Business - Breaking News

News has a built-in problem of being perishable. Born out of the past, news also suffers from a second-hand syndrome. The construct of news defies completeness. Kya latest chal raha hain? Kya naya khabar laye ho? Sun ne me aaya… these are the dialogues associated with the world of news. And like Siamese twins, news and rumour often get inseparably joined in the same structure making it difficult to separate one from the other. Efforts have been made for ages to tackle these built-in problems of news relays.

Eyewitnesses got special importance in the eyes of law, people in power employed special agents to give first-hand feedback. Messengers ran the marathon to report the news of the battles. Epics portrayed the need of running commentary from the point of action in the battlefield. Sanjay represented the dual role of a broadcasting channel and a news reporter in the Mahabharata. Sage Valmiki would have been really surprised to see how his brilliant idea has cloned itself into scores of news channels. The demands of a new generation consumer, market forces, and evolving technology all have put their own bits to make news change colour fast.

In those days, news was meant for kings and his men; common people had nothing to do with it. They were busy leading their own lives. In fact, being in the news was not even good or safe for them. Only in the fairy tales, the son of a farmer would hit the headlines winning the double jackpot of half the crown and a full princess.

With the entry of 24x7 news channels, we have entered a hitherto unknown supermarket of news. The TV screen is the new show window of these proliferating news channel malls. Like the retail revolution, news retail itself is still in the infancy of merchandising. In most cases they appear in a potpourri—a kurkure news served next to staple news. A similar trend is visible in the way news is treated by the new channels. Some shows value the speed of delivery. Some believe in recreating, enacting and dramatising it. Some believe in threadbare presentation of facts to the so-called invited experts and urge them to chew and convert it in to easily digestible pulp for common consumption. In a product parity market of multiple news channels, value addition is done through expert interpretation.

Amidst all these changes and treatments there is almost a conscious effort by the news channels to assure the viewers that the essence of news has not changed. Khabar wohi jo sach dikhaye. It’s a different story that for some channels the truth of the news is not in the topic but in the process. They take a potent nugget of information and start beating it on the anvil of truth. A breaking news shouts Eureka! about some silver screen idol’s illegitimate child. The subject is then taken through a mock process of information distillation—visual aid, expert comment, opinion poll, charts, and diagrams. Stretch the truth to its last point of elasticity. Wring out the last drop of juicy interpretation in a reality show that takes hours to announce the winner.

The exercise has become more elaborate with news becoming a 24x7 affair, a 365 days a year event. They create the construct of a day (24 hours) through their channels where each and every item is important, interesting, valuable and therefore eminently consumable. Before you realise you have spent the whole day through camera eye, with poor Prince inside the ditch.

From this perspective, news challenges the existing concept of a brand. A brand sets itself in a localised frame of consumption with the consumer—Coke with the mood of togetherness and refreshment, AXE when we are in the mode of glorifying male libido etc. All brand stories have a duration and consumption time and setting. Being 24x7, news channel brands do away with this boundary and demands nonstop interaction with its consumers.

Where finally are we landing then? In the domain of news or in the domain of another 24x7 TV channel where all programmes are carried under the tagline of news bazaar? Why should we value it’s news if it emulates the entertainment value of any family channel under the garb of news? At least other channels are far more honest in their intention of providing nonstop entertainment. There is a bigger truth in acknowledging the need for fiction in our life. It is interesting to note that a work of fiction tries to draw its value by coming closer to fact and the fact tries to value add itself by being fictional.

The fundamental change, I feel, which has taken place is not in the area of fact or fiction, news or entertainment but in the changing status of the audience for whom these programmes are made and presented. We all have ceased to be a passive recipient of information and have become active consumers of value. And value does not lie with the service provider or manufacturer any more.

As Prof CK Prahalad has said value needs to be co-created with the consumers. News channels can provide the platform around which the consumers can co-create their own experiences.

For example, the reality of a road accident is surrounded by a bigger reality of potential risk that every parent, child, pedestrian or a man on the street is exposed to. They would probably value portrayal of that reality of life with more force, urgency, and drama so that it impacts people who matter to end the problem rather than vivid portrayal of the family of the bereaved.

There is more opportunity for the channel to build credibility and loyalty in consumers by creating a community of citizens and getting their feedback; rope in a Kodak or a some other similar companies/brands to sponsor such programmes, dedicate a page, publish the most telling collection of such feedback in terms of pictures, reports, taped conversations with other news partners and channels, send copies to law enforcing authorities; reward and honour the contributors of such feedback.

Give generous exposure to the sponsor brands as investigation partners. It is in blending and synthesising the daily reality of pedestrians with business reality of experiencing the camera/recorder efficiency of Kodak/Sony and networking with other news media etc that the success of a particular brand of news or a channel/agency lies.

More and more people are acknowledging a bigger and more intimate role for media in their lives. Offenders are surrendering to news channels and not to police stations; people don’t call the police but a reporter to report a dowry case. The signal is loud and clear—those who can read it and make sense of it will win.

Merely chanting khabar wohi hain jo competitor dikhaye will not take them or their news very far.

—The author is vice-president, consumer insight and HFD, McCann Erickson India