People's Republic of Medialand

Citizen Journalism

As newspapers struggle to retain the mindspace and eyeballs of readers from the increasing dominance of electronic media, the challenge for many is how do you get the audience more involved in your product? Interactive features is one way out but they aren't enough. Newspapers, mostly in Mumbai, have recently introduced sections where pictures sent by readers are published and in some cases they are even allowed to file a report on some recent developments. And we are not talking about Op-Ed pages and letters column, which are often counter-productive as some writers tend to dominate these sections.

It's still early days for citizen journalism in India, but its already an established trend abroad and newspapers in India will do good if they pick up the lessons already learnt in developed markets. The London bombings and BBC's smart use of viewers' reportage has already made headlines.

Of course there are challenges. From citizen journalists it can easily turn into citizen paparazzi. The Kareena Kapoor incident is still fresh in most people's mind. Factors like lack of accountability, code of ethics and responsibility, corner stones of tradinational journalism will be questioned, but there are ways and means to overcome these and rewrite rules.

Online companies as usual are at the forefront of these changes. Yahoo is betting on citizen journalism and podcasting seem to make business sense too.

So whats the next thing to think about. Methinks, its embedded readers... A dedicated set of readers who reads the newspapers every morning at their home and send in their feedback. Readers are hardly taken seriously by most journalists and stories are often written keeping in midn whether fellow journalists would like it. If journalists want their readers to take their newspaper seriously and not switch-over to other media channels, we need to give readers the hot seat in our though process. Time to hand over the charge back to where it belongs, the readers.

That's The Way To Be

The net may have failed to emerge as the ultimate tool for commerce, but chances are that it's going to change the way we percieve media and challenge the very notion of it. No, I am not saying that news portals are going to emerge as the biggest thing to happen in the last two years in medialand. It's the sheer participation the internet allows to various people that is going to redefine media. Extremely fragmented, hopelessly divergent and probably commercial unviable, the new media will be powered by the people who today consumes media as opposed to the conventional model where in a a select who sit in their newsrooms decide what millions ought to read and think.

I am talking about the burgeoning of the blogs, community sites, wikis, every thing that allows everyone to post and publish their views and opinion and share it with anyone who is concerned. It's the ultimate democratisation of the medialand, no longer dominated by a few media barons or paper tigers who force their view onto others. Everyone on this earth is going to have a say. Political movements may have failed to bring about people's republic, but the net is set to make media a truly people's way of expression. An individual expression like graphiti, long ignored and in some place considered illegal, can be shared with millions of netizens across places.

The US elections saw an unprecedented amount of coverage on the net. Anyone having any opinion shared it and put his/her views forward. I believe, more than blogs, wikis may well be the ones which will lead this. Wikipedia, an online enclyclopedia is open-source and you and I can go there and change the profile of a person and that implies millions can simultaneously change the content inorder to suit their views and leave it for passive readers to interpret it. Wikipedia became a battleground during the presidential elections as George Bush and Kerry's profiled where tinkered the maximum number of times.

Few questions which come to my mind now:

1. Twenty years from now, will a student of history go through websites/blogs/wikis to understand and research on a particular event or check out the old issues of the newspapers, magazines and traditional media?
2. What happens to censorship?
3. Will fanatics and megalomaniac manage to get a larger canvas to play on?
4. How is a tool like Google News going to affect traditional media? Does it pose a larger threat to the local newspapers or to the national newspapers?
5. Are these commercially viable and more importantly do these form of media need to be commercially viable in order to succeed?

Where do you stand?

Responsibility & Media

In a recent article in New York Times, a writer quoting a survey asks the question, "Do Newspapers Make Good News Look Bad?".

In India, most would agree that the media in general has a strong liberal bias, while a few publications have a more dangerous extreme-right bias. The rightwing is however very limited and most Indian publications are dominated by editors who have grown up in an educational and social environment that celebrated the cause of socialism. Quite naturally, there are very few publications that claim to have a libetarian outlook and it seems that in US too, leftist ideologues still dominate the media in more ways that one. The NYT story writes:

How can a nugget of news like the economy's addition of 308,000 new jobs in March - the biggest monthly gain in about four years - yield a report that The Associated Press labeled "Bond prices tumble on jobs data"? Bias, the researchers suspected.

In a new paper, Kevin A. Hassett and John R. Lott Jr., economists at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative research organization in Washington, say they have discovered that economic reporters commit the same archetypal sin: slanting the news unequivocally in favor of the Democrats.

