really need journalists on his newspapers. OK he admitted he needed a few to shovel the news into his papers and a celebrity writer or two.

But the news itself he would 'buy in' from outside sources. Money spent on journalism, he said, was wasted. There was no way of measuring what difference extra editorial expenditure had on circulation. On the other hand, he boasted, you could measure exactly the difference made by spending more money on promotion. Spend half a million dollars on marketing and give away a free movie DVD with every copy of the paper and you could see how many extra copies you sold. It seems to be working because his last balance sheet revealed he was paying himself nearly $2m a week. We are not complacent. We are prepared to look at our performance and try to do better.

"Reporting the World", a project run by the Conflict and Peace Forums of Taplow Court, Buckinghamshire, has spent a lot of time and effort in getting around a conference table those journalists who have reported major conflicts and crises in recent years, and encouraging them to criticise each other's work in a constructive manner. More than 200 editors, writers, producers, and reporters helped to produce a practical check-list upholding the values of balance, fairness and responsibility in their coverage of international affairs. Most of these meetings were arranged by the European Centre of the Freedom Forum based in London. The centre's parent body, the Freedom Association of Arlington, Virginia, is a non-partisan foundation, a successor to one started in 1935 by publisher Frank E Gannett with the slogan: "a free press, free speech and free spirit for all people".

The London centre was a beacon for journalists of all colours, creeds and political beliefs, united by their concern that journalism should remain more than celebrity lifestyle, trivialisation, confessions and comic book stories. Now for the irony. Six weeks after 9/11, the parent body in the United States closed it down, saying that they needed the money for a news museum in downtown Washington! So investigative journalism is not dead yet.

Let's run through what we should be doing. We have to convince news organisations that there is more to journalism than profits and share price, that slick accountancy, cost cutting and spending money on promotion are not going to win an editor or a proprietor a place in the history books. We need a public interest defence in all legal actions brought against the media. Journalists should be able to defend a story by showing that what it revealed was so important to the public that everything else was irrelevant - something that, thanks to the European Court of Human Rights, the Sunday Times succeeded in doing in the thalidomide case.

I mean, if a drug company is aggressively marketing a drug that deforms unborn babies, then how the journalist got the story and whether it defamed drug company executives - and even whether publication would damage that elusive concept, "the national interest" - has just got to take second place to informing the people. We can support media that does investigative journalism, and stop buying media that does not. We can seek other sources of funding for our own investigations.

And, if everything else fails, we can take the Jan Mayman path and somehow finance ourselves. We are not without power.

How to save the face of a venerable news organisation

2007-02-11T23:12:00.000-08:00

Reuters had to act quickly when bloggers noticed that two photographs of Israeli military action had been doctored. Raymond Snoddy gets the full story from its new editor-in-chief .

It was vigilant bloggers who first raised questions about the validity of two Reuters photographs of Israeli military action in Lebanon published last summer. In one, wisps of smoke rising over Beirut seemed identical, as if extra smoke had been added to enhance the image. In the other the accusation was that the number of flares being dropped by an Israeli F-16 fighter had been increased by digital means to make the picture look more dramatic.

For full text read :
http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article2259498.ece

Nonprofit Journalism?

2007-02-11T23:00:00.000-08:00

Daniel Akst

When newsgathering isn't tied into company profits, does journalism—and the public—benefit?

In the media cacophony that is New York, whoever heard of Gotham Gazette? Apparently lots of people. The web site, devoted to news of the city and its neighborhoods, gets more than 105,000 unique visitors per month. "In May [2005]," says Sara Stuart, Gotham's director of marketing and communications, "when you Googled 'New York City politics,' Gotham Gazette was the first of 26 million results." National Public Radio (NPR), by contrast, is a household name.

In the early 1980s it had only two million weekly listeners, but since then what was once the province of a band of self-selected cognoscenti has grown into nothing short of a mass phenomenon. NPR now reports 26 million weekly listeners--a figure that has doubled in just the past decade. NPR programming reaches listeners on more than 780 independent public radio stations blanketing the country, not to mention on the Internet.

Gotham Gazette and NPR are both fast-growing media organizations, but they have something more interesting in common: they are both private, not-for-profit organizations. In fact, at a time of growing concern over whether quality journalism and high profit margins can continue to coexist in the traditional media, nonprofit journalism is flourishing. From individual bloggers to influential public affairs magazines, from community newspapers to broadcasting outlets, nonprofit media are multiplying in number, increasing their audiences and stretching the boundaries of journalism itself.

Thanks to the Internet, barriers to entry into the news business may well be lower than at any time since wandering minstrels carried news from place to place in verse. And while nonprofits can't ignore markets any more than they can ignore budgets, a news organization that hopes only to break even can focus less on what will sell and more on the kinds of coverage it believes society needs. Thus, while for-profit broadcasters appear to have scaled back their commitment to news, NPR has been adding journalists and ramping up coverage.

Of course, profit and excellence in the media are hardly mutually exclusive. The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal, which deploy masses of relatively well-paid professional journalists and maintain the highest standards, are all profit-seeking enterprises that also produce enormous social good. Princeton University sociologist and Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Starr, in his 2004 study, The Creation of the Media (Basic Books), is clear-eyed about the role of profit in all this, observing that, in general, "Markets in liberal societies enrich the public sphere far more than they impoverish it."

But in some situations the market mechanism--pressured by cultural, social and political changes--may not always be adequate, and some thoughtful people are suggesting that this is the case with respect to the profit-oriented media that dominate the American news landscape.

The traditional postwar mainstays of American news--the big three television networks and the many daily newspapers that provide most local coverage--seem to be caught in a dispiriting cycle of cutbacks and declining audiences that they lack the ability to break. At the same time, consolidation and the decline of family ownership have left media organizations subject to the same profit pressures as other publicly traded companies--despite the special mission media companies have always claimed for themselves. Under the circumstances, it's fair to ask whether the news organizations of today--and tomorrow--are up to the task of sustaining the informed citizenry on which democracy depends. "I think there is a fundamental role for nonprofit entities in our media system," says Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded a nonprofit organization of his own (freepress.org) to advocate media reform.

To critics like McChesney, the problem is a consequence of concentration and the obligations public companies of all kinds have to their shareholders. McChesney argues that the current system "is set up to maximize profit for a relative handful of large companies. The system works well for them, but it is a disaster for the communication needs of a healthy and self-governing society."James T. Hamilton, an economist and political scientist at Duke University whose works include All the News That's Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News (Princeton University Press, 2003), advocates outright nonprofit ownership as one of several means to generate more hard news coverage.

"One way to increase the attention reporters pay to politics and government is to shift the objectives of some owners away from profit maximization," he writes. "A foundation concerned with the quantity and quality of public affairs coverage might decide to purchase or run a news outlet that emphasized hard news."Sometimes when markets fail, the path is clear for government intervention and in fact, some advocates of a greater role for nonprofits support changes in tax and other public policies to promote this form of media ownership. In other advanced nations, after all, government plays a much bigger role, particularly in funding public broadcasting.

In America, by contrast, the federal government only provides about fifteen percent of what is spent on public broadcasting, an amount roughly matched by the states. McChesney, for one, believes the most cost-effective way for nonprofits to improve the media is by focusing on government policy. He cites as a precedent the original Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, underwritten by Carnegie Corporation of New York during the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson. The Commission's landmark report led to the creation of the U.S. public broadcasting system in 1967. But there are times when markets fail and government can't fill the gap, particularly in the wary and decentralized American tradition, which makes even modest government funding for the arts controversial, let alone the kind of national television tax that pays for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

Often, in such circumstances, private, nonprofit organizations can step effectively into the breach--and the seeming marketplace shortfall in quality journalism may be just the kind of breach they can ably help to fill. A shortage of quality television for kids was addressed in just this way when Carnegie Corporation commissioned the feasibility study (by Joan Ganz Cooney) that led to the birth of the children's Television Workshop--creator of Sesame Street.Nonprofits have succeeded in other complex, costly and socially critical ventures, including most notably higher education.

America's colleges and universities are decentralized, overwhelmingly not-for-profit, dependent on a mix of funding sources--and despite a little grade inflation, the envy of the world. What they supply is both vital and, with some rare exceptions, unavailable from profit-making businesses.

In the media, "the nonprofit sector shows promise," affirms University of North Carolina journalism professor Philip Meyer, who wrote a book called The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism In The Information Age (University of Missouri Press, 2004). He observes that, rather than being left entirely to a competitive marketplace, news coverage in this country has long been buttressed by various kinds of charitable or government benefits. McChesney points out that low postal rates, broadcast licenses, local cable monopolies and even the nature of copyright protections are among the many government policies that subsidize and shape the American media outside the free market system. Nonprofits can also help fill an important coverage gap inherent in the structure of America's advertising-driven media business model.

