If you are over 35, stretch your mind to your teenage years. Do you remember thinking that Russia and India were the best of friends, that the non-aligned movement was the biggest summit in the world? Many of those beliefs and ideas seem foolish now. Yet they came to our head and we lived by them. We accepted an ideology, a government and decades of economic inactivity since we believed that our mixed economy, non-aligned, left leaning way of life was the best option. If you think India should have snapped out of the Russian bear hug faster and switched affections to Uncle Sam, you’re doing it again. You are reacting to what you read, hear and watch on news.News is to the mind what infrastructure is to the economy – a crucial network of information, analyses, opinions, discussions, arguments and visuals. These ostensibly form the backdrop of our lives, but are actually active ingredients in everything we do. If the network of roads, railways or electric supply is weak, it will hamper your ability to work efficiently. If it is good, you will hardly have an opinion on it.
Similarly, if a democracy does not have a free news market with lots of debate and discussion, the state of everything from institutions to government suffers. The way we think, live, work, the choices we make, could destroy us. All it takes is a look at our past or that of the former communist countries or current dictatorial regimes to realise that. That is why a free news market is important. It is a non-negotiable fact of a working democracy. Coming as we do from a controlled news environment, a free news market is a concept alien to us. More often than not, it is equated with the freedom of expression. But there is more to a free news market than that. It is also about the freedom to do business – without capital, technology or other constraints. In a sense, the Indian news media has been freed only over the last three to five years, though technically, it has been ‘free’ since independence.
Partial press freedom came in 2002 when FDI was allowed. It became completely open in 2005, when foreign institutional investment was permitted. Though TV was given a free hand in 1992, capital and other controls meant that we did not really see a free news market till 2003. The Internet is largely free and so is the mobile phone. Radio is still hamstrung by regulations that forbid news broadcasting, but if a pending Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) paper becomes policy, that should change soon.The effect of this freedom is resonating across the country as news media options go through the roof – 67 news channels in 11 languages, 99 million copies of newspapers sold daily and hundreds of websites vying just for the privilege of giving us news. And they are battling for a scarce commodity – our time.This, in turn, has made information, opinion and analysis available to everybody, not just a few English speaking people. More importantly, it has given a voice to large tracts of India. Notice the ease with which Indians face TV cameras now, whether to show their anger at something or to take part in reality shows. As the prime accused in the murder of his daughter, Dr Talwar and his family have been using the news outlets to tell their side of the story. That is exactly what his compounder Krishna’s family did when he was arrested. Ten years ago, we would never have seen or heard of them after they had been arrested. “What you are seeing is years of repression coming out in aggression,” says Anurradha Prasad, managing director, BAG Films and Media (the company’s first 24 hour news channel was launched last year).This freedom has come with its own set of problems – that of tabloidisation, sensationalism, of selling out to advertisers and the blurring of ethical boundaries long held sacrosanct in the media business. Does that mean that it should be regulated? That we need a content code with committees and sub-committees? No, we don’t. What we see is a phase in the evolution of a free news market and reacting to it at one point in time and locking ourselves into regulation will be disastrous. “Right now, the situation is chaotic, this will eventually balance out, maturity will come,” says Prasad.
“I don’t think that any punitive action is needed against news channels. The government would like to control them because they show government shortcomings,” says Sanjay Gupta, editor and chief executive officer, Jagran Prakashan (it is part owner of IBN7, a Hindi news channel). Jawaharlal Nehru had once famously remarked that even a bad press was acceptable, but that it should be free and self-regulated. The UK is a great example of a country where the tabloid and the serious survive and make money and each operates within the same regulatory framework. In India, there is already a good programming code in place; all the news media industry needs to do is apply it well. The thing is, the industry is too busy coping, enjoying, moping or freaking out on the growth and so are consumers. This, then, is the perfect time to ask where it is all headed. This is the right time to look at the future of news.
After more than a month of research, about 40 interviews and reading tomes on the news business worldwide, one thing is clear. The biggest debates in the Indian news market currently are about the amount of news, its ability to bring in fair returns for investors and the quality of it. Two facts need to be hardwired into our minds before we begin the discussion. One, mass media dominates in India, a high volume market. The focus of this survey will, largely, be mass media vehicles for news. The online world is limited to 55 million people, even if it is the world you and I occupy. TV reaches 575 million people, whereas newspapers are read by more than 300 million. So, for those looking for buzzwords like user generated content or WAP and VAS, this survey will disappoint. It sticks to India’s reality. Two, for too long, the dialogue in policy matters has been limited to the middle class English speaking population. The Centre for Media Studies (CMS) data shows that in August 2007, a whopping 57 per cent of the stories in national newspapers originated from Delhi. Some of the top newspapers and channels are based in New Delhi, so the city is the de facto lens through which any event is viewed. There is a joke among most analysts that there is a Delhi-Mumbai corridor of English speakers, beyond which any discussion on India barely matters.The fact is that only 100 million Indians speak English, while 500 million speak Hindi and its various dialects. The other 500 million or so are split between several languages. Just as a free news market is a democratic axiom, so too is a heterogeneous one that reflects the pulls and pushes of all interest groups. The news market now evolving is pushing the business of news to a point where the debate on national issues is truly national.If it manages to do that, the free news market we see now would have achieved something that decades of control could not – involve all Indians in any discussion of their future.
It is the sound of an entire country going jabber, jabber. India has more than 575 million TV watchers, about 302 million newspaper readers, 55 million surfers and 1.2 million bloggers. Look at it another way – as a country, we buy 99 million copies of newspapers every day, making it the second largest newspaper market in the world, after the US. At 115 million TV sets and 275 million mobile phones, we are among the top five TV and mobile phone markets in the world. We have 67 news channels, arguably more than any other country in the world. If you total up the average across newspapers, news TV and online, Indians spend an average of 50 minutes a day consuming news.