The two economists combed through 389 newspapers and A.P. reports contained in the LexisNexis database from January 1991 through May 2004, during the administrations of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. They picked out headlines about gross domestic product growth, unemployment, retail sales and orders of durable goods and classified the headlines' depiction of the economy as either positive, negative, neutral or mixed. Then they crunched some numbers.

The core question that crops up over here is whether newspaper editors should abstain from reflecting their political leanings in their paper and whether it should be limited just to the editorial pages. Any news can be interpreted in more than one way, and can newspapers, which subscribe to a high level of responsibility and ethics and enjoy an immense trust among its readers, be allowed to decide the way in which interpretation to make.

To answer this question, we need to know what exactly does our readers want? In an environment dominated by the electronic media, what is the exact role of newspapers that deliver news, which in most cases is 12 hours after the reader has watched it on the television. If readers have already got a fair grasp of the events from TV, does he want to read the same story again in a newspaper or does he look forward to analysis and opinions so that he can form his own opinion on the event? On the other hand, reporting any event without any interpretation or opinion can only attract readers who are learning about the news for the first time, which in these days, is quite unusual. So has the role of the newspaper changed from an information provider to that of an opinion-maker?

If that is the case, then newspapers must make their ideological leanings clear so that a reader can choose from various newspapers and select on with which he can clearly identify with. That's perfectly okay, as long as the slant is consistent and transparent. On the other hand, if the role of the newspaper is to provide unbiased information, efforts should be made to keep the main pages of the newspaper free of any bias.

While this may be a raging debate in US, in India a more core question of, 'what makes news?' needs to be decided.

Of Hangmen and Census

Over the past one-month or a little more than that, two events have shown the extent to which Indian media can go in order to grab their viewer's attention. People familiar with the Dhananjay-hanging case will remember Nata Mullick for a long time to come. For the uninitiated, Mullick was the hangman, a profession that he shares with his family, but an almost unused professional. His services were being called for after 12 years, i.e., the time when the last hanging took place in Calcutta.

While the heinous crime Dhananjay committed and the debate on whether capital punishment should be allowed at all was well reported in the media, what gained center-place before and after the hanging was Nata Mullick. Almost every media, and all most in every form - print, TV and online, covered extensively his interviews, the way he prepares for the hanging day (inclusive of such revolting details like the lenght and cost of the rope, that he uses banana split to smoothen the rope, that he drinks before he hangs...) in the media. He was almost treated as a hero. Intelligent Mullick started charging the media for interviews and now apparently has a PR firm to manage his publicity during the local Durga Puja festival. That he was a person of no consequence, can never become a role model for any one and that he deserves no more than a line in a story on the hanging, didn't concern anyone.

However, the results of the media-spotlight were immediate. At least three kids in West Bengal and one in far-off Maharashtra tried to emulate media's most talked about personality - Nata Mullick and in the act killed their friends. The second event is the more recent declaration of census data.

The Government recently released the 2001 census data and next thing to appear on the morning's newspapers and TV channels was the data classified on the basis of religion. The data showed (and which was subsequently corrected because the govt. choose to ignore certain parameters which it sets for itself and which distorted the final results) that while the rate of population growth of Hindus had declined and that of Muslims and Christians had increased. That these minorities make less than 20% and 4% of the population respectively and that the increase was of some basis points and couldn't make any difference to the demographic profile of the country in 20 years even if all Hindus stopped procreating, didn't matter. It became a hot political issue.

The media for its part safely ignored the other ways in which the data was organized. More relevant things like literacy, sex ratio, housing and healthcare were also made available but were given a pass. That the country, which these editors never stop from reminding, is prone to sectarian violence and some odd politicians make a living out of spreading hatred on the basis of religion, too didn't matter. The news was carried along with strange analysis of the trends and it soon became the topic of conversation among the majority and a topic of concern for the minorities.

In both cases, the events and the slant was very much newsworthy and is guaranteed to grab huge reader attention, who may also be interested in knowing such things. But where do we draw the line between responsibility and means that we use to grab our readers attraction? This never gets debated, at least in the Indian media space.

Billion Dollar Question

It's not very often that you get an opportunity to compare publications on an equal footing. Doing it comes with the risk of never achieving parity before giving a judgment. The Birla story however has thrown up a unique opportunity, quite similar to what a few media commentators did while tracking all American publications on 12th September 2002. However, in this case too, its impossible to compare all the newspapers but the window of oppurtunity lies in the case of magazines, though just three to be precise.

Three large and well established magazines - India Today, Business World (BW) and The Week - had the Birlas on their cover, last weekend. While readers may have by now experiencing a fatigue factor over the Birla coverage, I was merely enjoying reading the same story across the three magazines, and trust me, they were not quite the same. Coming up at least a week after the entire episode blew up, there was a level playing field and also a limited set of news and events for everyone to report, and so they did and but the men stood out from the boys.