Since daily newspapers, for example, get four-fifths of their revenue from advertising, the places that need coverage most--places where people don't have a lot of money--typically get it least. This is why newspapers in some places have dropped the names of their older, struggling host cities from their names--the better to follow their affluent readers to the suburbs. At the same time, papers "covering" entertainment, home design and restaurants have proliferated, all of them appealing to the affluent and many carrying nothing like news. Nonprofit media could pay more attention to the Americans who don't shop or eat out quite so much.

More media, Less news

2007-02-11T22:48:00.000-08:00

Newspapers are making progress with the internet, but most are still too timid, defensive or high-minded

THE first thing to greet a visitor to the Oslo headquarters of Schibsted, a Norwegian newspaper firm, is its original, hand-operated printing press from 1856, now so clean and polished it looks more like a sculpture than a machine. Christian Schibsted, the firm's founder, bought it to print someone else's newspaper, but when the contract moved elsewhere he decided to start his own.

Although Schibsted gives pride of place to its antique machinery, the company is in fact running away from its printed past as fast as it can. Having made a loss five years ago, Schibsted's activities on the internet contributed 35% of last year's operating profits.

News of Schibsted's success online has spread far in the newspaper industry. Every year, says Sverre Munck, the executive vice-president of its international business, Schibsted has to turn away delegations of foreign newspaper bosses seeking to find out how the Norwegians have done it. “Otherwise we'd get several visits every month,” he says.

The company has used its established newspaper brands to build websites that rank first and second in Scandinavia for visitors. It has also created new internet businesses such as Sesam, a search engine that competes with Google, and FINN.no, a portal for classified advertising. As a result, 2005 was the company's best ever for revenues and profits.

Unfortunately for the newspaper industry, Schibsted is a rare exception. For most newspaper companies in the developed world, 2005 was miserable. They still earn almost all of their profits from print, which is in decline. As people look to the internet for news and young people turn away from papers, paid-for circulations are falling year after year. Papers are also losing their share of advertising spending.

Classified advertising is quickly moving online. Jim Chisholm, of iMedia, a joint-venture consultancy with IFRA, a newspaper trade association, predicts that a quarter of print classified ads will be lost to digital media in the next ten years. Overall, says iMedia, newspapers claimed 36% of total global advertising in 1995 and 30% in 2005. It reckons they will lose another five percentage points by 2015.

Even the most confident of newspaper bosses now agree that they will survive in the long term only if, like Schibsted, they can reinvent themselves on the internet and on other new-media platforms such as mobile phones and portable electronic devices. Most have been slow to grasp the changes affecting their industry—“remarkably, unaccountably complacent,” as Rupert Murdoch put it in a speech last year—but now they are making a big push to catch up. Internet advertising is growing rapidly for many and is beginning to offset some of the decline in print.
Newspapers' complacency is perhaps not as remarkable as Mr Murdoch suggested.
In many developed countries their owners have for decades enjoyed near monopolies, fat profit margins, and returns on capital above those of other industries. In the past, newspaper companies saw little need to experiment or to change and spent little or nothing on research and development.

Set in print

At first, from the late 1990s until around 2002, newspaper companies simply replicated their print editions online. Yet the internet offers so many specialised sources of information and entertainment that readers can pick exactly what they want from different websites. As a result, people visited newspaper sites infrequently, looked at a few pages and then vanished off to someone else's website.

Another early mistake was for papers to save their best journalists for print. This meant that the quality of new online editions was often poor. Websites hired younger, cheaper staff. The brand's prestige stayed with the old medium, which encouraged print journalists to defend their turf. Still today at La Stampa, an Italian daily paper owned by the Fiat Group, says Anna Masera, the paper's internet chief, print journalists hesitate to give her their stories for fear that the website will cannibalise the newspaper.

For the past couple of years, however, newspapers have been thinking more boldly about what to do on the internet. At its most basic, that means reporting stories using cameras and microphones as well as print. The results can be encouraging. America's Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has introduced a new Emmy award for news and documentaries on the internet, mobile phones and personal media players. Five of the seven nominations for this September have gone to reports by nytimes.com and washingtonpost.com.

It also means being more imaginative. In the late 1990s, the early years of the Wall Street Journal's website, one of the paper's journalists came up with the novel idea of posting online a 573-page document that backed up an article. “It wasn't the most compelling content,” remembers Neil Budde, its founding editor and now general manager of news at Yahoo!, an internet portal. But it was a start. Now newspapers have a better idea of what works online. This is not always traditional journalism as taught in journalism school. Brian Tierney, who became owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer after Knight Ridder sold it last year, noticed that a popular item on the paper's website has been a video of Mentos mints causing a 2-litre bottle of Diet Coke to explode into the air. “We should do more of that,” he says.

More newspaper companies are likely to treat their websites as a priority these days. “Before, newspapers used their second- and third-rate journalists for the internet,” says Edward Roussel, online editorial director at Britain's Telegraph Group, “but now we know we've got to use our very best.” Many companies are putting print journalists in the same room as those who work online, so that print writers are working for the website and vice versa. Some insist that this is a mistake. “It is completely wrong not to separate web and paper operations,” says Oscar Bronner, publisher of Der Standard, a daily paper in Austria. Print journalists don't have time to reflect and analyse properly if they also have to work for the website, he argues.

Running to stand still

How impressive are the results of these online experiments? At lots of newspaper companies, internet advertising is growing by at least 30% a year, and often more. At la Repubblica in Italy, for instance, the paper's website gets about 1m visitors a day, nearly double the circulation of the printed paper.

The value of online ads grew by 70% in the first half of 2006. For the first three months of 2006, the Newspaper Association of America announced that advertising for all the country's newspaper websites grew by 35% from the same period in 2005, to a total of $613m. But to put that in perspective, print and online ads together grew by only 1.8%, to $11 billion, because print advertising was flat. At almost all newspapers the internet brings in less than a tenth of revenues and profits.

At this point, says Mr Chisholm, “newspapers are halfway to realising an audience on the internet and about a tenth of the way to building a business online.”

The big problem is that readers online bring in nowhere near the revenues that print readers do. All but a handful of papers offer their content free online, so they immediately surrender the cover price of a print copy. People look at fewer pages online than they do in print, which makes web editions less valuable to advertisers. Gavin O'Reilly, president of the World Association of Newspapers in Paris, says that print readers are much more valuable than online readers, who use newspaper websites in a “haphazard and fragmented way”. Vin Crosbie, of Digital Deliverance, a consulting firm, recently estimated that newspapers need between 20 and 100 readers online to make up for losing just one print reader.

Many newspaper bosses would say this is too pessimistic: one British paper, for instance, reckons that one print reader is worth ten online. But even that is a daunting multiple.

Newspapers today concentrate on only two parts of the market for internet advertising. They earn little or nothing from internet search, which is bigger than either display or classified ads. Especially in America, newspapers rely heavily on classified ads online and have fewer display ads, says Mr Crosbie. Elsewhere, the pattern may be reversed, but newspapers still lack a broad base of internet-advertising revenue; for instance, Juan Luis Cebrián, chief executive of Grupo PRISA, the owner of El Pais, says the Spanish newspaper is enjoying strong growth in display advertising, but has few online classified ads.

On the other hand, newspapers' websites have higher profit margins than print does, because they have no newsprint or distribution to pay for. The Wall Street Journal is one of the few papers that charges for its content online. Others may follow suit, especially if growth in advertising slows. The online business model is still in flux, argues Richard Zannino, chief executive of Dow Jones & Company, publisher of the Wall Street Journal. The average price of ad space in the printed paper is now only three times higher than on Wall Street Journal Online, says Mr Zannino, compared with six to seven times for the industry as a whole in America. He expects the relative price of an internet ad to rise.

The secret of making money online, according to Schibsted, is not to rely on news aggregators like Google News and Yahoo!. Three-quarters of traffic to the websites for Schibsted's VG and Aftonbladet comes through their own home-pages and only a quarter from other websites. “If visitors come from Google to stories deep in the paper and then leave,” explains Mr Munck, “Google gets the dollars and we get only cents, but if we can bring them in through the front page we can charge €19,000 [$25,000] for a 24-hour banner ad.” In spite of this, most newspapers still depend on news aggregators.

The danger for newspapers is that all their efforts on the internet may only slow their decline. Doing the obvious—having excellent websites and selling ad space on them—may not be enough. The papers with the best chance of seeing their revenues grow are those experimenting with entirely new businesses online and off.