Last year, advertisers spent Rs 12,000-odd crore to reach them in those 50 minutes, according to data put together by Starcom Worldwide. Add in subscription and news is a roughly Rs 16,000 crore market. That makes it the second largest media business in India after entertainment – in audience share, topline and now investor interest, too. Why do we have so much news? "There is an influx of funds because news is elastic; there has been no fatigue factor yet. Have you seen any channel close down?" asks Arnab Goswami, editor in chief, Times Now. "The growth in ad spends on the news genre has outpaced the growth of the TV advertising pie," adds Raj Nayak, chief executive officer, NDTV Media. Newspaper advertising has grown below the industry average, but on a base that is 10 times that of TV news. Size, democracy and innocence make for a seductive cocktail of reasons why the Indian news market rocks. Now stir in a lot of investment (Rs 1,500 crore since January 2007 and still counting), low entry costs, a declining global market for news and you know why we are hot. However, as the rush into news increases, almost everybody has seen a jump in operating costs, though margins haven't declined yet. The level of competition and the state of the economy (oil prices rising, inflation and the threat of GDP growth slowing down) suggest that consolidation is about to happen. There is usually a strong positive correlation between GDP and advertising growth; if one slips, the other will, too. A bulk of the news media in India is advertiser funded, so if GDP slips, expect advertising growth to decline.A lot of funFor now though, the fundamentals of the news business on both the supply and the demand side, seem strong. According to IRS data, there are 359 million literate Indians who do not read a publication. Television as yet penetrates only half of India and, at 55 million surfers, websites haven't even scratched the surface. The possibilities for growth in unheard of markets, with, say, a Bhojpuri news channel or a Bengali lifestyle one, are as yet unexplored. To these building blocks, add a couple of qualifiers. The first and biggest is a functioning democracy. Indians love to debate, argue and generally drive each other crazy. And as they move from having one newspaper and one TV channel, they are discovering the fun of arguing across the country on scores of television channels, newspapers and on the Internet, in about 20 odd languages.
The second is a complete lack of cynicism, so far. We are just discovering what it means to be media rich. Unlike the West, we are not a sated or bored audience, but a credulous and avid one. Literacy is prized and the 'buddhijeevi' or 'intellectual' is a man who can debate or discuss anything. For decades, the debating was limited to coffee houses, ‘dhabas’, schools, colleges or village panchayats. "News is information, even village gossip is news," says Sanjay Gupta, editor and CEO, Jagran Prakashan. For long, our thirst for information and for an outlet to voice our opinion remained just that – a thirst. Till as recently as 1990, a few newspapers defined both the news agenda and the texture of the news market along with the state owned Doordarshan and All India Radio. When satellite television first hit India in 1991, CNN brought a whiff of what independent news could be, and then came the BBC. By 1995, websites such as Indiaworld.com, Rediff and, later, Indiatimes came into play. India's first private news channel, the Hindi/ English STAR News was launched in 1998. With economic liberalisation, the opening up of news and information, too, had begun. The big news event, however, happened in 2000 with the coming of Aaj Tak. This spunky little Hindi news channel from Aroon Purie's Living Media changed the rules of the game. Its 24 hour news anchors made news accessible and available to more than 500 million people who understand Hindi or its various forms. Life after Aaj TakAaj Tak's success (it is still the leading news channel in India) made one very important point. It showed that the language of news, just like the language of entertainment, had to be as local as possible. This coincided with several things. The first was the loosening of controls over foreign capital in the newspaper business. Two, technology had made it easier to launch more editions in print or more channels with less bandwidth on TV. The third was the growth of several new categories of advertisers who found news suitable for their products. These are advertisers whose products have a higher male skew or need their involvement in the purchase decision. Automobiles, telecom, financial services were (and are) the fastest growing categories of advertising on newspapers, television and on websites, too.
"News is very important for us. A lot of our products, such as LCDs, PCs and mobile phones, are targeted at males," says LK Gupta, chief marketing officer, LG India. About three-fourths of LG's ad spend goes to "media vehicles that are news disseminators", says Gupta. Advertisers such as LG and Tata Motors led to the doubling of the overall ad pie from just under Rs 10,000 crore in 2003 to Rs 22,000 crore in 2007. This, in turn, has meant a tripling of the TV news ad spend and a 60 per cent growth in spends on newspapers during this period. The money argumentThe youngest newspaper on the block, Sakshi, a Telugu newspaper that launched with 23 editions earlier this year, has had a great beginning. Designed by Mario Garcia, the man who designed Mint, among other newspapers, Sakshi aims to be more contemporary and younger than leader Eenadu. It has, for instance, three pages of business against Eenadu's one, every day. This means 32 pages for Sakshi against Eenadu's 30 on most days, says KRP Reddy, director, advertising and marketing, Sakshi. It takes roughly Rs 100-150 crore to launch a newspaper. The rapidity of launches (Sakshi is one of about a dozen this year) raises obvious questions about the viability of these ventures. "Today, most newspaper investment happens for valuation. I doubt whether they are serious about the business," says Shravan Garg, group editor, Bhaskar Group of Publications. Besides advertising, there is very little that news media can get from other revenue streams. Except for the Rs 4,000 odd crore that newspapers are estimated to make from circulation revenue, there isn't much coming by way of pay revenue. Internet, mobile or overseas – any of the other sources of revenue – are not yet significant for most companies (except for Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd, or BCCL). Then there is the threat of rising newsprint prices slated to touch $1,000 per tonne by the end of the year, up from just under $800 a tonne currently.
Yet, it is newspaper companies that most analysts and investors are comfortable with. Most of the listed and unlisted newspapers make operating margins of close to 25 per cent or more. So, in spite of the expansion, the bottom lines of the existing businesses are still healthy. Also, the fit with online and mobile is clearer and more direct for newspaper companies, so investors like them. It is in television news that investors should start getting concerned. The way the business is structured, there is complete dependence on advertising. "I wonder why new players are coming, what is their proposition, do they have a bottom line or only a topline," quips G Krishnan, executive director and CEO, TV Today Network. "In TV news right now, people are just taking advantage of the availability of capital," answers Vivek Couto, executive director, Media Partners Asia, a Hong Kong based media consulting firm. The fact is that operating costs for television news have gone through the roof. Just the cost of distributing a channel went up from Rs 15 crore in 2006 to Rs 30 crore in 2007 because the largest form of distribution, cable, is log jammed with new channels. The only figures available are for the three listed broadcasters, of which two, NDTV and Network18, are now diversified media companies, not pure news broadcasters. "No one is making money from TV news in India," says Couto. (His firm recently did some analysis in this area, though he did not share the figures with us.) A shakeout, therefore, is imminent, especially if the market slows down. However, unlike many other countries which are homogenous markets, in India, within each genre and each language, two-three channels will survive. The ones to survive will be the ones who enter the maximum number of small Rs 50-100 crore niches the market offers, from city channels to lifestyle or education news. The immediate issue, however, is not the growth potential of the market, but the threat of regulation. Thanks to news television's wild jump into tabloid news and newspapers' into money for editorial deals, there is a real possibility that a nasty content code will hit the business soon. That, as the next piece argues, will be more dangerous than a fall in ad spend growth.
