Deliver what you promise

Slice of Italy is a pizza delivery service in New Delhi and I have been somewhat of a fan of their pizzas. Its glossy brochure happens to showcase Roman submarines and highlights their size- a full 10". And the displayed picture is tempting. I ordered one submarine sandwich yesterday, and it came inside a box that would barely hold a 6" pizza. Inside, the sandwich was cut into two halves, and wrapped in thin transparent plastic that made it look like anything but appetizing. The real thing as delivered was just too different from what was promised on the brochure. It did not make me cringe, I did not call them and asked for a refund, and more importantly, I found it reasonably competent on taste. But they had one chance to show that aside from their great pizzas, they deliver exactly what they promise- and they blew it. I would have liked if their order taker had taken the trouble to inform me the gruesome injury the sandwich would have to endure as it was forced to fit inside a box not made to size.

I will still continue to order from them, but next time I will stick to pizzas.

Thought

If writing is therapeutic, then I can do with some therapy.

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New York Times

The New York Times is introducing some design changes in its news pages to differentiate hardcore news coverage from pieces that include opinions. I am not sure if NYT is the first newspaper to attempt doing this, but to me it feels like taking the notion of journalistic purity to the extreme. I haven't seen the redesigned edition but most likely it means using different fonts (in perhaps a size bigger) for the straightforward news coverage to differentiate it against opinionated or analytical coverage (examples are news analysis, journals, diaries and columns). Ok, I'm always for transparency and voluntary disclaimers (as far as possible) when publishing opinions by both the opinion-holders as well as publishers, but segregating news from opinions by virtue of newspaper designs is to me an insult to your readers.

Supporters of NYT may have argued that readers are so used to reading opinions in the garb of news coverage that it ought to be a moral duty of the publisher to forcibly seperate the two, in the broader public interest. However, the argument is weak as long as we remember that news coverage, insofar as is handled by human journos and not robots, will always be subjective. No matter how much objectivity they'll ever try and ingrain you with, your coverage of a car accident or a political rally will be markedly different from the next reporter on the scene. A news coverage is merely a 'transcription of vision', in other words, a distillation of all sensory data received or perceived by a reporter. How he chooses to distill it, deciding which part to retain and which to let go, is intrinsically subjective.

I believe that the decision is merely a ego-and sales-boosting gimmick. However, I would much like to see our very own so-called serious newspapers, the likes of The Indian Express and The Hindu publish something like this (NYT Reader Guide).

News television's folly

It doesn't matter anymore if you are 'inside' media industry or just a layman consumer of media, everyone I meet these days seems to hold the opinion that television news channels have nearly lost the plot. That they are too sensation-centric and that they achieve their purpose by picking one triviality after another and blowing it up. Nobody it seems was happy to see saturation coverage across all television news channels of Prince (just a name) falling down a well till he was rescued by army. The moot point is, if the world or so it seems is deeply upset with trivialisation and sensationalisation of news, why don't the people who matter get the point? From what I have heard and read on the subject, it is obvious that the disillusionment with the present state of affairs has indeed set in at various (editorial) levels across major newschannels. Unfortunately, they have their hands tied and their voices muffled by the dictates of the programming format that their channel promoters have chosen.

Truth is, television news was never meant for 24-hours broadcast. Except in matters of history making events, a continuous news coverage even on varied subjects will bore an audience to death within days, if not hours. It is sad that news television has so spectacularly failed to find its standing in the face of the other two prominent media, viz the newspapers and the Internet. The three media have dynamics so obviously different that it is a shame that promoters of tv newschannels decided to ignore them all in the name of commercial interests. What they ended up doing was engraining a fatal flaw in their programming strategy, which I'll elaborate on a bit later.

First, a brief apprisal of the dynamics of three major media, which have otherwise been discussed and elaborated by many people far expert than I am. If news once a day is the sole domain of newspapers--and the dynamics of TV news and Internet easily prevent them from such (mis)fortune--24-hours news is the sole domain of Internet. Newspapers in mature markets have tried to fight television by bringing several editions in a single day, but they have failed miserably. Would you want a latest edition of ToI, HT or IE (my favourite) at 6 am, 12 noon and 5 pm? In the same tone, nobody wants to watch news on television 24 hours a day. People will simply switch channels or turn the damned TV off. Television, in its trying to assume the dynamics of the Internet and giving us 24-hour news, has failed in exactly the same way as newspapers in the example above. It has failed to generate, and sustain viewers interest in continuous news broadcasts, which by virtue of various laws of economics, turn repetitive. It has its eyes and ears open to sense the audience boredom, but its hands are tied by the illogical requirement of trying to push news 24 hours a day. Since this requirement cannot be wished away that easily, the only option remaining is to kill the audience boredom. Hence, an understandable if not justifiable resort to trivial news in the name of human-interest stories that are supposed to do exactly that, sustain human interest in their newschannels. Ironic? Deeply.

