Boojet 2009

No, I will not bore you with incredulous stories of how the government will be taxing your potty now. I started getting ET Now on Airtel DTH yesterday so today morning because I kinda got heldf up, I thought, might as well watch the budget at home than in office or some large conference hall. After all, I do have a halfway-decent LCD panel (grumble, grumble - duties have come down, though it really wouldn't have hit the price that much). Anyway, this much is for certain, CNBC-TV18 landed one helluva' blow with their first wave of guests - Uday Kotak, Deepak Parekh and KV Kamath. And ET Now had Arnab Goswami talking (versus Mitali, is that even fair competition - why Arnab? Why not Andy, Abheek or Sri? They sound a lot less shrill). Guess who won the battle for the remote in the first wave. ET Now's guests were so-so and the other channels were lost in the water. Don't get me wrong, I do like what I have seen on ET Now until now, but today was the battle of the channels. And while the evening shows might be different, and you do watch the business channels in the evening on a day like today, I will be 35,000 feet in the air during prime-time. Not that I think that I'll be missing much, though a good bitch-fest is always fun!

Scheiße

Yes, I know that Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code has been sort of declared unconstitutional, I mean sort of because Delhi's higher court is yet to review it. I also know that this means that everyone can finally get blow-jobs legally (how come no-one wrote about that?) after not all sex involves penetration of a hole at the bottom of your torso. The point being that why on earth did everyone go so frikkin' beserk over it in the media (one internal mail in a TV channel had the lovely term 'gayism' in the context - "we should cover all aspects of 'gayism'" - never knew that it was a '-ism' until now). Seeing the wall-to-wall coverage made it seem like that Gay guys would go around buggering each having in public (the cops will still frown on public displays of affection - and I wonder how on earth they will amend Section 375) , and the insanity of the coverage made homophobes even more stringent in their opposition. Primarily because much of the coverage was silly and anchored by illiterate idiots most of the time - Times Now comes to mind first and foremost. And if you wanted to see homophobia in full flight (other than Baba Ramdev promising to cure homosexuality through Yoga!), the language news channels were there with their versions of craziness. It was a pity that Dinara safina did not give Venus Williams as strong a challenge as Elena Dementieva gave Serena Williams, at least I could have watched Winbledon for a while longer. Watching news TV was hellish yesterday. And what is worse we are now heading into the budget madness on TV.
PS: I still don't get ET Now - anyone listening? Talking of which PR people have interesting stories, but more on that later.

The end of journalism, Mr Narisetti?

While the news sites and TV channels are all overjoyed with the Section 377 ruling - I refer you back to a blog post I wrote a long, long time ago. Anyway, while I applaud the Delhi High Court, which at times seems to me to be the only sensible HC in India, I am yet to read the details of the case. talking about stuff I wrote a long time, there is this post about us Indians being more racist than most.
Anyway, this post is about something I read about Raju's new employers that left me feeling a bit shaken. (EDIT: WaPo has their ill-thought out plan off, hope no-one at Times Group got wind of it) One can argue that such things have been happening in ndia for a while, but never 'officially'. Sure, sometimes the editor-proprietor, and we know that the line has been very blurred for a while, has used his 'access' to parley favours for friends. But this is akin to MediaNet and whatever the other news organisations call their equivalent organisations charging for access to ministers and the like. Imagine, The Hindu charging for access to MMS, since their old Delhi CoB is now the Media Advisor to the PM. This is like that.
In other news on the media front, while a bunch of people have been removed at News X, some decent people among them whose fault was to align with the old powers that be (even though that was an incredibly stupid thing to do, if you ask me personally), there are people being hired as well. We hear that PGT, long relegated to Lok Sabha TV will be making a Prime-Time talk show return when the channel is rebranded. I really must stop watching news TV completely now, why can't tennis be a year-round sport. And talking about Tennis, here is an open letter...
"Dear Star Sports,
I do not wish or want to watch Sania, Bhupati or Leander Paes play pointless Doubles games when there is a Federer, Nadal, Djokovic or Murray game on. I will be willing to pay you for that. Yes, I realise that I am paying Airtel a lot for bandwidth and can actually watch the games online thanks to some kind soul somewhere in the world streaming the match. But I would much prefer a decent TV stream anyday. I bought a bad-ass 40-inch panel to watch increasing amounts of live sports. I would li9ke to meet the head of your Tennis programming and whack him over the head with a racket. Preferably a very tightly-strung one. This is why I wish that our players lose Doubles rather fast. At least this year, they didn't disappoint me.
Yours Truly,
K"
PS: Weird no, all the Eastern European chiklets got all the Press, but the two Williams' are playing the Womens finals!