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this. When you are at a particularly dull dinner party next, just mention the words ‘news channels.’ Then sit back and watch the conversation that erupts across the room. You will hear words like ‘Sensationalist, trivialisation, tabloidisation, invasion of privacy... .’Welcome to the party. The abundance of news outlets in India (See previous story) comes with its own set of social, ethical and moral issues that any serious analysis of the business cannot ignore. How much is too much? In the name of accessibility and relevance are we really destroying the news ethic? Why does ‘dumbing down’ happen in the first place? Will the tabloidisation of news fall to levels where advertisers will start walking out to avoid being associated with a negative content genre. Will investors get put off? What about the viewer – the fact is, he is lapping it up. Every time Rakhi Sawant, a celebrity whose only talent is the one she has for hogging publicity, is on air, the show beats everything else on viewership. It is the worst pieces of programming that the public most wants to watch, so why blame the media? Alternatively, the question to ask is this - are we getting blinded by television news channels and ignoring the good things that an abundance of news across all media has done. It has helped bring to the forefront issues which would have never made it on to the news agenda. News outlets have become the new haven for people who don’t have a voice. From activist Binayak Sen’s arrest to farmer suicides to Aarushi’s murder, the news -media not just TV news channels - has forced authorities to sit up and do things. As viewers flock to TV news, it has forced newspapers and magazines to focus on real issues and real people, not just intellectual babble about V.S. Naipaul or Paul Theroux (the English print media’s obsession with Naipaul is something!). For the first time in years the whole issue of editorial being sold in newspapers, the unhealthy dependence on advertising in both print and TV that leads to unethical practices, and the blurring lines between editorial and business are being discussed openly. The question is how far news media should be pushing. Can the now very public ridicule for television news help the government to force through changes such as the content code that could harm both the news business and democracy in the long run? If the future is the internet or mobile, (which is as mass as TV), should these also be subject to the same controls? One of the foundations that make this business robust in India is democracy. Does the freedom of expression come without responsibility? Does it translate into the freedom to do bad reportage, lousy analysis and post whatever you want to on the net in the name of user-generated-content? No it doesn’t. Just like other freedoms, the one to express yourself has to be earned and it is a freedom that not all news outlets have earned, yet. At the heart of a profitable (and free) news business lie credible brands that people trust and go to again and again. The BBC, The Economist, CNN, Guardian, The New York Times are all profitable, yet trusted brands. They don’t sell editorial, they don’t sensationalise news. It is their content and that from good mainstream news brands that drives the traffic on most aggregators and search engine sites, says research from Poynter’s The State of the News Media. Of the top 20 news sites in the US, 17 are from old mass media brands. So whether the future is more digital, less print, more mobile less TV, being able to trust a headline blindly, is a real imperative in this business. That doesn’t go away with a change in media vehicle. You could argue that The Sun is still the most popular newspaper in the UK, not The Guardian or that people prefer ITV and Channel 4 not BBC for their entertainment. That is exactly what will happen in India. So the Mumbai Mirror will survive along with Hindustan Times and.India TV along with CNN-IBN. The tabloid (as in popular) and the serious both have a place because there are people who want them. In any market in the world, the tabloid is the more popular form and by definition has a larger audience and ad spend. The serious news media usually has a lower audience share but commands a higher rate. There are historical and structural reasons why news is tilting towards the sensational, especially on TV (more of this later). But most are just signs of an evolving industry. What’s happening?There is no doubt that TV news channels lead the ‘tabloidisation’ brigade. An analysis of content on the top six national news channels by the New Delhi-based Centre for Media Studies (CMS) shows that entertainment programming increased almost three times the level in 2006 while politics plummeted from 23 per cent to 10 per cent. Sports and crime saw big jumps. Development and environment issues got a fraction of programming time across the three years of the study. TAM data backs that. Non-news programming was 39 per cent of what news channels broadcast this year, up from 25 per cent in 2006. “Everyone is trying to make a quick buck,” says Bhaskar Rao, chairman, CMS. “Hindi news channels have turned into cheap entertainment/reality channels dishing out content which is not fit for family viewing and can seriously disturb the social fabric of our country,” says Raj Nayak, CEO, NDTV Media. Newspapers, it would seem are, less guilty of ignoring the ‘larger good’. So politics, for some reason seen as more serious news, remained at the top of the news agenda for the top four national English papers, according to CMS. The fact remains that newspapers are especially weak when it comes to advertiser pressure and deals that are not in the reader interest. So does another fact - it was newspapers that started the change. When did it start? ‘Prime minister visits Yugoslavia.’ Many years back this was the typical headline in Indian newspapers. This was the time when editors treated readers with contempt and readers treated editors with reverence. That was till 1986 when a young man named Samir Jain took over an ailing Bennett, Coleman & Co Ltd (BCCL). In an era when no one questioned what editors did, Jain, now vice-chairman of BCCL, tried to look at his paper, The Times of India like he would have at a consumer product. He played around with everything - people, pricing, content and format - to maximise returns. In a few years BCCL became India’s largest and most profitable media company. At Rs 2,789 crore in revenues and Rs 760 crore in operating profits (2005-06), it still is. That is really when the notion of news started changing. Almost every major newspaper followed Jain’s lead in some form or the other. The content started becoming more accessible, less ‘intellectually snooty,’ and cover prices fell, in some cases drastically. The movement picked up speed with liberalisation. As entertainment channels took off in the early nineties, reading time went down. Newspapers struck back with more colour, more supplements and lower prices, and in much of this Jain took the lead. Today, 10 years after the first private news channel was launched in India, the entire notion of news has been turned upside down. That raises questions about the definition of news.So what is news?News is about relevance and “What is relevant has changed,” says Ravi Dhariwal, CEO, BCCL. Arnab Goswami, editor-in-chief, Times Now, points out to stories like Sunita Williams or the controversies around the recent India-Australia series. Earlier these would never have made headline news even if everyone was dying to know more. In the old days (let us call them the Yugoslavia days), consumers did not have a choice. Between 1990 and now, four things changed – their numbers, patience, time and choice. Of these, choice is the most critical to understand what is happening. All media is booming simultaneously in India. In the US, newspapers took off first, then radio, then television and later the internet. So each had time to evolve. Most of Indian media has been liberated only over the last ten years. This has meant over 200 TV channels, thousands of websites and dozens of newspapers and magazines all jostling for time and attention at the same time. As a result while the total time spent on media increased in this decade (it is now going down), it got split between more and more vehicles. (See charts on the time spend on media in opening essay). This coupled with liberalisation, rising purchasing power, stressed out lives and all the other accompaniments of a prosperous India changed everything – the notion of what, when, why, how and who, of news. News now, “has to do with a greater degree of interconnectedness and relevance in the world,” says Dhariwal. The biggest manifestation is the space that news outlets, even in regional languages ones, now