Some are launching profitable new ventures that are only indirectly related to journalism. Schibsted, for instance, has started an online slimming club, called Viktklubben.se, using its Aftonbladet newspaper brand. Viktklubben.se charges its 54,000 members €50 each every three months. The Telegraph Group in Britain uses the Daily Telegraph to sell readers everything from goose-down pillows to Valentine's Day topiary baskets to insurance. The division now contributes close to a third of the firm's total profits, according to an executive at the company. “Newspapers will have to get into new businesses and extract more value from their audience,” says Paul Zwillenberg, global head of media and entertainment at OC&C Strategy Consultants in London. Examples like these are fairly rare, though. Most newspaper companies still insist that producing high-quality journalism and distributing it in new ways will be enough to keep them growing.

It's the journalism, stupid

Consultants advising newspaper groups argue that they need to adjust their output. Research into the tastes of mainstream newspaper readers has long shown that people like short stories and news that is relevant to them: local reporting, sports, entertainment, weather and traffic.

On the internet, especially, says Mr Chisholm, they are looking to enhance their way of life. Long pieces about foreign affairs are low on readers' priorities—the more so now that the internet enables people to scan international news headlines in moments. Coverage of national and international news is in any case a commodity often almost indistinguishable from one newspaper to the next.

This impression is exacerbated as papers seek to save money by sacking reporters and taking copy from agencies such as Reuters. “Our research shows that people are looking for more utility from newspapers,” says Sammy Papert, chief executive of Belden Associates, a firm that specialises in research for American newspapers. People want their paper to tell them how to get richer, and what they might do in the evening.

Few newspaper companies like to hear this and they tend to ignore the research they have paid for. Most journalists, after all, would rather cover Afghanistan than personal finance. But some are starting to listen. Gannett, the world's biggest newspaper group, is trying to make its journalism more local. It has invested in “mojos”—mobile journalists with wireless laptops who permanently work out of the office encamped in community hubs. Morris Communications, based in Augusta, Georgia, recently launched a new home-delivered free paper for Bluffton, a fast-growing area of Beaufort, South Carolina, called Bluffton Today, with a page of national news, one of international and the rest “hyper-local”.

Its website has pictures and blogs from readers and detailed community information. “Back in the 1940s and 1950s papers used to be full of what we call ‘chicken-dinner news’—the speakers at civic clubs and whose daughter won a blue ribbon in canoeing,” says Will Morris, the firm's president. “But then newspapers started to lose touch with their readers.”

The more adventurous newspaper companies, like Morris Communications, are showing themselves willing to embrace content and opinions from readers. Rather like OhmyNews, a Korean “citizen-journalism” operation that many people think heralds the future for news-gathering, Schibsted exhorts its readers to send information and photographs. When a mentally disturbed man ran amok and killed people on a tram in Oslo in 2004, it was a reader with a mobile-phone camera who sent VG its front-page picture of the arrest. At Zero Hora, a Brazilian paper owned by RBS Group, the circulation department asks 120 readers what they think of the paper every day and Marcelo Rech, the editor, receives a report at 1pm. “They usually want more of our supplements on cooking and houses and less of Hizbullah and earthquakes,” says Mr Rech.

Still more changes to the content and form of newspapers are likely as businesspeople gain power at newspaper firms. “You won't be able to have many sacred cows...Newspaper companies will have to become more commercial,” says Henrik Poppe, a partner in McKinsey. Some leading titles, including the Wall Street Journal, have recently decided to put advertisements on the front page for the first time. For the moment, the trend towards greater commercialism is most evident in America, but is likely to spread elsewhere as newspaper companies struggle financially.

At the Philadelphia Inquirer, Mr Tierney, a former advertising executive, shocked people by announcing that he would bring in an advertising person to redesign the paper—traditionally a task strictly for editorial. In future, businesspeople are likely to insist that newspapers adopt practices that are already standard in other industries. Mr Tierney, for instance, says it is unreasonable to expect everyone from the age of 18 to 88 to buy the same product. The industry needs to sell papers for different age and demographic groups, he says.

The most shocking development for traditional newspapers has been the wild success of free dailies, which like the internet have proved enormously popular with young people. Roughly 28m copies of free newspapers are now printed daily, according to Metro International, a Swedish firm that pioneered them in 1995. In markets where they are published, they account for 8% of daily circulation on average, according to iMedia. That share is rising.

In Europe they make up 16% of daily circulation. Metro calculates that it spends half the proportion of its total costs on editorial that paid-for papers do. In practice that means a freesheet with a circulation of about 100,000 employing 20 journalists, whereas a paid-for paper would have around 180. Metro's papers reach young, affluent readers and are even able to charge a premium for advertising in some markets compared with paid-for papers.
“The biggest enemy of paid-for newspapers is time,” says Pelle Törnberg, Metro's chief executive.

Mr Törnberg says the only way that paid-for papers will prosper is by becoming more specialised, raising their prices and investing in better editorial. People read freesheets in their millions, on the other hand, because Metro and others reach them on their journey to work, when they have time to read, and spare them the hassle of having to hand over change to a newsagent.

Some traditional newspaper firms dismiss free papers, saying they are not profitable. Carlo De Benedetti, chairman of Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso, publisher of la Repubblica, for instance, says that Metro loses money in Italy and that other freesheets are struggling. Globally, however, Metro has just become profitable.

Consultants say that lots of traditional newspaper companies are planning to hold their noses and launch free dailies. In France, for instance, Le Monde is planning a new free daily, and Mr Murdoch's News International is preparing a new free afternoon paper for London, to be launched next month. Deciding whether or not to start a freesheet, indeed, perfectly encapsulates the unpalatable choice that faces the paid-for newspaper industry today as it attempts to find a future for itself.

Over the next few years it must decide whether to compromise on its notion of “fine journalism” and take a more innovative, more businesslike approach—or risk becoming a beautiful old museum piece.

Aug 24th 2006From The Economist print edition

The future of newspapers

2007-02-11T22:40:00.000-08:00

Who killed the newspaper?

The most useful bit of the media is disappearing. A cause for concern, but not for panic

“A GOOD newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself,” mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species. The business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart (see article).

Of all the “old” media, newspapers have the most to lose from the internet. Circulation has been falling in America, western Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand for decades (elsewhere, sales are rising). But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline.

In his book “The Vanishing Newspaper”, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition. That sort of extrapolation would have produced a harrumph from a Beaverbrook or a Hearst, but even the most cynical news baron could not dismiss the way that ever more young people are getting their news online. Britons aged between 15 and 24 say they spend almost 30% less time reading national newspapers once they start using the web.
Up to a podcast, Lord Copper?

Advertising is following readers out of the door. The rush is almost unseemly, largely because the internet is a seductive medium that supposedly matches buyers with sellers and proves to advertisers that their money is well spent.

Classified ads, in particular, are quickly shifting online. Rupert Murdoch, the Beaverbrook of our age, once described them as the industry's rivers of gold—but, as he said last year, “Sometimes rivers dry up.” In Switzerland and the Netherlands newspapers have lost half their classified advertising to the internet.

Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world's general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004. Tumbling shares of listed newspaper firms have prompted fury from investors. In 2005 a group of shareholders in Knight Ridder, the owner of several big American dailies, got the firm to sell its papers and thus end a 114-year history. This year Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, attacked the New York Times Company, the most august journalistic institution of all, because its share price had fallen by nearly half in four years.

Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people's daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on- and offline. And they are investing in free daily papers, which do not use up any of their meagre editorial resources on uncovering political corruption or corporate fraud. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it does, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.

Getting away with murder

In future, as newspapers fade and change, will politicians therefore burgle their opponents' offices with impunity, and corporate villains whoop as they trample over their victims? Journalism schools and think-tanks, especially in America, are worried about the effect of a crumbling Fourth Estate. Are today's news organisations “up to the task of sustaining the informed citizenry on which democracy depends?” asked a recent report about newspapers from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a charitable research foundation.
Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned papers and papers have shunned what was in stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it will surely survive the decline to come.

That is partly because a few titles that invest in the kind of investigative stories which often benefit society the most are in a good position to survive, as long as their owners do a competent job of adjusting to changing circumstances. Publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal should be able to put up the price of their journalism to compensate for advertising revenues lost to the internet—especially as they cater to a more global readership. As with many industries, it is those in the middle—neither highbrow, nor entertainingly populist—that are likeliest to fall by the wayside.

The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account—trying them in the court of public opinion. The internet has expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national papers or, worse, their local city paper. News-aggregation sites such as Google News draw together sources from around the world. The website of Britain's Guardian now has nearly half as many readers in America as it does at home.