Before CNN in United States, major networks including CBS telecast no more than 2-3 news bulletins in a single day, and the rest of the time was filled up with regular programming. When Ted Turner's CNN came with the idea of 24 hour news, his was the first channel to broadcast hourly news bulletins. These half-hourly bulletins were interrupted by other programmes, a very obvious solution to prevent viewer fatigue. This should explain why I loved watching CNN for hours on end in mid and late nineties (when I had time), but I somehow can't tolerate a single Indian news channel today for more than an hour. Too much news is boring.

Studies suggest that the world is moving towards a 'softer' media, in other words a general, pervasive human-interestization of news stories. Hard core news is boring, they mean, and the audiences across the world are gravitating towards happier, general, dramatic stories that compensate for the time they are devoting to watching news channels and reading newspapers in exchange of watching a compelling drama or a rib-tickling comedy on entertainment channels. I have one point of disagreement. What they are looking over is the fact that we are feeding audiences too much news, which is the 'only' reason people are alienated by the so-called hard news.

In a compelling book titled 'The Elements of Journalism' the authors make a compelling point for basic human need and yearning for hard news, which is primarily political or economic in nature. It is precisely because of this need that respectable publications around the world are still considered respectable by many a yardsticks. Light, human-interest and dramatic stories have a place of their own, but they can never begin to count as the primary definition of news.

Coming back to television, in the Indian context, much of the blame must be heaped on at the earliest 24-hour channels for setting a programming standard that despite being ridiculous, was followed religiously by all other (late) entrants, lest they lose their premium marketing tag of '24-hour newschannel'. Star News and Aaj Tak in late nineties may only be emulating the tv channels making waves in the international arena in those days, but they failed to realise that not only did this strategy entail a serious misreading of television's dynamics, but that the channels they were emulating were so nascent in their own markets that it would not be unwise to call them a bold experiment in news broadcasting. Sadly, the experiment was doomed to fail.

If only the early players had correctly read the dynamics of television-journalism, or the later ones had the galls to go against the trend, we would have been blessed with a rich, responsible and engaging electronic media. Firstly, the frequency of news-bulletins should have been thoughtfully chosen, in my view anything more than 8 bulletins a day is an excess. Of course, all of them need to be 'live'. The rest of the programming time should have been filled with non-news content; current-affairs programmes, documentaries, entertainment programs, reality shows, game shows, you name it. Efforts should have been made to keep this part of the content as entertaining as possible, while ensuring the sanctity of news bulletins. Not only could this strategy had made a channel's offering rich, varied and tempting, but in an interesting side-effect, it would have also ensured an obvious point of differentiatation in market that everyone expected to saturate even way back in 2000. Why, but why, did everyone still run after 24-hour news strategy?

Producing news for a live bulletin costs a lot, because of satellite links and all that logistical costs. I once read a few years ago that it costs (then) Rs. 6 lakh to produce a 1/2 hour live bulletin. Once you spend that sort of money for a half-hour's content, and you have 23 1/2 hours remaining, as a channel owner it is only human for you to order repeat of this bulletin at least once. Sure, news don't change that much every half-hour? But sadly, audiences do. Many Indian newschannels repeated news bulletins, and at least one even had the audacity to always run a 'Live' super on its bulletin that was run an hour earlier. The practice has abated, but it still exists. On the other hand, they could have spent a fraction of that money to produce equally engaging, and possibly far entertaining programmes.

In the absense of a clearly defined space for non-news programming, the television channels have to find interesting stories to tell within their news bulletins to sustain the viewers interest. Money is after all oxygen of a newschannel, and once ethics, morals, principles and virtues of journalism are pitted against 'oxygen' in a zero-sum game of pure survival, it is easy to figure who gets murdered. This is the reason mainstream TV journalism has degenerated into a no-holds-barred game, where lines once considered taboo are now easily crossed, and they become stepping stones on the path to higher and higher TRPs. The channels also lose self-respect, and arguably, respect and credibility. Can they sustain it for long? My guess is in the negative.