give to international views, opinions, business and entertainment. “People don’t attach the same glamour to politicians that they do to sportspersons, entertainers or business people. The new generation is unwilling to accept people in authority, but are willing accept successful people,” says G. Krishnan, executive director and CEO, TV Today Network. Sakshi, a Telugu paper launched in Andhra Pradesh this year with 23 editions, offers three pages of business, against the one page that leader Eenadu does. This would have been unheard of in a language paper till even ten years back. Arpita Menon, vice president, Nine Dot Nine Mediaworx, puts it well. If you plot the centre of a concentric circle of issues that news vehicles carry then 15 years back politics was at the centre with lifestyle, crime or entertainment, the lurid stuff at the fringes. The target audience was one mass of Indians assumed to be interested in a common list of things that editors decided on.Now, the target audience has splintered in dozens of clusters. And the centre of the concentric circle for each cluster, young middle-aged, old, is different. So young people want education and career guidance from newspapers, they want ‘time-pass’ from television and a social life on the internet. Older people want more politics and serious news and so on and so forth. Finally, the heterogeneity of the market is reflected in the way news is changing. Why news standards are fallingThat news is becoming more accessible, more heterogeneous and relevant is wonderful. However, “A disproportionate amount of time is spent on things that can’t be called news,” says Goswami. Many point out that it is Hindi channels that are more sensationalist. That, says Krishnan is not correct. “The viewership numbers in other languages are so small, that it doesn’t show up,” says he. Even Tamil and Telugu news channels get a lot of viewership for dumbed down programming. But really why is this happening on a scale where there seems to be a backlash in the making? Why are news channels showing fake godmen making predictions or MMS clips of a 14-year old murder victim? Why have things degenerated from accessibility to sleaze? We came across several reasons, which work together or individually to make the Indian news business what it is. One, is the “TRP trap,” says Rao of CMS. India is an avowed one-TV market. Indian families believe that TV watching is a family activity and getting a second TV will isolate younger members. (See The Brand Reporter May 16-31, 2008). So news television vies for the same audiences that entertainment or sports does. To this add the pressure of 24-hour news which stresses the best brands. In the US, cable channels which run 24 hour news are the ones accused of sensationalising while the quality of news on broadcast channels, which have intermittent news, rarely draws any flak. Now factor in 67 24-hour news channels all fighting for every fractional increase in rating points. The result is what you see. Ditto for newspapers which try to get the largest mass of people possible with buckets or kettles as gifts. So what they get is gift junkies, not readers. Two, even with low ratings it is possible to capture the high impact of the viewership of niche channels, but at 7,200 meters for 72 million cable and satellite homes, most analysts say the sample for measuring viewership is too small. Media buyers’ obsession with numbers makes it an uphill battle for a niche brand to prove that the 30 minutes even 10 users spend on it, is high-quality time. Chandradeep Mitra, president, Mudra Max agrees that, “the buying community is to blame for what is happening.” Since advertisers, marketers or media owners, seem unwilling to pay higher fees for a bigger sample, metrics become a limiting factor. The third factor, is the lack of revenue flexibility. In TV pay revenues remain a distant dream because pay TV platforms like digital cable or DTH are some way from reaching critical mass. On analog cable, the widest mode of distribution, most news channels are afraid to go pay for fear of losing viewers and therefore ad revenues. In newspapers the debate on raising prices has been going on since Samir Jain came. A newspaper costs anywhere between Rs 15 and Rs 30 to produce but it sells for Rs 1-3. Therefore there is tremendous pressure on making money through advertising and the abject dependence on it. It is routine for advertisers to pull out campaigns from papers that critique them even a bit. “That explains,” says Tehelka’s Tarun Tejpal, “why there has been no single corporate corruption story in newspapers in the last five years.” Four, operating costs across the board are going up even while capital costs have fallen. In dailies, newsprint, marketing and content costs have gone up the highest. In TV it is distribution and content costs that have doubled over the last couple of years. As a result, “the depth of coverage has reduced,” says Krishnan of TV Today. Against every four hours earlier, TV news is now refreshed every half hour. That means more anchors, more reporters and a wider coverage so that the chances of getting a fresh story increase. In newspapers beats are becoming redundant; anybody is put onto any story creating a sea of people who know a little bit about everything. What does it mean? “This massification would have happened earlier if controls had not existed, so this is a natural progression,” says Bala Deshpande, senior director, ICICI Venture. True. In entertainment TV, the demand for differentiated content has come now, after 15 years of free private television. Whether we like it or not, in spite of the freedom to do so Indian audiences are not switching off the Babajis and the lurid stories. Only when news audiences are sated and sick of the popular form of news will they look for news outlets that offer serious analysis or cutting edge talk shows. Even then a larger proportion of the audience will prefer the popular form of news. What are the implications of this massification? It may mean that the advertiser who comes to news because there is a male skew and high involvement is going away. L.K. Gupta, chief marketing officer, LG India says that he hasn’t decided because he can’t see the evidence. “If news channels go more mass we will have to cherry pick what suits our TG (Target Group),” says Ambi Parameswaran, executive director and CEO, Mumbai, DraftFCB-Ulka. He illustrates his point with cricket. A brand has to choose the tournaments and the channels best suited to its needs.Mitra of Mudra Max, reckons that the male skew is coming down in newspapers. This makes news more attractive to a larger set of advertisers. For instance, ever since Aaj Tak changed tracks three years back to become more mass, the Amba Sariya kind of advertiser has been replaced by the more premium Gili Diamonds type. FMCGs or Fast Moving Consumer Goods such as soaps and shampoos, which would have never touched news, are now regulars on news channels. For the serious news advertiser the options are limited – BBC, CNN-IBN, CNBC, NDTV 24X7, business newspapers and magazines. In the long run, the players who diversify beyond news in other genres, geographies and media are the ones that will emerge healthier, more credible and profitable. They are also the ones investors lust after. The few broadcasters that are refusing to massify such as NDTV and Network 18 are the ones with a diversified portfolio. NDTV Hindi is seen as losing share because it is the only channel that does not have a crime show. In newspapers, though, this is not necessarily true. The most serious and credible papers like The Hindu or Business Standard are the ones whose record on diversification is not as good. There are other ways of bringing credibility back. One is reduce the dependence on advertising. “The reader is reluctant to pay Rs 3 for a paper, but pays Rs 3 for a one line SMS,” wonders A.S Raghunath, a media consultant. His point is that media owners have to move towards charging a fairer price for their product and improving the advertisers’ perception of the audience that they offer. The other is better metrics and research. Since most research agencies come from markets where newspaper circulation is declining, they have very little incentive to invest in newspaper research and measurement and make it more real-time. That would apply to TV research too. Media owners need to get together to invest in measurement tools that make the sample more robust and reduce the ‘TAM town’ bias or the ‘readership’ bias. As the money that rides on news keeps increasing, news outlets will have to get their act on both the quality of content and metrics in order. That is the only way to avoid attracting the regulators’ eye, losing advertisers and putting off investors. It will also safeguard the future of a free news market.