The End?

The NewsX saga has rolled out to its end with the sacking (‘firing’ whatever you want to believe) of 78 employees. However, as usually happens in such cases there has been immense amounts of back-biting and bitching. Nobody other than the truly incompetent should lose their jobs, and believe me there are enough truly incompetent people in this industry. But whenever there is a drastic purge accusations fill chain emails about why A, B or C didn’t lose their jobs and what their political or apolitical connections are.
Here is the funny thing, emails are possibly the worst way to spread canards – IP logging and all, with Google, MSN and Yahoo more than happy to bend over backwards and provide IP addresses. Heck, Airtel even wrongly sent a techie to jail by handing over data and is offering him a restitution of Rs 200,000. That would not have covered the cost of flowers at Sunil Mittal’s daughter’s wedding. But then again, as some of you say, Apple’s and Orange’s.
The dead-tree industry is not doing much better than the indirectly dead-tree industry (Thermal power plants, I know it is a bit of a stretch, but with little time to blog lately spare me) from what I hear. The Times and ET apparently have so much inventory to spare that they’re handing it over to ET Now by the bucketload and I’m yet to see any signs of life on that front. A colleague who is closely related to someone senior in the channel joked that he managed to see the channel for the first time in Allahabad.
The interesting evolution has been with CNBC-TV18’s programming, suddenly it is less about the markets (Markets are so 2007-2008!) and quite corporate but stories that would have been buried as single-columns are getting mad amounts of airtime. Bajaj’s biggest engine yet is a ten-minute story? No doubt, there are some good stories, but somehow I always seem to notice the bad ones.
That said, with Wimbledon on, I don’t really see too much news TV. Actually, last week with MJ’s death I watched too much CNN and BBC. Actually with Iran and all the celebrity deaths (Billy Mays died last night!) I don’t see the Indian news channels much. The ones I do end up watching are the Bangla news channels because of their Maoist coverage.
Back to CNBC-TV18 in an oft-talked about piece of news that is now final, the network has been given permission to start three new channels – ‘South’, “Gujarati’ and ‘Channel 3’. The first two I can guess, the third I’ve been trying to figure out. Not that I think that I will be target audience for any of the three. And just how much money is there in business news? Enough to support so many channels, or is TV18 copying from the Times playbook and using the ‘flanking’ product idea. Interesting to see if this can work in Business channels, it did not work for UndieTV with city-focused channels. Then again, Raghav B is a bit more adept – but why have The V do a show on business tycoons – that show is a snooze fest for us in the know and ends up sounding like a circle jerk festival.
Back to the start of the tale, I feel bad for people who lose jobs in a weak economy and an even weaker media. Not everybody who has lost a job is truly incompetent or a twat. Some people are nice guys, and I wish them well. As for why I haven’t been blogging as much as I used to, I have generally been very busy of late. My Cover Story run rate has shot up and with several more interesting stories in the pipeline, I find myself spending less time in office. I guess things will settle down, and I must admit not being in office is not a great thing at all in this weather. F***, it is hot and with Anil Ambani not providing us electricity, things might get worse.
One last thing, may Anil Wilson’s soul rest in peace. Amen!

Opinions on ETNow

Frankly, I don'ty have one simply because I have not seen the channel as yet. Not because I don't want two, but simply because despite having THREE (read that THREE) different Direct-To-Home connections (DishTV, Tata-Sky and Airtel) at home I don't get ETNow. I believe that a ton of money has been spent on distribution, but with high-end colonies, presumably colonies with a high proportion of ET readers, having moved over to DTH - have you looked at the (Panchsheel, DefCol or even Bandra West skylines lately?) this is a slight issue. I really would like to watch ETNow, you know! I've seen far too many adverts and not the product as yet. I believe that something might happen before Pranab-babu's 'F*** the Monsoon Failed' Budget. I also know that TAM ratings don't consider DTH households - which make all TAM numbers for English news channels slightly, no make that terribly shambolic. But, I also think that ETNow will trash CNBC-TV18 in the ratings simply because of the amount of reporters that they have. And if ET can manage an 'integrated' newsroom, the demand that TimesNow does the same will only increase, and it should. I know a lot of people in ET read this blog, so please forward this post to someone in Ditribution. Because, if people (almost all my friends are DTH and/or IPTV) don't start seeing the channel soon, we will tend to lose interest.

