While technology may change our lives, may indeed change the manner of recording and disseminating news, the necessity to remain true to the profession in matters relating to truth and objectivity surely will stay constant, says M.V. Kamath.

The changing face of the media

BEFORE one presumes to discuss what is the right role for the media, one might ask a simpler question: what, traditionally speaking, is the role of the media? And the traditional answer would be: To inform, to educate and to entertain. Nobody has as yet laid down the proportion in which these three should be presented. Serious journals, say, like Economic and Political Weekly or a daily like The Hindu, may give a preponderance of space to informing and educating their readers. Tabloids — and other journals that do not have to be named — lean on entertainment. This is not necessarily a journalistic sin. Entertainment is as much a part of life as education is though a right mix of information, education and entertainment would be an ideal worth struggling for. That, indeed, would be the right role for the media.

Who is to determine what is the right role? The spontaneous answer to it would be: why, the editor, of course! In ages past it was the editor who laid down the law of what goes into his paper and what should not. In a newspaper office, the editor had the final word. The buck stopped at his table. It was he who presided over the morning meeting of the senior editorial staff and it was he who determined the intellectual, emotional, educational, informational and entertainment content of the next day’s issue.

Newspapers were known by their editors. It could be a Tushar Kanti Ghosh, a K.Srinivasan, a Syed Abdullah Brelvi, a Frank Moraes, a Stalin Srinivasan, an M. Chalapathi Rao or an S. Sadanand. On the first day’s issue of the Bangalore-based Deccan Herald, right above the masthead was to be seen prominently displayed the name of the editor: Pothan Joseph. The editor was held in that much importance. No more.

That was exactly 50 years ago (June 17, 1948, to be exact). Things are now changing rapidly — even unbelievably. Editors no more carry any clout. Increasingly they are being "down-graded", in keeping with the times. The concept of one editor as media-supremo is under siege. And in many newspapers it has ceased to exist. Time was, not long ago, when everyone knew, for instance, who the editor of The Times of India was. Today the editor hardly matters. It is the Executive Director of Bennett Coleman who really is in charge of the paper.

This was clearly spelt out recently by Arun Arora, a Director of Bennett Coleman & Co and Chief Executive of The Economic Times, in an address to the Rotary Club of Bombay. True, as the saying goes, one swallow does not a summer make, and what is true with Bennett Coleman is not necessarily true of other newspaper managements elsewhere in the country. But Arora’s explicit description of how the Times Group of papers is run carries its own moral. This was detailed in the Bulletin of the Rotary Club of Bombay.

According to Arora, an effort was made to define the Group’s business. Was it in the business of newspapers, magazines, printing, publishing or "events"? A search revealed that the group was in none of these businesses. Arora put it this way: "Our business, we said to ourselves, is audiences. One of our audience is the reader, the other is the advertiser. And we can have quality readers only if we meet their hopes and aspirations. These quality readers have them to be brought to the quality of advertisers so that their message percolates down and we, in turn, can make money which can make us stronger".

The next question that Bennett Coleman had to face was determining its goal. Was it to increase the circulation and become world leader? Was it to look for revenue increases to keep on making money? Or did it want to make profits? Apparently after a long debate in the Bennett Coleman hierarchy, it was agreed that all these factors were incidental and would automatically fall in place if the ideal goal of "maximisation of brand equity" was kept in mind. There was also agreement that if the company grew in credibility and prestige, even as it became immediately recognisable and readily accepted by all, everything else followed.

To quote Arora again: "First, the Group’s age-old hierarchical structure was decimated because it was felt that it was turning the company into a sort of army, with orders coming from top and the rest merely obeying orders. This, it was felt, was anathema to the very process of creativity. The old system was replaced with the "matrix" structure in which there were "a lot of people who are on the playing field and running and when the ball drops, anybody can pick up the ball and run with it. And therefore the job gets done and people get satisfaction". To build flexibility within the organisation so that people had authority even at the lowest levels, people with knowledge were placed at all levels.

This is how he analysed the situation: "If we have somebody subscribing to one ideology, we should have another person subscribing to another ideology. If somebody says he is for the Shiv Sena, there should be somebody equally strong for the BJP, the Congress, the Left and so on, so that all kinds of opinions are expressed in the paper. We call this pluralism... so we decided to separate news and views. Today our leading papers have no single person in charge of the editorial. People laughed when we brought in this concept; they said if there is no editor, the papers will wither and die... Now it’s there for everybody to see that the papers have gone from strength to strength". There is now an editor for the editorial page and a News Editor who is responsible for the news on all other pages. Bennett Coleman believes this approach has turned out to be eminently successful.

To promote group brand equity, the first decision was to think of each publication in The Times Group as a "brand". Thus, The Times, The Economic Times were looked at as "brands". Even within The Times, there were "sub-brands" such as The Sunday Times, The Saturday Times and so on. For each "brand", the company appointed a "Brand Manager" to look after it. With "brand managers" for every "product" the Group went one step further and appointed a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) for every "Brand". Thus there is a CEO for The Times, another for The Economic Times and so on, all down the line.