Similarly, if a democracy does not have a free news market with lots of debate and discussion, the state of everything from institutions to government suffers. The way we think, live, work, the choices we make, could destroy us. All it takes is a look at our past or that of the former communist countries or current dictatorial regimes to realise that. That is why a free news market is important. It is a non-negotiable fact of a working democracy. Coming as we do from a controlled news environment, a free news market is a concept alien to us. More often than not, it is equated with the freedom of expression. But there is more to a free news market than that. It is also about the freedom to do business – without capital, technology or other constraints. In a sense, the Indian news media has been freed only over the last three to five years, though technically, it has been ‘free’ since independence.
Partial press freedom came in 2002 when FDI was allowed. It became completely open in 2005, when foreign institutional investment was permitted. Though TV was given a free hand in 1992, capital and other controls meant that we did not really see a free news market till 2003. The Internet is largely free and so is the mobile phone. Radio is still hamstrung by regulations that forbid news broadcasting, but if a pending Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) paper becomes policy, that should change soon.The effect of this freedom is resonating across the country as news media options go through the roof – 67 news channels in 11 languages, 99 million copies of newspapers sold daily and hundreds of websites vying just for the privilege of giving us news. And they are battling for a scarce commodity – our time.This, in turn, has made information, opinion and analysis available to everybody, not just a few English speaking people. More importantly, it has given a voice to large tracts of India. Notice the ease with which Indians face TV cameras now, whether to show their anger at something or to take part in reality shows. As the prime accused in the murder of his daughter, Dr Talwar and his family have been using the news outlets to tell their side of the story. That is exactly what his compounder Krishna’s family did when he was arrested. Ten years ago, we would never have seen or heard of them after they had been arrested. “What you are seeing is years of repression coming out in aggression,” says Anurradha Prasad, managing director, BAG Films and Media (the company’s first 24 hour news channel was launched last year).This freedom has come with its own set of problems – that of tabloidisation, sensationalism, of selling out to advertisers and the blurring of ethical boundaries long held sacrosanct in the media business. Does that mean that it should be regulated? That we need a content code with committees and sub-committees? No, we don’t. What we see is a phase in the evolution of a free news market and reacting to it at one point in time and locking ourselves into regulation will be disastrous. “Right now, the situation is chaotic, this will eventually balance out, maturity will come,” says Prasad.
“I don’t think that any punitive action is needed against news channels. The government would like to control them because they show government shortcomings,” says Sanjay Gupta, editor and chief executive officer, Jagran Prakashan (it is part owner of IBN7, a Hindi news channel). Jawaharlal Nehru had once famously remarked that even a bad press was acceptable, but that it should be free and self-regulated. The UK is a great example of a country where the tabloid and the serious survive and make money and each operates within the same regulatory framework. In India, there is already a good programming code in place; all the news media industry needs to do is apply it well. The thing is, the industry is too busy coping, enjoying, moping or freaking out on the growth and so are consumers. This, then, is the perfect time to ask where it is all headed. This is the right time to look at the future of news.
After more than a month of research, about 40 interviews and reading tomes on the news business worldwide, one thing is clear. The biggest debates in the Indian news market currently are about the amount of news, its ability to bring in fair returns for investors and the quality of it. Two facts need to be hardwired into our minds before we begin the discussion. One, mass media dominates in India, a high volume market. The focus of this survey will, largely, be mass media vehicles for news. The online world is limited to 55 million people, even if it is the world you and I occupy. TV reaches 575 million people, whereas newspapers are read by more than 300 million. So, for those looking for buzzwords like user generated content or WAP and VAS, this survey will disappoint. It sticks to India’s reality. Two, for too long, the dialogue in policy matters has been limited to the middle class English speaking population. The Centre for Media Studies (CMS) data shows that in August 2007, a whopping 57 per cent of the stories in national newspapers originated from Delhi. Some of the top newspapers and channels are based in New Delhi, so the city is the de facto lens through which any event is viewed. There is a joke among most analysts that there is a Delhi-Mumbai corridor of English speakers, beyond which any discussion on India barely matters.The fact is that only 100 million Indians speak English, while 500 million speak Hindi and its various dialects. The other 500 million or so are split between several languages. Just as a free news market is a democratic axiom, so too is a heterogeneous one that reflects the pulls and pushes of all interest groups. The news market now evolving is pushing the business of news to a point where the debate on national issues is truly national.If it manages to do that, the free news market we see now would have achieved something that decades of control could not – involve all Indians in any discussion of their future.
It is the sound of an entire country going jabber, jabber. India has more than 575 million TV watchers, about 302 million newspaper readers, 55 million surfers and 1.2 million bloggers. Look at it another way – as a country, we buy 99 million copies of newspapers every day, making it the second largest newspaper market in the world, after the US. At 115 million TV sets and 275 million mobile phones, we are among the top five TV and mobile phone markets in the world. We have 67 news channels, arguably more than any other country in the world. If you total up the average across newspapers, news TV and online, Indians spend an average of 50 minutes a day consuming news.
Last year, advertisers spent Rs 12,000-odd crore to reach them in those 50 minutes, according to data put together by Starcom Worldwide. Add in subscription and news is a roughly Rs 16,000 crore market. That makes it the second largest media business in India after entertainment – in audience share, topline and now investor interest, too. Why do we have so much news? "There is an influx of funds because news is elastic; there has been no fatigue factor yet. Have you seen any channel close down?" asks Arnab Goswami, editor in chief, Times Now. "The growth in ad spends on the news genre has outpaced the growth of the TV advertising pie," adds Raj Nayak, chief executive officer, NDTV Media. Newspaper advertising has grown below the industry average, but on a base that is 10 times that of TV news. Size, democracy and innocence make for a seductive cocktail of reasons why the Indian news market rocks. Now stir in a lot of investment (Rs 1,500 crore since January 2007 and still counting), low entry costs, a declining global market for news and you know why we are hot. However, as the rush into news increases, almost everybody has seen a jump in operating costs, though margins haven't declined yet. The level of competition and the state of the economy (oil prices rising, inflation and the threat of GDP growth slowing down) suggest that consolidation is about to happen. There is usually a strong positive correlation between GDP and advertising growth; if one slips, the other will, too. A bulk of the news media in India is advertiser funded, so if GDP slips, expect advertising growth to decline.A lot of funFor now though, the fundamentals of the news business on both the supply and the demand side, seem strong. According to IRS data, there are 359 million literate Indians who do not read a publication. Television as yet penetrates only half of India and, at 55 million surfers, websites haven't even scratched the surface. The possibilities for growth in unheard of markets, with, say, a Bhojpuri news channel or a Bengali lifestyle one, are as yet unexplored. To these building blocks, add a couple of qualifiers. The first and biggest is a functioning democracy. Indians love to debate, argue and generally drive each other crazy. And as they move from having one newspaper and one TV channel, they are discovering the fun of arguing across the country on scores of television channels, newspapers and on the Internet, in about 20 odd languages.