In addition, a new force of “citizen” journalists and bloggers is itching to hold politicians to account. The web has opened the closed world of professional editors and reporters to anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection. Several companies have been chastened by amateur postings—of flames erupting from Dell's laptops or of cable-TV repairmen asleep on the sofa. Each blogger is capable of bias and slander, but, taken as a group, bloggers offer the searcher after truth boundless material to chew over. Of course, the internet panders to closed minds; but so has much of the press.

For hard-news reporting—as opposed to comment—the results of net journalism have admittedly been limited. Most bloggers operate from their armchairs, not the frontline, and citizen journalists tend to stick to local matters. But it is still early days. New online models will spring up as papers retreat. One non-profit group, NewAssignment.Net, plans to combine the work of amateurs and professionals to produce investigative stories on the internet. Aptly, $10,000 of cash for the project has come from Craig Newmark, of Craigslist, a group of free classified-advertisement websites that has probably done more than anything to destroy newspapers' income.

In future, argues Carnegie, some high-quality journalism will also be backed by non-profit organisations. Already, a few respected news organisations sustain themselves that way—including the Guardian, the Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charities, thousands of fired-up bloggers and well-informed citizen journalists: there is every sign that Arthur Miller's national conversation will be louder than ever.

Aug 24th 2006From The Economist print edition

The pressmen and pressmachines

2006-04-19T04:52:00.000-07:00

- By H.Y. Sharada Prasad
Not all editors read their own newspapers. Their day is rather full of appointments such as an off-the-record palaver with a minister or party leader or an interview with a visiting fireman for a television channel or a sundowner with a business magnate. It is with difficulty that they find time to run through the leading article their editorial writer might have prepared. Their main concern as editors is not to let their competitors walk away with too many beats or exclusives. With so many preoccupations, they are too busy to notice mistakes that might have crept into their paper unless their attention has been drawn to them.

There are some editorial fuss-pots, however, who have a low tolerance level as far as mistakes are concerned. They do not make a distinction between minor typographical errors or not-so-minor mistakes of fact. They view them all as a personal affront to their competence and even to their character. I recall two such editors with some nostalgia from my newspaper days more than 50 years ago in good old Bombay. Claude Scott and J.D. Ewing were editors, one following the other, of the National Standard, whose name was later changed to the Indian Express.

Temperamentally Scott and Ewing were far apart, but they had one thing in common. When they came to the office at 9.30 they brought with them "the marked paper" which showed they had gone through every single line of the morning’s product including the market and sport pages, and marked out every mistake of spelling, syntax and usage. Before lunch-time, this marked paper would be circulated in the editorial department with the editor’s comments. I was told this was the prevalent practice in London’s Fleet Street.

The marked paper taught our reporters to be more circumspect in reporting court cases and political allegations and it taught the sub-editors to avoid stuffiness in headlines and intros. Both gentlemen did this with such humour that the offenders did not feel humiliated. They were both champions of plain prose and disapproved of pedantry not only in the news pages but also in the editorial comments. "Do you expect your reader to carry a dictionary around with him?" they would ask. Another point which they impressed on us was the need to avoid the use of slang. A bicycle was not to be referred to as a bike or a microphone as the mike. Children should not be called kids, as that would amount to insinuating that their parents were goats.

A basic rule in sub-editing is that levity or cleverness must be avoided when reporting serious events. A standard example given in text-books of journalism is that if there is a building collapse involving many deaths, you should not say "Sons of Toil Buried/ Under Tons of Soil."

One other rule commended to journalists is that when they have written a headline, they must, at the stage of revision or proof-reading, look at it as how it might appear to a mischievous or perverse reader. This piece of advice came back to me when I saw the following heading given to an editorial in a leading national newspaper recently: "Making Water/ A Basic Right"
If the awkward ambiguity of this heading does not strike you at once, try to read the heading aloud, the first time giving a longer pause after the first word, and the second time giving the longer pause after the second word. The first will mean conferring the status of a fundamental right on accessibility to water. A second, and a wicked, meaning arises when "making water" is treated as a unit. In everyday conversational English, "to make water" is to urinate, and that would create the impression that this respected newspaper believes that the citizen has the basic right to piss anywhere and everywhere!

Responsible newspapermen have always believed that journalism implies a two-way communication between editor and reader. Freedom of the press involves not merely the rights of the men and women who run the media, but of the readers or listeners or viewers as well.
Recently the Hindu introduced an innovation. It has appointed a Readers’ Editor whose function is to correct errors that might have caused confusion in the readers’ minds and issue clarifications in the interests of fair reporting. Every day a column is published on the page facing the editorial page (op-ed page as it is called) under the heading "Corrections and Clarifications." In it the newspaper candidly acknowledges its mistakes pointed out by readers and discovered on its own. The column published in the Hindu on April 11 included seven items. One of them said that a reader had pointed out that the paper had erred in describing the SSBN Typhoon-class nuclear submarine as US-built, whereas it was built by Russians. Another item corrected a mistake committed by the Press Trust of India which had identified Mr M.C. Bhandari as the United Arab Emirates ambassador, whereas he was India’s ambassador to UAE.

The column has so far not published letters from readers challenging the opinions of the paper. It is presumably thought that that is the province of "The Letters to the Editor" column.
With a practised proof-reader’s eye I spotted a rather hilarious typo in the Bangalore edition of the Hindu of April 11. A report on page 5 quoted the new advocate-general of Karnataka, Mr Uday Holla, as saying that he knew Mr F.S. Nariman, the Supreme Court advocate, and Mr B.N. Narasimha Murthy, the former advocate-general of the state, and "both were men of impeachable character and integrity," and an example for the younger generation. I waited for five days to see whether the paper had apologised to the two legal luminaries, and whether any alert reader had pulled up the paper. But no.

If you hear people complaining that there are more mistakes these days even in the leading newspapers, don’t brush it aside as the incorrigible gripe of grumbletonians. The fact is that as technology progresses the scope for mistakes also grows. Computers have taken over the pressroom. The concept of a senior looking at the "copy" produced by juniors has become obsolete. Editorial departments are run horizontally and not vertically. There is a touching faith in the infallibility of the "spell-check" provided by the machine. When memory, grammar and experience — three things that old professionals loved to claim — are at a discount, don’t be surprised that the avoidable becomes inevitable.

H.Y. Sharada Prasad was adviser to Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi

Reviving the fine art of subbing

2006-03-04T22:46:00.000-08:00

Stings and scoops may be exciting high points but good, sound editing is surely the bedrock on which media credibility and prestige rests.

Ammu Joseph

"Once in the hands of subs we can only pray!"
"You can't reform subs."
"The Press can be relied upon to apply the Procrustean principle to all contributors!"

These and similar responses to a recent instance of massacre by subbing in a leading English daily indicate the widespread lack of faith in the abilities and proclivities of sub-editors (a.k.a. copy editors) among those who have had close encounters with them. But reporters and writers are not the only ones who see that there is a major problem with editing in the Indian press today. Even lay readers can often be heard bemoaning the poor language - to say nothing of content - that now marks much of the print media, at least in English. So it may be worth trying to figure out what is going wrong where.

The relationship between writers/reporters and sub-editors has always been fraught. Having been on both sides of the editorial desk at various points in my career, I am well aware that many a reputable writer would be nowhere without the ministrations of a sensitive and skilled sub. I truly believe that subbing is an extremely important journalistic function and that a meticulous sub is an invaluable asset to any publication.

In fact, I have always regretted the traditional devaluation of "the desk" within the profession, which is sadly mirrored in media education. I also think it is unfortunate that those who perform such an essential and potentially creative task within the press receive so little recognition and appreciation even from colleagues. While television news has begun to credit technical team members, in the print media rank and file editors still remain anonymous and unsung. It is significant, I think, that the plethora of awards, fellowships and other opportunities for print journalists today focus almost exclusively on reporters and writers.

It could well be that this lack of acknowledgement leads to poor self-image and frustration among subs, which in turn is reflected in their work. A related problem may be that few opt for desk jobs because they really enjoy the challenges of editing and production. Instead, many seem to take to editing because they have no choice and/or because they prefer or are compelled to go for office-bound work with regular hours (albeit subject to shift timings in newspapers). With the glamour and rewards attached to reporting and writing, and the downgrading of copy editing even in J-schools, this is not surprising. But the ensuing disinterest and discontent can be quite damaging, especially in terms of quality of work.

However, other factors seem to be at play, too. There is little doubt that language proficiency is a rare quality today - certainly in English - even among those who have studied at elite schools and colleges. While poor language skills among reporters and writers can be camouflaged by skilful editing, no such safety net is available to sub-editors who are linguistically challenged. Language competence is an obvious prerequisite for good editing but, ideally, editors must also be interested in language and committed to the careful, correct use of it.