ET Now

While The Economic Times has turned up the volume about ET Now, including carrying stories by their reporters more frequently, today mornings piece about the edit team and anchors was surprising. Not because of the way people got billing but because Rahul Joshi's name was nowhere in the piece. C'mon, everybody and their uncle knows that Rahul is the brains behind the channel (and recently that has come at the expense of the paper) - I can understand if he wants to be the anti-Arnab, but please. People do like names once in a while y'know.

I do have a lengthy prose piece planned out, but currently I'm stuck between Twitter and a hard place, so that will have to wait for a while. I'll keep posting on lunatic layoffs and other crazy stories, but for now I have to find a decent Espresso and type out one hell of a lot of stuff on MS Word. By the way, MS Word is 25 years old this year, after browsers it is my most used piece of software and given that I keep on swapping browsers, Word is possibly my highest used piece of software ever. I've argued that Google has become the journalists best friend, but for better of for worse (I like Office 2007 for some reason) Microsoft Word has pretty much become the spouse.

PS: This Shiney Ahuja case is very surprising. Didn't know he would take after Bollywood baddies of note!

Imperialistic

I had lunch today with the top marketer of a Bangalore-based company. In case you were wondering, I was surprised at the salad spread at The Imperial, seems to have slipped a bit, the sushi seemed anemic and the wasabi tasted no different than the green maida paste that Moets, Defence Colony, hands out (I have no idea why my friends like going to Moets for food). The dessert selection was, as always, impeccable. But, I’m not discussing five-star lunches, even though I could write quite a bit of prose on lunches. The small pleasures in life, and then I wonder how I never end up losing weight.

Anyway, long story short. Somewhere during lunch we started discussing the state of the media and me as usual started moaning about our plight and silently thanking my lucky stars that the marketing buffon who destroyed our finances and couldn’t pimp a Hollywood Actress in Dubai if you asked him to, works for our rivals now. Again, I digress – that is the problem with stream of consciousness writing – its comes out as an incomprehensible babble.

So, I mentioned layoffs and how they had been rather severe at Archana Complex among other places. Suddenly, my host piped up, “Are things really bad there?” she asked and continued to tell me a rather bizarre tale involving the channel that operates out of a movie hall. It seems that a reporter pitched a story to them, and they seemed agreeable and asked when she wanted to come down. And prompt came the reply that whenever they would fly her down.

Now, all of us travel on other companies expense. Heck, I just went outside the country. But never in a way where I ‘pitch’ the story and then insist on being flown down and wined and dined. So, my host called up the channel boss to figure out why this was so and it seems that this is now accepted policy at this particular organisation. Which made me swallow my ice-cream.

Guys have done bizarre things, and I know costs are pinching but this seems a bit too much. I can understand that the reporter did not want to hand the story over to her local colleague, some reporters, actually all reporters are extremely possessive of stories, well, I’m not but I’m a sort of ‘fire and forget’ sort of reporter and if someone else can do the story, big deal. At least now. I guess that is because a level of pragmatism has filtered into my life.

That said, if the story is good enough I am sure getting travel approvals passed can’t be that difficult. Now if you insist on travelling with a cavalcade (camerapersons) then, well. See, I have some opinions on the future of news gathering and distribution, but this much is for certain, multiple people doing one story is going to become a thing of the past for run of the mill stories – I shoot pictures and do it decently well and am figuring out lights right now. Concept photography and Live TV will still need camerapersons and photographers but not armies of them. Heck, with next-generation networks I suppose we will have live-streaming through services like Qik, I played with the Nokia N97 yesterday and that is what reporters will be expected to do, sooner than you think.

But more about all of that later. This was a surprising piece of news, and coming from an extremely large company, I believe it – they’re more credible than the news channel. And after this piece of news, I wonder how much credibility is left. Then again, isn't that what this blog is all about?

Sorry, sorry, sorry...