The second is a complete lack of cynicism, so far. We are just discovering what it means to be media rich. Unlike the West, we are not a sated or bored audience, but a credulous and avid one. Literacy is prized and the 'buddhijeevi' or 'intellectual' is a man who can debate or discuss anything. For decades, the debating was limited to coffee houses, ‘dhabas’, schools, colleges or village panchayats. "News is information, even village gossip is news," says Sanjay Gupta, editor and CEO, Jagran Prakashan. For long, our thirst for information and for an outlet to voice our opinion remained just that – a thirst. Till as recently as 1990, a few newspapers defined both the news agenda and the texture of the news market along with the state owned Doordarshan and All India Radio. When satellite television first hit India in 1991, CNN brought a whiff of what independent news could be, and then came the BBC. By 1995, websites such as Indiaworld.com, Rediff and, later, Indiatimes came into play. India's first private news channel, the Hindi/ English STAR News was launched in 1998. With economic liberalisation, the opening up of news and information, too, had begun. The big news event, however, happened in 2000 with the coming of Aaj Tak. This spunky little Hindi news channel from Aroon Purie's Living Media changed the rules of the game. Its 24 hour news anchors made news accessible and available to more than 500 million people who understand Hindi or its various forms. Life after Aaj TakAaj Tak's success (it is still the leading news channel in India) made one very important point. It showed that the language of news, just like the language of entertainment, had to be as local as possible. This coincided with several things. The first was the loosening of controls over foreign capital in the newspaper business. Two, technology had made it easier to launch more editions in print or more channels with less bandwidth on TV. The third was the growth of several new categories of advertisers who found news suitable for their products. These are advertisers whose products have a higher male skew or need their involvement in the purchase decision. Automobiles, telecom, financial services were (and are) the fastest growing categories of advertising on newspapers, television and on websites, too.
"News is very important for us. A lot of our products, such as LCDs, PCs and mobile phones, are targeted at males," says LK Gupta, chief marketing officer, LG India. About three-fourths of LG's ad spend goes to "media vehicles that are news disseminators", says Gupta. Advertisers such as LG and Tata Motors led to the doubling of the overall ad pie from just under Rs 10,000 crore in 2003 to Rs 22,000 crore in 2007. This, in turn, has meant a tripling of the TV news ad spend and a 60 per cent growth in spends on newspapers during this period. The money argumentThe youngest newspaper on the block, Sakshi, a Telugu newspaper that launched with 23 editions earlier this year, has had a great beginning. Designed by Mario Garcia, the man who designed Mint, among other newspapers, Sakshi aims to be more contemporary and younger than leader Eenadu. It has, for instance, three pages of business against Eenadu's one, every day. This means 32 pages for Sakshi against Eenadu's 30 on most days, says KRP Reddy, director, advertising and marketing, Sakshi. It takes roughly Rs 100-150 crore to launch a newspaper. The rapidity of launches (Sakshi is one of about a dozen this year) raises obvious questions about the viability of these ventures. "Today, most newspaper investment happens for valuation. I doubt whether they are serious about the business," says Shravan Garg, group editor, Bhaskar Group of Publications. Besides advertising, there is very little that news media can get from other revenue streams. Except for the Rs 4,000 odd crore that newspapers are estimated to make from circulation revenue, there isn't much coming by way of pay revenue. Internet, mobile or overseas – any of the other sources of revenue – are not yet significant for most companies (except for Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd, or BCCL). Then there is the threat of rising newsprint prices slated to touch $1,000 per tonne by the end of the year, up from just under $800 a tonne currently.
Yet, it is newspaper companies that most analysts and investors are comfortable with. Most of the listed and unlisted newspapers make operating margins of close to 25 per cent or more. So, in spite of the expansion, the bottom lines of the existing businesses are still healthy. Also, the fit with online and mobile is clearer and more direct for newspaper companies, so investors like them. It is in television news that investors should start getting concerned. The way the business is structured, there is complete dependence on advertising. "I wonder why new players are coming, what is their proposition, do they have a bottom line or only a topline," quips G Krishnan, executive director and CEO, TV Today Network. "In TV news right now, people are just taking advantage of the availability of capital," answers Vivek Couto, executive director, Media Partners Asia, a Hong Kong based media consulting firm. The fact is that operating costs for television news have gone through the roof. Just the cost of distributing a channel went up from Rs 15 crore in 2006 to Rs 30 crore in 2007 because the largest form of distribution, cable, is log jammed with new channels. The only figures available are for the three listed broadcasters, of which two, NDTV and Network18, are now diversified media companies, not pure news broadcasters. "No one is making money from TV news in India," says Couto. (His firm recently did some analysis in this area, though he did not share the figures with us.) A shakeout, therefore, is imminent, especially if the market slows down. However, unlike many other countries which are homogenous markets, in India, within each genre and each language, two-three channels will survive. The ones to survive will be the ones who enter the maximum number of small Rs 50-100 crore niches the market offers, from city channels to lifestyle or education news. The immediate issue, however, is not the growth potential of the market, but the threat of regulation. Thanks to news television's wild jump into tabloid news and newspapers' into money for editorial deals, there is a real possibility that a nasty content code will hit the business soon. That, as the next piece argues, will be more dangerous than a fall in ad spend growth.