In the breaking news culture that prevails in much of the media today, little value appears to be attached to the kind of painstaking, time-consuming, detailed work that good subbing involves. Although computerisation has made the editing process far less laborious and protracted, the time and effort thus saved have clearly not translated into more smart and sensitive subbing.

To make matters worse, there seem to be few checks and balances to ensure that editing improves the quality of writing (if and where necessary) or, at least, does not make it worse. Interference with style is not the only issue here; distortion of meaning is a common, distressful occurrence. Senior editors seldom take complaints about editorial hacking seriously, even if factual and grammatical errors have been introduced and meanings altered, especially if the plaintiff is a freelancer (however accomplished and experienced). Instead, hackles raised, they often proceed to blacklist those who dare to point out deficiencies in their editorial systems. The resulting sense of invulnerability often intensifies the ill-founded arrogance and superciliousness of many "working journalists," particularly in dealings with their equally hard-working and professional but independent colleagues. No lessons are learnt and editorial slash-and-burn practices continue unabated.

Yet the importance of using language well is obviously still recognised across the world. Otherwise a book like "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" would not have become an international bestseller. And "Elements of Style" - which I first acquired in journalism school 30 years ago - would not be still going strong, its new editions continuing to find a place in the survival kit recommended to students in prestigious J-schools, along with an up-to-date, comprehensive dictionary and a thesaurus to supplement the rather basic one that comes with word-processing software.

It is clear that the present crisis on the desk will have to be acknowledged by media practitioners and decision-makers before it can be effectively tackled. Efforts to stem the rot are obviously required at multiple levels, ranging from J-schools to editors’ cabins. Stings and scoops may be the exciting high points of the media but good, sound editing is surely the bedrock on which media credibility and prestige rests.

3/2/2006, The Hoot

Despite the obituaries, newspapers refuse to die

2006-01-07T00:40:00.000-08:00

Simon Jenkins

Newspapers have shown they can grasp each new technology and bend it to their will.

JOHN McEnroe was once asked why he got so angry. Did he hate his opponents? Good heavens no, said the great man. He loved them. What he hated were tennis balls. I feel the same about computers. They keep hitting the net or bouncing out of court. They attribute their own failings to my "human errors." To add insult to injury, their salesmen tell me, year after year, that they mean to reduce my newspaper to cat litter.

Hence my delight at this week's report from Las Vegas that Google was considering the launch of a $200 computer, since denied. I assumed it had recognised that personal computing is where motoring was before Henry Ford. Manufacturers have their customers driving over-engineered Lagondas and Hispano-Suizas. They design ever-fancier and more costly machines, and then rig the market to prevent anyone undercutting them. They honour Marx's dictum that capitalism is a conspiracy not by the free market but against it.

Older but faster

My first word-processor was faster to use and had a longer battery life than anything produced since. In these crucial features, each new computer has been less efficient than the last. (I have recently been told that my new machine cannot handle my excellent 10-year-old software but requires the slower, messier and more vulnerable Word.) As a result I can download the Library of Congress and divert a moon rocket to the surface of Mars, but I cannot write a faster sentence or keep going five hours. I want an electronic typewriter that can display words at page length, edit, and transmit them. I just want a PC version of the Model T Ford.

If it is the case that monopolists have contrived to throttle the $200 computer, I pray that some genius will come to my aid. In the back streets of Bangalore or Shanghai must be waiting another John Walter, whose mechanical presses in 1785 put technology at the service of that greatest democratising force in history, the newspaper.

Such thoughts are brought to mind by the publication this week of the seventh volume of the history of Walter's paper, The London Times, from Rupert Murdoch's purchase in 1981 to the present day. It has been attended by the usual undertakers, dusting off their black hats and rehearsing their dirges on the industry. The world of newspapers is once again on its last legs, its words going on screen, and its advertising online. We have only so much "eye time" in a day, and not enough to waste on print. Presumably the Times' seventh volume must be its last.

On my first day as a trainee at The Times many years ago I was warned by an old hand that I was making a terrible mistake. Within five years, he said, there would be just three dailies left in Britain, as in Paris and New York. The market was exhausted. Real journalism would be on television. There was no future in smearing black ink on dead trees and getting child labour to deliver it on cold mornings. Get out, Jenkins, while the going is good, I was told.

My informant was a victim of those classic media afflictions, techno-dazzle and pessimism. Even today it is impossible to go to a journalism seminar without being told that newspapers are finished. In future they must fight their corner online. Columnists must "blog or die." Why read an article by some pompous preacher when you can air your views to the world and get it to answer back? Most of this doom-talk emanates from America, where newspaper circulations have indeed been falling for decades. The popular view is that this is because of competition from television and the Internet. Fewer people use public transport. The electronic media offer more readily accessible information. As a result, not a year passes without another noble title sinking like a battleship in Pearl Harbor, its reporters re-enacting The Front Page for gleeful television cameras.

America's serious newspapers are declining because they are dull, worthy and uncompetitive. Graham Stewart's Times history points out that in 1981 the outlook for British papers was indeed grim. This is not because they were losing money — most had relied on outside support for years — but because their production and editorial methods were inflexible and deterred competition. Even so, daily circulation was little changed from 20 years earlier, hovering at a million either side of 14 million.

Cost structure transformed

From the mid-1980s two things happened. The first was graphically illustrated by The Times' move from central London down the river to Wapping. The industry's cost structure was transformed. Publishers stopped handing out banknotes to their print workers on demand each night, hoping that this would force weaker rivals to close and deter new entrants, as was happening elsewhere in Europe and America.

More important was the impact of Wapping on editorial innovation across the industry. Newspapers could compete in size, design, and content without incurring extravagant union penalties. As The Times showed in 1966 and again in 1993, price cuts could send sales soaring and increase the market overall, albeit at a heavy cost. Rivalry led to editorial experiment; The Independent was founded. Sales surged when it and then The Times went tabloid. The same surge greeted The Guardian's successful Berliner relaunch last year.

British popular newspaper sales have continued to fall, from 13 million overall in 1965 to less than nine million today. But they are a separate publishing market. Upmarket newspapers show a reverse trend. Their daily circulation has defied every pundit, rising by a third since 1965 from two million to close to three million. The figure for the serious Sunday titles is the same today as it was then, 2.7 million. Add The Economist, which calls itself a weekly newspaper, and the figure would be one million higher. This growth in serious newspaper sales is unique. Britain has a wider choice of national titles at this end of the market than ever — and than any western country. America's five leading papers have lost more than seven per cent of their gross circulation in the past decade alone.

There is one reason for this. Elsewhere in Europe and America publishers are trapped by archaic unions in a quasi-monopolistic market stripped of any zest to compete. Try to start a new newspaper in an American city and you will be met by a wall of monopolistic behaviour, from unions, advertisers, and usually an existing dominant title. America has ignored British experience, but people will go on buying newspapers provided they keep updating their content and presentation. The competition here is frantic and costs most publishers a fortune in cross-subsidy. This year only The Daily Telegraph is reportedly profitable among serious titles. But cross-subsidy has long been a feature of newspapers. The market is healthy.

Newspapers are, like books, damned by futurologists because their medium, print on paper, is antique. In truth they have shown that they can grasp each new technology, including computers, and bend it to their will. What Gutenberg invented no one has bettered. Dead trees live. Read on.

The end of journalism? Not at all

2006-01-04T00:54:00.000-08:00

Wednesday January 4 2006 07:13 IST

SAEED NAQVI

The debate on new journalism, to which sting operations are a recent addition, runs the risk of being divided along generational lines, between the fuddy-duddies and the harbingers of a new dawn. It is a mistake to see transitions in stark colours. True, journalism no longer is what it was and shall not remain the way it is. My own hunch is that sheer public pressure will restore to it that which may have been discarded in a hurry and which may be the “essentially useful”. Credibility is only one such value.

Look at the American (and British) media in the context of the Iraq war. It is a universal truth that when war breaks out, the first casualty is the truth. Not surprising, therefore, that the American media, embedded or not, lined up behind what it perceived as the national purpose. As would happen in a free press, soon stories appeared about official deception, brazen management of the media, a whole system of planting stories and concealment of atrocities. Not surprisingly, President Bush’s ratings plummeted alongside that of the media most enthusiastic about his enterprise. The self-correcting mechanism in the media, which in a democracy is public opinion, is at work. This will happen in India too. The public over a period of time will endorse, discard or refine the journalism of soundbites and sting operations.