If so much space has been given to describe the structure in Bennett Coleman it is merely to point out that it might come to be known as a trail-blazer. Already, in many papers, the editor has been reduced to taking care only of the editorial page. As Tennyson might have said, "the old order changeth yielding place to new" and managements fulfil themselves in many ways lest one management system becomes cause for self-destruction.

All this is strictly in terms of internal management. The larger question is whether in the next 20 years newspapers will continue to retain their present structure, even as "products". In the western world, as The Economist (July 4 1998) has noted, news is focusing away from politicians, the number of political reporters is shrinking, and the number of consumer-affairs correspondents is growing and even the way stories are covered is also changing. This is not quite true of reportage in India, but this could change. Certainly the amount of space given to consumer affairs has been steadily growing in recent months as even a casual glance at our national newspapers would indicate.

The Economist says: "In any other industry, competition drives companies to differentiate their products. But in the news business, competition seems to push news editors not so much to find something interesting and new, but to pour resources into the same old story". This could possibly be the shape of things to come in India and one must watch out for it. But massive changes are noticeable already in some of our "national" papers like The Times of India, The Hindu, The Hindustan Times, Indian Express and The Statesman. Supplements are the order of the day.

In all this, what is the role of technology? To pose the question more bluntly, will technology make newspapers redundant? To say that at least as of now, technology has not replaced the newspaper in the developed world is to say the obvious. If the New York Times or The Telegraph of London can survive and even do better financially, one does not smell any immediate danger to our own newspapers. But who can tell with any degree of conviction?

A decade ago such words and phrases like "Web",

"Internet" "E-mail", "Indolink", "HotBot" etc would have been gibberish. Today if you subscribe to Internet, you have the world at your finger-tips. Information flows into your living room or your study or your den where you have the infrastructure installed. You may not need the whole newspaper, which few read in full, anyway. All that one who is anxious to know what is happening around the world will have to do is to press the right knobs to get one-sentence news ‘bytes’ or texts of editorials. Newspapers would then only be for raddi.

Yet another phenomenon, already noticeable in Andhra Pradesh, may yet come to be replicated and that is "decentralisation" of news. In Andhra Pradesh, the journal Eeenadu has as many editions as there are districts, each edition specialising in news pertaining to that district. Again, in Mumbai, one afternoon daily has two editions, one for the city and one for the suburbs. It is arguable whether this is something worthy of emulation, but the point is stressed that each edition has the merit of giving fuller coverage of an event that is meaningful to its circulation area.

With affluence and price reduction in computers and growing interest in getting news quick and fast, more and more people may like to know what is happening even as it is happening. We have the instance of the CNN reporting the Gulf War "byte" by "byte", instance by instance. Just as once the teleprinter ran round the clock in newspaper offices, in the course of the next quarter century we may have citizens subscribing to on-line news, round-the -clock update of political events, crime and the stock exchanges. No more would there be a need to rustle the papers and skip over the stock exchange quotations or the crime page, to get at what one is really looking for.

The news reporter will have to compete with television and here one has to deal with a new phenomenon. A cricket match, for instance, has already been seen by thousands of people on the TV screen. In addition, they have heard the commentary as well. What can the sports correspondent now write of the match that the viewer does not know about? Here is where his ingenuity and his sense of "I was there" comes in the picture. In a sense, television news is becoming less of a performance and more like print journalism. The print journalist faces a new challenge. He has to provide fresh angles to the same story with which the viewer is already more than familiar.

Admittedly, in such a vast country as India, television — even with three or four channels — still will not be able to compete with the print media which can spread its coverage right down to the small town and village. It is doubtful, for instance whether TV can really beat Eeenadu in news coverage in Andhra Pradesh, unless TV has a recording team in each district headquarters. But one thing can be freely stated: In future, the news reporter for the print media will have increasingly to go in not only for providing spot news, but for backgrounding, which, given the constraints of time, TV will not be able to provide. This means that a news reporter has really to be knowledgeable where once he was merely a recorder of events.

A quarter century or more ago, but more especially in the 1930s and 1940s, knowledge of shorthand was almost a must for a journalist. His task was merely to report what was actually said, and to do so accurately. Today, the short-hand typist is as dead as the dodo. A reporter, for that matter, would not even have to go back to his office to type out a report. He can speak to his office right from the scene of action.

Even more innovative is the fact that pictures are now moving from video tape to computers. In an advanced newsroom, journalists can write and edit pictures simultaneously. And as the technology is changing, so are working practices. As The Economist notes: "Chris Shaw, editor of Britain’s 5 News, produces an hourly news update with four people who edit, write, man a camera, mix sound, mix vision, time, run the teleprompt, transmit and present the bulletin".

India is still at the beginning of the technological revolution. But in another two decades it will surely catch up and it is a brave soul indeed who can correctly predict the shape of things to come.

While technology may change our lives, may indeed change the manner of recording and disseminating news, the necessity to remain true to the profession in matters relating to truth and objectivity surely will stay constant.