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this. When you are at a particularly dull dinner party next, just mention the words ‘news channels.’ Then sit back and watch the conversation that erupts across the room. You will hear words like ‘Sensationalist, trivialisation, tabloidisation, invasion of privacy... .’Welcome to the party. The abundance of news outlets in India (See previous story) comes with its own set of social, ethical and moral issues that any serious analysis of the business cannot ignore. How much is too much? In the name of accessibility and relevance are we really destroying the news ethic? Why does ‘dumbing down’ happen in the first place? Will the tabloidisation of news fall to levels where advertisers will start walking out to avoid being associated with a negative content genre. Will investors get put off? What about the viewer – the fact is, he is lapping it up. Every time Rakhi Sawant, a celebrity whose only talent is the one she has for hogging publicity, is on air, the show beats everything else on viewership. It is the worst pieces of programming that the public most wants to watch, so why blame the media? Alternatively, the question to ask is this - are we getting blinded by television news channels and ignoring the good things that an abundance of news across all media has done. It has helped bring to the forefront issues which would have never made it on to the news agenda. News outlets have become the new haven for people who don’t have a voice. From activist Binayak Sen’s arrest to farmer suicides to Aarushi’s murder, the news -media not just TV news channels - has forced authorities to sit up and do things. As viewers flock to TV news, it has forced newspapers and magazines to focus on real issues and real people, not just intellectual babble about V.S. Naipaul or Paul Theroux (the English print media’s obsession with Naipaul is something!). For the first time in years the whole issue of editorial being sold in newspapers, the unhealthy dependence on advertising in both print and TV that leads to unethical practices, and the blurring lines between editorial and business are being discussed openly. The question is how far news media should be pushing. Can the now very public ridicule for television news help the government to force through changes such as the content code that could harm both the news business and democracy in the long run? If the future is the internet or mobile, (which is as mass as TV), should these also be subject to the same controls? One of the foundations that make this business robust in India is democracy. Does the freedom of expression come without responsibility? Does it translate into the freedom to do bad reportage, lousy analysis and post whatever you want to on the net in the name of user-generated-content? No it doesn’t. Just like other freedoms, the one to express yourself has to be earned and it is a freedom that not all news outlets have earned, yet. At the heart of a profitable (and free) news business lie credible brands that people trust and go to again and again. The BBC, The Economist, CNN, Guardian, The New York Times are all profitable, yet trusted brands. They don’t sell editorial, they don’t sensationalise news. It is their content and that from good mainstream news brands that drives the traffic on most aggregators and search engine sites, says research from Poynter’s The State of the News Media. Of the top 20 news sites in the US, 17 are from old mass media brands. So whether the future is more digital, less print, more mobile less TV, being able to trust a headline blindly, is a real imperative in this business. That doesn’t go away with a change in media vehicle. You could argue that The Sun is still the most popular newspaper in the UK, not The Guardian or that people prefer ITV and Channel 4 not BBC for their entertainment. That is exactly what will happen in India. So the Mumbai Mirror will survive along with Hindustan Times and.India TV along with CNN-IBN. The tabloid (as in popular) and the serious both have a place because there are people who want them. In any market in the world, the tabloid is the more popular form and by definition has a larger audience and ad spend. The serious news media usually has a lower audience share but commands a higher rate. There are historical and structural reasons why news is tilting towards the sensational, especially on TV (more of this later). But most are just signs of an evolving industry. What’s happening?There is no doubt that TV news channels lead the ‘tabloidisation’ brigade. An analysis of content on the top six national news channels by the New Delhi-based Centre for Media Studies (CMS) shows that entertainment programming increased almost three times the level in 2006 while politics plummeted from 23 per cent to 10 per cent. Sports and crime saw big jumps. Development and environment issues got a fraction of programming time across the three years of the study. TAM data backs that. Non-news programming was 39 per cent of what news channels broadcast this year, up from 25 per cent in 2006. “Everyone is trying to make a quick buck,” says Bhaskar Rao, chairman, CMS. “Hindi news channels have turned into cheap entertainment/reality channels dishing out content which is not fit for family viewing and can seriously disturb the social fabric of our country,” says Raj Nayak, CEO, NDTV Media. Newspapers, it would seem are, less guilty of ignoring the ‘larger good’. So politics, for some reason seen as more serious news, remained at the top of the news agenda for the top four national English papers, according to CMS. The fact remains that newspapers are especially weak when it comes to advertiser pressure and deals that are not in the reader interest. So does another fact - it was newspapers that started the change. When did it start? ‘Prime minister visits Yugoslavia.’ Many years back this was the typical headline in Indian newspapers. This was the time when editors treated readers with contempt and readers treated editors with reverence. That was till 1986 when a young man named Samir Jain took over an ailing Bennett, Coleman & Co Ltd (BCCL). In an era when no one questioned what editors did, Jain, now vice-chairman of BCCL, tried to look at his paper, The Times of India like he would have at a consumer product. He played around with everything - people, pricing, content and format - to maximise returns. In a few years BCCL became India’s largest and most profitable media company. At Rs 2,789 crore in revenues and Rs 760 crore in operating profits (2005-06), it still is. That is really when the notion of news started changing. Almost every major newspaper followed Jain’s lead in some form or the other. The content started becoming more accessible, less ‘intellectually snooty,’ and cover prices fell, in some cases drastically. The movement picked up speed with liberalisation. As entertainment channels took off in the early nineties, reading time went down. Newspapers struck back with more colour, more supplements and lower prices, and in much of this Jain took the lead. Today, 10 years after the first private news channel was launched in India, the entire notion of news has been turned upside down. That raises questions about the definition of news.So what is news?News is about relevance and “What is relevant has changed,” says Ravi Dhariwal, CEO, BCCL. Arnab Goswami, editor-in-chief, Times Now, points out to stories like Sunita Williams or the controversies around the recent India-Australia series. Earlier these would never have made headline news even if everyone was dying to know more. In the old days (let us call them the Yugoslavia days), consumers did not have a choice. Between 1990 and now, four things changed – their numbers, patience, time and choice. Of these, choice is the most critical to understand what is happening. All media is booming simultaneously in India. In the US, newspapers took off first, then radio, then television and later the internet. So each had time to evolve. Most of Indian media has been liberated only over the last ten years. This has meant over 200 TV channels, thousands of websites and dozens of newspapers and magazines all jostling for time and attention at the same time. As a result while the total time spent on media increased in this decade (it is now going down), it got split between more and more vehicles. (See charts on the time spend on media in opening essay). This coupled with liberalisation, rising purchasing power, stressed out lives and all the other accompaniments of a prosperous India changed everything – the notion of what, when, why, how and who, of news. News now, “has to do with a greater degree of interconnectedness and relevance in the world,” says Dhariwal. The biggest manifestation is the space that news outlets, even in regional languages ones, now give to international