Once, as a cub reporter, I drove around Rajasthan for The Statesman to cover one of the severest famines in history. Returning to Jaipur, I found the front pages of all my rivals splashed with photographs of a tributary of the Rajasthan Canal, with headlines which played down the severity of the famine because canal waters would bring irrigation to the parched land. “What have you done?” I shouted at Rajendra Shankar Bhatt, state government spokesman, “The countryside is groaning under famine and you’ve planted photographs of canal waters.” With almost mocking indulgence, he said: “Relax, Naqvi, that which has been published is the truth.”

I thought I was at my furious best that afternoon as I hammered out my story, replete with Bhatt’s Goebbels-like approach. Instead of being praised, I was called back to New Delhi and rapped on the knuckles by the editor for being “intemperate”, and quite unworthy of being the paper’s representative. Judge for yourself. Was the editor being excessively fastidious? The result of his stern view was that Bhatt remained a powerful officer for decades. Had I received editorial support, he would have lost his job, such was the credibility of The Statesman those days.

That, paradoxically, was the problem. How could a newspaper, which valued its credibility above all else, place its reputation on the line on the basis of an “incomplete” report filed by a cub reporter? “Incomplete” report? Of course. The story was based on visual descriptions of famine and the photographs in the other papers were designed to divert attention from the people’s misery. I should have interviewed Bhatt, spoken to the Rajasthan Canal authority, the chief secretary, MLAs on the treasury benches from affected districts who were disgusted with official apathy, even sought an interview with the chief minister and Opposition leaders.

That was the sort of labour required for a credible investigative story. It was that sort of rigour which imparted to media organisations the credibility which is rare these days. There is no alternative to rigorous training. But how do you have trained hands for a media industry burgeoning at break-neck speed, requiring thousands of reporters and editors each month?

There is no solution except to brace yourself for an extended period of a professionally imperfect media. It is like flying through turbulent weather. Eventually you will reach your destination. After all, in the midst of professionally indifferent media, there are newspapers and TV networks which are professionally competitive. These will serve as models, even as newer and better media institutions begin to churn out trained hands. Sting operations are a part of the hectic pace at which the media is evolving, carrying with every sting as much promise as risk.

I am afraid sting operators will have to draw up some such catalogue of their targets. Technology cannot be thwarted but it also has its limits. The button-camera will take pictures of Bangaru Laxman or cash-for-question MPs. What next? It is now in the hands of the marketing departments of competitive button-cameras to place the implement in the hands of sting operators from district to district, panchayat to panchayat — wherever the common man comes into contact with the corrupt.

In the end, public opinion will determine the durability of sting operations. We are either passing through a phase or entering one where the sting operator will become a permanent feature of the media scene.

Will newspapers go down the dinosaurs' way?

2005-12-26T03:54:00.000-08:00

In February, the Examiner group began distributing tabloids free of charge to affluent households (with annual incomes of $75,000 and above) in Washington DC and Virginia. The group had launched a San Francisco tabloid earlier.
The US State Department has chosen me as the Philippines’ participant to the 2005 International Visitors’ Program for Leadership in Print Journalism conducted from September 15 until October 6. Together with 19 other participants from Asia, Africa, Latin America, Middle East and Eastern Europe, the program brought me to several cities in the US including Washington DC, New York, Tampa Bay, Omaha, San Diego and Los Angeles, where we had opportunities to interact with executives from several media organizations. Below is my story.)

WASHINGTON DC-Bob Woodward, assistant managing editor of Washington Post and celebrity investigative reporter who helped uncover the Watergate scandal in the ‘70s, was in his element one cool September night at the McLean Hilton in Virginia. He was, after all, launching his new book The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat, a personal account of his cloak-and-dagger liaisons with Mark Felt, the FBI whistleblower whose revelations kicked off a political storm that ousted US President Richard Nixon in 1974 and changed the course of American history. Speaking before a huge crowd of admirers, Woodward’s reminiscences painted a glorious picture of the Post’s happy past.

However, that night may have also been a regression for him, a fleeting respite from the current storms ravaging his paper: declining circulation, readership, and advertising revenue, courtesy of the intensifying onslaught by “new media” like the Internet as well as cable and satellite TV.

Five days earlier at The Washington Post’s headquarters in the nation’s capital, Andrew Mosher, the deputy foreign editor, talked to the BusinessMirror-and 19 other print journalists from Asia, Europe, Middle East, and Latin America-about his paper’s dilemma.

“Last year, our daily circulation was 800,000; now it’s down to 700,000,” Mosher said unflinching.

In its heyday, The Washington Post’s daily circulation was more than a million. These days, Mosher said, these numbers are falling and no one in the top management could give a satisfactory explanation as to why this is happening. They have no clear ideas too on how to deal with declining readership, which eventually would hurt ad revenues and ultimately the company’s bottom line.

But the Post is not alone.

On Wednesday, the New York Times Co. said its earnings fell by more than half in the third quarter, even as sales rose, because of higher costs and a charge related to staff reductions, the Associated Press reported.

The company, which publishes The Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune in addition to its flagship newspaper, had net income of $23.1 million for the quarter, down from $48.3 million in the same period a year ago.

In September, the Times said it would slash about 500 jobs over the next six to nine months.

At about the same time, the Philadelphia Inquirer (circulation: 388,000) also announced similar cost-cutting measures.

The big divide
MOSHER believes the problem facing US newspapers is part of a larger-possibly global-phenomenon.

“People are not really reading anymore,” he said, noting that consumers these days prefer to get their information from the Internet and other electronic media. People are just too busy to read, he said.

In reporting the story of the job cuts in New York and Philadelphia, Post reporter Frank Ahrens noted that national daily newspaper circulation in the US has declined every year since 1987.

“Newspapers once the only source of news, now compete not only with radio and network television, but also with numerous cable television networks and Internet news sources. In addition, other media-satellite radio, computer games, DVDs, Ipods and so forth-sap time required for reading daily newspaper,” Ahrens wrote.

“The death of evening newspapers across the country over the past three decades foretold the current slump.”

This depressing trend has ignited a debate within the company, and in newsrooms across the United States. On one side are young turks who are calling for a redesign of the newspaper, making it more readable to young readers by using more colors, graphics and pictures, with crisp and trendy stories. On the other side of the fence are the “dinosaurs” like Mosher who are resisting such changes for fear of alienating their current readers.

“If we change the look, readers might think it’s no longer the same Washington Post they used to read,” Mosher argued.

Politics in the US also tend to delineate between conservatives (or those perceived to be adherents of free markets and the war in Iraq) and the liberals (thought of to be adherents of big government). Hence there are views in newsrooms about the need to “play it to the middle” in order to capture the attention of the greater number of readers who are assumed to dwell in the gray areas of the American political spectrum.

“Should there be more analysis? Should it have more ‘attitude’? No one has a satisfactory answer,” Mosher sighed, reflecting the anxieties of an old media institution that is getting less sure of itself.

A changing audience
MEDIA experts from the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based journalism training center that owns the St. Petersburg Time, say multi-tasking is now the name of the game. Citing a recent study by Middleton Media Studies Project by the Indiana-based Ball University, Howard Finberg, Poynter’s director for interactive learning noted that 30 percent of American’s observed waking day is spent with media as a sole activity, while 39 percent of the day is spent with media while being involved.

Citing the same report, Finberg said Americans spent 240.9 minutes watching television and 93.4 minutes surfing the Internet. Only 32.8 minutes are being spent reading various print media. But for newspapers per se, Americans spend a mere 12.2 minutes a day.

Ken Auletta, a New York-based media critic who writes incisive analytical pieces on media and communications for the New Yorker magazine, said new forms of media are displacing the newspaper in significant numbers. In 1960, all daily newspapers in the US sent out 59 million copies a day in an effort to reach 180 Americans. In 2004, that figure dropped to 54 million even though the US population doubled.

This trend, he said, came at a time when Americans were increasingly getting cynical of traditional media. Around two-thirds of Americans think the press in general is biased, which Auletta pointed out, has contributed to the decline of print media. That most traditional media organizations are affiliated with large conglomerates only strengthen the perception that they represent powerful special interests groups. Hence, Auletta said, the younger generation tends to look at new media as an alternative source of “empowerment.”

Auletta believes this situation could be dangerous. “Every one seems to think their audience is shrinking, so media, both print and broadcast, tries to shout louder to get attention,” he said. Taking this approach, however, risks alienating audiences even further. This largely explains, according to Auletta, the rise of so-called “silly journalism” that’s focused on sensational stories, tasteless entertainment, and gossip.

Rising tabs
AS circulation numbers drop, news organizations are being forced to evolve as they grapple to find the business model of the future.

Just this week, the Asian Wall Street Journal scrapped its broadsheet printing style for a smaller tabloid format. In a letter to readers, its editor, Reginald Chua, said the new format “is designed to make it easier to navigate through the paper.”
The American edition of the Journal will also shrink its format slightly in line with other major US newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and USA Today. The redesign of the US edition will save it $18 million per year, the company said.