Business World's coverage led by DN Mukerjea was by far the best. It had all the regular information, but it was the way it was written and the exact details, which made it, read like almost a thriller. And that's the way, I guess, it should be. Even small details like Lodha took out the will from a everyday-used plastic was mentioned, stuff readers will always remember along with the magazine.

India Today's coverage was a poor second. Just about okay with occasional mistakes, like it quoted two parts of the same will and said that they were two different versions and will be contested. The Week's coverage was, plain and simple, pathetic... you expect a very senior journo to write this kind of the story and in this case, if it was, then its really sad. I am presuming that it a job of a young rookie.

However, another reason why BW stands out is that it did ask the validity of the Rs 5000 crore (roughly a billion dollars) figure most people are quoting. It showed, and by correct means that it should be aroound Rs 550 crore, a more realistic figure. That's something none of the magazines and not even the newspapers seem to have explained and every one was going by their won crazy estimations, a trait often common with journos when they are chasing deadlines. TVS Shenoy however pointed this out on rediff long time back. And, by know, dear reader, if you claim to have got tired of reading on Birlas and will jump at anyone saying that you know enough about them, well, its time for some intersting trivia, which you may have missed.

Did you know that the Birlas were not always Birlas or that opium brought in the first big bucks for the Birlas? It's time to read ET!

Postscript: Quite expectedly Business Today too came up with an issue with the Birlas in cover. Though they got a week more, the story had the same amount of information and BW continues to be the best. However, again quite expectedly, BT also had a story on the other young scions in business families and the possible scenarios in those business families. However, a better story would have been on whether business families in India Inc have credible succession plans. Tough story, agreed, why didn't we do it? It requires good amount of resources, a whole lot of journos are required to get working on it to bring out the story before the issue dies down and BT has it. They should have taken the risk.

EAVESdropping

The appointment of Mythili Bhusnurmath as the Chief Editor of Financial Express (FE) has finally confirmed what many of us were suspecting. Women are making their presence felt in Indian journalism. She becomes the first chief editor of a major Indian publication who happens to be a woman.

Mythili was managing the editorial pages of The Economic Times (ET), prior to joining FE and replaces Sanjaya Baru, who took over as the media adviser to the prime minister. In India at least, newsrooms are increasingly having an equal number of women journos, and I am not talking about people in the desk. At least in Times of India group, women journalists are almost as many as men and the Mumbai Resident Editor of both ET and Times of India are women.

Though many would point out that it's just an aberration, and that most editors and bureau chiefs continue to be men, most will agree that at least among our generation, there are more women becoming journos than men and it's only a matter of time before Indian media houses becoming a truly diverse organisation. (A WACC study proves the point.)

Not an easy feat by any means, considering that while we journalists talk about transperancy, corporate governance, technology implementation and all the good things companies should follow, media organisations in most cases are the last to follow. At least when it comes to gender equaltites and work place diversity, we follow what we preach. So is it that when it comes to women in media, we in India are at a far better position than developed countries including US?

Our story on women in technology proved that, but unfortunately, I couldn't gather any good data to prove this particular point. However, a couple of interesting factoids about women journos in States did come up while I was searching on the emergence of women in journalism.

Born in 1864, Elizabeth Jane Cochran is considered to be the first woman investigative journalist. Her pen name was Nellie Bly and one of her claims to fame is that she broke Jules Verne's fictional character Phileas Fogg's record for traveling around the world in 80 days by more than a week. Older than Cochran, Ida Tarbell, is also considered one of the pioneers, but she started her career late and later became a celebrity in her own right. But there is something more interesting if you look at the character of Anne Royall, who made her mark in the 18th century.

I am not quite sure though, whether she can be called a journo, considering her ways and means of getting news. She actually interviewed US president John Quincy Adams sitting on his clothes as he bathed in the Potomac and refused to budge before he answered all her questions. She would tour the American South in a coach along with four slaves searching for gossip and news and published something called the "Paul Fry". So what does all this mean? Nothing much, news organisations are quite similar to any other organisation and benefits of diversity are common all across.

For now, journalism, at least broadcast journalism, is the career of choice among the women in India. Not just because Priety Zinta plays the role of a journo in the flick Lakshya or a few ads which feature journos, but a study conducted by Grey Cells, a division of ad agency Grey Worldwide, called Evesdropping actually pointed out that broadcast journo is the career of choice for the maximum number of young Indian girls (41% to be precise)!