views, opinions, business and entertainment. “People don’t attach the same glamour to politicians that they do to sportspersons, entertainers or business people. The new generation is unwilling to accept people in authority, but are willing accept successful people,” says G. Krishnan, executive director and CEO, TV Today Network. Sakshi, a Telugu paper launched in Andhra Pradesh this year with 23 editions, offers three pages of business, against the one page that leader Eenadu does. This would have been unheard of in a language paper till even ten years back. Arpita Menon, vice president, Nine Dot Nine Mediaworx, puts it well. If you plot the centre of a concentric circle of issues that news vehicles carry then 15 years back politics was at the centre with lifestyle, crime or entertainment, the lurid stuff at the fringes. The target audience was one mass of Indians assumed to be interested in a common list of things that editors decided on.Now, the target audience has splintered in dozens of clusters. And the centre of the concentric circle for each cluster, young middle-aged, old, is different. So young people want education and career guidance from newspapers, they want ‘time-pass’ from television and a social life on the internet. Older people want more politics and serious news and so on and so forth. Finally, the heterogeneity of the market is reflected in the way news is changing. Why news standards are fallingThat news is becoming more accessible, more heterogeneous and relevant is wonderful. However, “A disproportionate amount of time is spent on things that can’t be called news,” says Goswami. Many point out that it is Hindi channels that are more sensationalist. That, says Krishnan is not correct. “The viewership numbers in other languages are so small, that it doesn’t show up,” says he. Even Tamil and Telugu news channels get a lot of viewership for dumbed down programming. But really why is this happening on a scale where there seems to be a backlash in the making? Why are news channels showing fake godmen making predictions or MMS clips of a 14-year old murder victim? Why have things degenerated from accessibility to sleaze? We came across several reasons, which work together or individually to make the Indian news business what it is. One, is the “TRP trap,” says Rao of CMS. India is an avowed one-TV market. Indian families believe that TV watching is a family activity and getting a second TV will isolate younger members. (See The Brand Reporter May 16-31, 2008). So news television vies for the same audiences that entertainment or sports does. To this add the pressure of 24-hour news which stresses the best brands. In the US, cable channels which run 24 hour news are the ones accused of sensationalising while the quality of news on broadcast channels, which have intermittent news, rarely draws any flak. Now factor in 67 24-hour news channels all fighting for every fractional increase in rating points. The result is what you see. Ditto for newspapers which try to get the largest mass of people possible with buckets or kettles as gifts. So what they get is gift junkies, not readers. Two, even with low ratings it is possible to capture the high impact of the viewership of niche channels, but at 7,200 meters for 72 million cable and satellite homes, most analysts say the sample for measuring viewership is too small. Media buyers’ obsession with numbers makes it an uphill battle for a niche brand to prove that the 30 minutes even 10 users spend on it, is high-quality time. Chandradeep Mitra, president, Mudra Max agrees that, “the buying community is to blame for what is happening.” Since advertisers, marketers or media owners, seem unwilling to pay higher fees for a bigger sample, metrics become a limiting factor. The third factor, is the lack of revenue flexibility. In TV pay revenues remain a distant dream because pay TV platforms like digital cable or DTH are some way from reaching critical mass. On analog cable, the widest mode of distribution, most news channels are afraid to go pay for fear of losing viewers and therefore ad revenues. In newspapers the debate on raising prices has been going on since Samir Jain came. A newspaper costs anywhere between Rs 15 and Rs 30 to produce but it sells for Rs 1-3. Therefore there is tremendous pressure on making money through advertising and the abject dependence on it. It is routine for advertisers to pull out campaigns from papers that critique them even a bit. “That explains,” says Tehelka’s Tarun Tejpal, “why there has been no single corporate corruption story in newspapers in the last five years.” Four, operating costs across the board are going up even while capital costs have fallen. In dailies, newsprint, marketing and content costs have gone up the highest. In TV it is distribution and content costs that have doubled over the last couple of years. As a result, “the depth of coverage has reduced,” says Krishnan of TV Today. Against every four hours earlier, TV news is now refreshed every half hour. That means more anchors, more reporters and a wider coverage so that the chances of getting a fresh story increase. In newspapers beats are becoming redundant; anybody is put onto any story creating a sea of people who know a little bit about everything. What does it mean? “This massification would have happened earlier if controls had not existed, so this is a natural progression,” says Bala Deshpande, senior director, ICICI Venture. True. In entertainment TV, the demand for differentiated content has come now, after 15 years of free private television. Whether we like it or not, in spite of the freedom to do so Indian audiences are not switching off the Babajis and the lurid stories. Only when news audiences are sated and sick of the popular form of news will they look for news outlets that offer serious analysis or cutting edge talk shows. Even then a larger proportion of the audience will prefer the popular form of news. What are the implications of this massification? It may mean that the advertiser who comes to news because there is a male skew and high involvement is going away. L.K. Gupta, chief marketing officer, LG India says that he hasn’t decided because he can’t see the evidence. “If news channels go more mass we will have to cherry pick what suits our TG (Target Group),” says Ambi Parameswaran, executive director and CEO, Mumbai, DraftFCB-Ulka. He illustrates his point with cricket. A brand has to choose the tournaments and the channels best suited to its needs.Mitra of Mudra Max, reckons that the male skew is coming down in newspapers. This makes news more attractive to a larger set of advertisers. For instance, ever since Aaj Tak changed tracks three years back to become more mass, the Amba Sariya kind of advertiser has been replaced by the more premium Gili Diamonds type. FMCGs or Fast Moving Consumer Goods such as soaps and shampoos, which would have never touched news, are now regulars on news channels. For the serious news advertiser the options are limited – BBC, CNN-IBN, CNBC, NDTV 24X7, business newspapers and magazines. In the long run, the players who diversify beyond news in other genres, geographies and media are the ones that will emerge healthier, more credible and profitable. They are also the ones investors lust after. The few broadcasters that are refusing to massify such as NDTV and Network 18 are the ones with a diversified portfolio. NDTV Hindi is seen as losing share because it is the only channel that does not have a crime show. In newspapers, though, this is not necessarily true. The most serious and credible papers like The Hindu or Business Standard are the ones whose record on diversification is not as good. There are other ways of bringing credibility back. One is reduce the dependence on advertising. “The reader is reluctant to pay Rs 3 for a paper, but pays Rs 3 for a one line SMS,” wonders A.S Raghunath, a media consultant. His point is that media owners have to move towards charging a fairer price for their product and improving the advertisers’ perception of the audience that they offer. The other is better metrics and research. Since most research agencies come from markets where newspaper circulation is declining, they have very little incentive to invest in newspaper research and measurement and make it more real-time. That would apply to TV research too. Media owners need to get together to invest in measurement tools that make the sample more robust and reduce the ‘TAM town’ bias or the ‘readership’ bias. As the money that rides on news keeps increasing, news outlets will have to get their act on both the quality of content and metrics in order. That is the only way to avoid attracting the regulators’ eye, losing advertisers and putting off investors. It will also safeguard the future of a free news market.
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