The shift to tabloids, which started in the United Kingdom several years ago, is one of the most notable trends in the industry.

Established by the Anschutz Group, whose business interests include oil exploration, film, soccer teams, and entertainment, the Examiner focuses largely on local news that run no longer than 250 words.

“This is a newspaper for people who want to be informed about their community but are too busy to read,” said John Wilpers, the paper’s editor-in-chief.

It carries only a few stories on foreign events save for developments in Iraq because the editors believe their readers are not as interested in such news. Instead, Wilpers and the other editors are pushing for “civic journalism” or stories that are closer to home and which “connect with people’s lives.”

For Wilpers, the Examiner represents the future of journalism as its business model due to a lower operating cost owing to its lean staff.

“The Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal will still be there in the future but they will evolve into niche newspapers with significantly lower circulation, say 500,000 or less,” Wilpers predicted.

So far, several major broadsheets like The Washington Post, the Tampa Bay, Florida-based St. Petersburg Times and San Diego Union-Tribune have introduced their own tabloids to cater to younger readers while maintaining their own broadsheets. These tabloids are distributed free in subways, bus stops, hotels and other strategic public spaces.

In San Diego, the San Diego Reader, which feels like a folksy version of the New Yorker or Harper’s, regularly runs blogs of emerging creative writers in the city in an effort to get the attention of young readers.

The average reader in America is 50 years old. Hence, there are fears that broadsheets would lose their financial viability as readers grow old and die and the younger ones gravitate for “new media.” By introducing free tabloids, print media executives are hoping that someday these readers would “migrate” to broadsheets as they mature.

Still there is a fear that these free tabloids could cannibalize their broadsheets’ circulations. To avoid this, executives do not allow their tabloids, which have a separate staff and use different corporate identities, to use stories that appear in their broadsheets.

“Kids go college, graduate, get married, have kids, get involved in community affairs and start reading the newspaper,” noted Jim Booth, senior editor of St. Petersburg Times. “That’s the cycle then but not anymore. How to address this problem I don’t know. If I do, I’d be making millions by now.”

Other broadsheets like the Baltimore Sun and the Long Island, New York-based Newsday are freshening up their design in the hopes of winning back lost subscribers.

Many are apparently taking their cue from USA Today, whose colorful layout and feel-good stories enabled it to buck the trend of declining circulation.

Online news
THE one trend that everyone seems to agree on is establishing a presence on the Internet. News organizations in the US—and elsewhere— have poured huge investments into beefing up their online editions.

Media critics like Ken Auletta liken this to “planting a flag on the moon.” Many of the big names like New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post are experimenting on how to generate revenue from their online editions, from charging a few dollars for access to certain content to web advertising.

And it seems to be paying off for some.

After ten years, the Post has started to earn money from its online edition but others have not been as successful.

Still media executives are hoping that there will come a time when accessing online newspapers will become a daily routine that readers will pay for content.

Auletta himself is convinced that the future is on the Internet. There are indications, he said, that online advertising will continue to grow in the next ten years. If online newspapers could provide the kind of readers that advertisers want to reach, they could turn in tidy profits.

The San Diego Union-Tribune (circulation: 300,000 on weekdays and 400,00 on Sunday) seems to be doing just that. The newspaper’s SignOnSanDiego.com not only contain breaking news to compliment the paper, but is a portal in itself as it also provides extensive information on jobs, real estate, cars and boats, shopping, travel, health and fitness, sports, restaurants, museums, and even wireless news for Web-enabled cellular phones, personal digital assistants, and other portable devices. To access the day’s paper, one has to answer a little questionnaire, thus enabling the company to continuously capture demographic data about their readership.

“Right now, we are primarily a news organization,” explained Todd Merriman, senior editor for news of the San Diego-Union Tribune. “In the future, we are going to be a news media organization.”

Despite such developments, some media executives are still wondering if there’s really room for print media in the brave new world of instant information.

Auletta himself conceded that print media is, technology-wise, obsolete. Data now flows at the click of the mouse, while the newspaper has practically remained unchanged since the Gutenberg Revolution, delivering tangible papers to readers a day after.

But no one’s giving up the fight.

“Are we a dinosaur? Yes, we are,” Auletta said. “But hey, dinosaurs lived for millions of years!”

Stinging rebuke to journalism

2005-12-26T03:37:00.000-08:00

The hidden camera is a powerful instrument but also a dangerous gadget for the unscrupulous
Chandan Mitra
It’s a matter of time before sting operations of TV outstrip saas-bahu serials in terms of TRP ratings. Quite possibly, Ekta Kapoor may soon set up a Sting Division of Balaji Telefilms, which will have starlets posing as intrepid journalists trapping politicians accepting bribes in each episode. The serial could well be titled Main bhi kabhi MP tha and show the real-life tale of woe of a succession of people’s representatives getting stung, losing their seats in Parliament and getting expelled from their party.
I don’t intend to be facetious. The scenario visualised above is not to suggest that some MPs have been unfairly targeted, or that they should be pardoned. In fact, stringent punishment ought to be meted out to those who were caught on camera displaying crude greed. The Ethics Committees of both Houses will, surely, indict them and I hope suspend them for at least one more session. Ideally, those who have accepted cash for raising questions or negotiated a cut for sanctioning projects from their MPLADS funds should be stripped of their membership of Parliament. But since such a course might run into legal complications, suspension for one session may be a more practical alternative.
But the issue is larger and involves the ethics of sting journalism. The TV shows that revealed our politicians in the raw, however, were not necessarily motivated the high ideal of cleansing the system contrary to the producers’ claims. They were primarily driven by the urge to make a quick buck or climb a few notches on TRP ratings. So, two wrongs don’t make a right.
The latest sting operations are ethically unjustified because they are staged; they do not depict actual happenings. While that does not justify MPs taking money or conspiring to do so, the depictions violate the cardinal principle of sting operations: Entrapment of people or luring them to commit a crime through monetary inducements is prohibited worldwide. But there being no such law against this in India, channels have started using sting as a easy option to boost viewership.
Sting operations must conform to statutory laws that prohibit the invasion of privacy by the media. The hidden camera is a powerful instrument in the hands of a genuine crusader for social reform but an equally dangerous gadget in the hands of a greedy journalist. Taking pictures or recording conversations with a person without his/her knowledge is an unacceptable breach of the ethics of journalism and social behaviour. A couple of years ago, dandiya festival organisers in Gujarat were forced to ban camera phones because voyeurs started taking snaps of women’s cleavages at these dances and MMS-ing them to their acquaintances.
It has been argued that a distinction must be made between sex-laden MMS clips taken on the sly or even catching the likes of Shakti Kapoor and Aman Verma making advances to decoy starlets, and capturing politicians accepting bribes. Holier-than-thou Tehelka-types assert that their stings serve a public purpose whereas others amount to invasion of privacy. Unfortunately, no such distinction can actually be made.
As it transpires, at least one MP has indignantly asserted that he took the money only because it was offered for an NGO he runs and that he even gave a receipt for it. Without vouching for the veracity of his version, this is a perfectly credible scenario. In the growing desperation to make money or enhance TRPs, TV channels are quite capable of going the whole hog to frame politicians.
Sting has thus been reduced to a huge entertainment operation. People’s appetite for drama being insatiable they get easily addicted to newer forms of excitement. That’s why I believe saas-bahu is passé and sting has emerged as the biggest driver of India’s entertainment industry.
The time has come to devise appropriate regulatory mechanisms for conducting and airing such operations. A recent expose of sales tax officials accepting bribes is a justified use of the hidden camera since it shows actual transgression of laws. While not holding any brief for the condemnable MPs and small-time actors, it is necessary to underline that it is unfair to demand superhuman standards of morality from them.
Indian journalism has a fine record of investigation—Bofors and the fodder scams come immediately to mind. None of these exposes required resort to the hidden camera. So, I believe public interest journalism does not need to be conducted only through deceit, which is the basic principle of sting. Jocularly I remarked to some journalists the other day that soon we shall witness a sting to end all stings: It will be called Operation Haman and show all MPs in their bathrooms to prove the old adage, “Hamam mein hum sabhi nangey hain” (We are all naked in the bath). It might not be such a far-fetched thought!

The writer is Editor, The Pioneer and MP, Rajya Sabha.

Manic Media

2005-12-26T03:23:00.000-08:00

The recent cash-for-query sting operation has sparked heated debate on the methods news organisations are using to grab headlines and ‘consumers’ in an overheated and wild media market. What’s going on?
Snooping to conquer
Apart from the days of the Emergency, Indian media history has, perhaps, not witnessed a moment such as this, when the press fraternity has risen to the occasion, both in defence and in alarm, to allegations of legal adventurism, and interrogated its ethical parameters. The Cobrapost-Aaj Tak sting is not, however, the only reason. It is only the latest in a series of sting operations in a country where the abundance of corruption is matched only by the non-functionality of the institutions that were created to prevent them.
On the one hand is the need to keep such a country on its toes. On the other, is the ethics of it all. In the previous cases, the verdict was against those indicted in the sting operations. This time around, the questions were loud and clear: “What was the point? How much lower do we need to stoop to dig out muck?”
There’s got to be more to this than the holier than thou need to expose corruption. In a mature democracy that many believe we are, is it imperative that the media subverts the other pillars of democracy — the judiciary, legislature and the executive? And whence comes this spurt in media vanguardism, anyway?
The usual suspects would be ratings, and the vulgar race for eye-balls. There are 12 national news channels in India airing what supposedly passes for news. Such proliferation can be blamed either on a hunger for news (among a couch-stuck multitude) or a hunger for revenue. Both these appetites are catered to with a spectacular coverage of unspectacular events. But loud histrionics — which accompanies all manner of (heart) breaking news, from plunging necklines to crumbling civilisations — is forever being driven to ever louder levels by news channels caught in a downward spiral of one-upmanship.
At the end of the day, it is the sting operation which gives that edge, that smell of exclusivity that is sure to dwarf the rival broadcaster. The audience, on the other hand, finds it irresistible when the immediacy of news and the adventure of a reality show are sandwiched into a single programme.
Tehelka.com’s high-profile defence expose started the trend. But television channels picked up where they left off. Recent stings like the casting couch and ‘Operation Duryodhan’ clearly prove that while media companies are struggling with all the competition, they are also converging in certain ways.
Also, if deception is synonymous with stings, journalists have no claim to moral high ground.
The ‘foxification’ of journalism, a term derived from Rupert Murdoch’s pet Fox, which taught The Sun and Daily Mirror a thing or two about populism, was always a concern. But never did all The President’s Men fall so miserably in indignity, as perhaps this week. At least not in India. - Sayandeb Chowdhury
Law and behold
There are no specific laws in India that deal with sting operations or the purchase and use of hidden recording equipment. However, there are laws which need to be taken into consideration while examining the legality of sting operations.
No one can impose on another’s privacy without following the due course of law. For instance, if someone wants to tap the phone of any individual, he or she would require proper authorisation from the concerned authorities.
Section 72(3) of the Information Technology Act reads:
Whoever intentionally captures or broadcasts an image of a private area of an individual without his consent, and knowingly does so under circumstances violating the privacy of that individual, shall be liable to pay compensation not exceeding Rs25 lakh to the person so affected.
Evidence permissible in court depends on the manner in which it has been procured. If a person has been taped while taking a bribe, it is permissible as evidence. However, if the person has been induced into taking a bribe which has then been recorded, this will not be permissible.

DNA Saturday, December 17, 2005 21:43 IST

Free Press

2005-12-18T23:08:00.000-08:00

- By Seema Mustafa

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, with his deep love and appreciation for the United States, should also take a leaf out of its book on media management. And should direct the men around him to do the same. For while US President George W. Bush has made distortions and lies the hallmark of his administration, there is a certain penchant for transparency and respect for dissent etched into the American system. The US officials, given a choice, prefer to share information than hide it and criticism is not dismissed but taken on board, and literally handled with care.

So while on the one side there are the images of the embedded journalists, on the other there are those who have not hesitated to question the Bush administration in words more scathing, perhaps, than used by many of us here in writing on the war on Iraq for instance. And what is encouraging is the ability of US officialdom to listen to the criticism within, to respond to it, and to work to counter it not by issuing threats but as scribes point out, with counter arguments, special briefings and a certain transparency that might not convince but certainly helps inform. Of course, externally Bush could be weaving plans to bomb television outfits like Al Jazeera, but internally he is bound by a certain code of discipline arising from the well entrenched right to information that does not allow him to target journalists, or treat them with disrespect.

It is quite the opposite in India. Prime Minister Singh and his men-in-arms might be bending backwards to accommodate US interests here, but clearly criticism still rattles South Block windowpanes. The response is twofold. First, invariably it is of anger finding expression in threats. The other day senior editors invited for a dinner hosted by a Cabinet minister for international guests were amazed when in the presence of visiting ministers, ambassadors and others, this gentleman launched into a loud tirade against Indian journalists. The anger was palpable and had the suave diplomats around him shaking their heads in wonder, as the minister used words not usually heard at such functions to describe scribes.

Rapists, murderers, he literally shouted and his journalist guests bit their tongues as a nasty retort would have created a major embarrassment for the government of India. So much for Indian democracy, remarked a guest. He is worried about retaining his portfolio, the journalists explained. Then of course, there are the SMS messages from the PMO expressing pleasure, or displeasure as the case may be, about news reports. And then there are the spokespersons of ministries, getting so carried away in their temporary seats of power, that they actually threaten not to allow a certain journalist or a newspaper for a select briefing if their rules are not followed to the last comma.

If this does not work, the second approach is of exclusion. And it is this approach that makes a mockery of tolerance, and the government’s supposed commitment to right to information. For doors are closed and the effort of officialdom is to deny the journalist information by keeping him or her out of special briefings, and closer interactions with the corridors of power. Of course, most of what is shared in these briefings is so minimalist in nature, that the journalist does not miss anything in real terms. But what is being questioned here, is the approach and the mindset that is now getting institutionalised and carries through governments, be it the BJP-led NDA or the Congress-led UPA. The taxpayers’ money is regarded as personal bounty, by the little politicians who make it to the top, and is used not to serve the country, but to hide the facts, to play with information, and to target journalists and newspapers who do not toe the prescribed line.

Journalism is a great profession. Unfortunately, many of us who have drifted into this have lost sight of this fact. It is a powerful profession provided the power is used — as in any other profession — with responsibility. To say that this does not always happen, is true. But to allege that this never happens, is blatant disinformation spread by those who have a lot to hide, and are scared of a media that reports the truth without, to use a near forgotten cliché, fear or favour. Journalism is not sensationalism. And in India, the media exercises a certain code that prevents it from writing on the private lives of politicians. If this were not the case, then believe me, the link between Andaleeb Sehgal and Jagat Singh as well as other scions of political royalty would have been irreversibly established by the newspapers a long time ago; and reports about political intervention by friends and families of ministers in the crucial matter of transfers and postings would have changed the complexion of Union Cabinets.

It is not that journalists do not know the truth. They do not always write it. Restraint restrains their pen, which is more than fine, if it is do with a certain ethics and the rule of law. It is unforgivable if this comes from authoritarian proprietors, self-styled editors and worse still, from the government. The situation is becoming so lopsided that while the first form of restraint is generally exercised by the responsible media, the second restraint is crippling the journalists’ power to inform, and to act as a valuable watchdog. It is really a vicious circle, and the scribes unable always to look beyond the day are failing to detect it, with the result that every little politician and his subservient official now stand up and attack the media at will while we stand and watch and listen and hope that they do not mean the "us" but just the "them."

The question here is: who are they to attack the media? What is their credibility or for that matter their locus standi? Little politicians, ministers today, and on the streets tomorrow with their integrity compromised, and their hands dirty with black money are certainly not qualified to question the journalist. Little officials, following the politicians’ dictates, shifting from one policy to another without a brain cell being exercised, looking for that big posting, certainly do not have the authority to question the media. These columns have carried several articles criticising the media, but when those in power misuse their offices to disinform and brief selectively, then the time has definitely come for journalists to close ranks and shout a determined: Stop! Those drawing their salaries from the taxpayer must be made to share information, freely and fairly and not use their private wars with scribes and newspapers to suppress facts, or make information available only to a select few and not all.

For instance, the Prime Minister, at best a representative of the people (although in the present case he is only a representative of Congress president Sonia Gandhi), cannot be allowed to determine who will travel with him and who will not on an official visit. If the rule is that the Prime Minister can take mediapersons when he travels abroad, then the opportunity has to be given to all registered and recognised newspapers in turn. Or else the rule should be abolished. He is not going in his private plane, he is not being accompanied by just his family and friends, he is going as the head of the government of India on government money and he does not have the authority to turn Air India One into a flight carrying favourite scribes. In doing so he is denying information on a long term basis to the others, and in democratic India he definitely does not have the right to do so.

Journalism is a grand profession. A proud, and highly respectable profession. A word of advice to journalists from a battle-scarred veteran: remember this, and do not allow yourself to be browbeaten by those who have little respect for the facts, and none for the truth.