Now say that as fast as humanly possible about ten times over, and you will get what I want to say. There was a good reason I decided to give blogging a break, the election results unfortunately having nothing to do with that. Frankly, I got bored, and I have been tweeting far too much. And my new Editor likes me a lot and promptly gave me more work than I could handle. He also sent me off to the Orient, which was nice but somehow my fingers have been churning out too much work.
That is no reason for coming back online to this place though. Maybe I needed a place I could come back to, where I could bitch and moan about my work-load, people and things in general. Yeah, some things on this blog will upset some people and other things will confirm the opinions of others. But honestly, I have never written with any malice intended towards anybody, well, sometimes, but not always. My alter ego is really doing a lot of work and I might even have something exciting planned on the side for a while, but more about that is it fructifies. And somehow that read like fruit flies. Ayways, lets back into business...
There are a half-dozen Rajya Sabha seats that open up in August - the nominated seats and according to the grapevine, at least one senior journalist, actually a very senior journalist whose growing bald patch (not the term 'patch' as against 'head') is seen far too often on UndieTV for everyone's good will be getting one of the seats. That and another one will supposedly go to an IT honcho who recently retired and has spoken about entering public life since he is bored of dictating books for other people to write (for him).
As regards the fiscal health of the media industry, things really haven't improved in May and the first half of June. Misguided investments are still dragginmg some companies down and others are having their own issues. Hitherto cash cows are now barren, and the girlie magazines which were always tarty, are now street hookers when it comes to advertisers. Heck, you could possibly afford an advert in most of them (save Vogue). Out on the internet people are still predicting the horrible 'daath' of the newspaper industry but I can't see the entire world buying e-readers anytime soon, though I will write more about that in a bit. The layoffs continue and the salary cuts haven't stopped, some people have been caught in the crossfire, but lets not carry on about it too much...
Plus, ET Now is supposedly launching within the next few days/weeks/months. Do you really care anymore?

Interwebs, media and such…

Horrible load-balancing problems struck every large Indian media site on counting day, one even boasted that their ‘servers went down’. Doh! The biggest and most dramatic failure was Election Commissions own site – http://eciresults.nic.in – and I wondered why on earth NIC can’t set up a load-balancing server set-up for themselves. Try accessing the budget site on budget day, impossible. But NIC knows that there are occasional spikes and really should gear up for it.

Media companies on the other hand don’t. And this led to serious issues during the MumbaiAttacks in November where several sites collapsed under the stress. But is changing and spending massive sums of money for the internet worth it? That question is being answered in very strange ways by different organizations and a couple of them are saying, ‘You know what, it isn’t!’

What does not help is that traditional reporters, including yours truly, don’t really want to contribute over and above for online editions. The argument being that our jobs are stressful enough before you add the web to the mix. The honest reason being that most reporters are seriously lazy, heck you see that in the rampant ‘stealing’ that takes place every day, so much so that using the internet to find a story and then rewriting it has become par for the course. Attribution and acknowledgement have become dirty words. I’m a features writer, so believe me I know the pain of seeing data and facts you dig up stolen by imbeciles. But like Indian highways, all you can do is shrug your shoulders and move on and hope that sooner or later things change.

So, back to my point, there is still a severe shortage of genuine and good online content in India. Most news sites carry the same Press Trust of India rehash, and some sites prioritize story A over story B. Which, given PTI’s habit to hyperbole and claiming things that might or might not have happened is usually entertaining. Blogs are just blogs, opinionated examples of bad writing, and I would put myself in that bracket as well. I don’t really think too hard when stringing together paragraphs here, and only do so when I have the time away from talking about technology.

But technology is moving towards more and more access devices but access to what is the question? There ain’t that much to see online in India. Yes, there are some really cool blogs and sites, but nowhere enough content to satisfy a content whore such as me. And then again, far too many of them are discussing the rights and wrongs of what was discussed in India, so you have a situation where people are stringing together half-truths to debate the half-truths broadcast and printed in the mainstream.

The mainstream, where if reporters wanted, genuinely good web content can be created doesn’t really give a shit. Heck, on counting day both HT’s and ToI’s websites were far, far behind the channels. Updates from reporters were slow in coming and there was still far too much of sameness, too much PTI.

And then you have the features magazines, where there is decent content but no clear direction on ‘how to’ monetize that content. Putting everything up on the internet really doesn’t seem to solve the problems, instead it creates some that didn’t exist before. But, I do believe that features writers can take a lead on news writers when it comes to the web, because so much more work is going into the story. There are so many pictures that are not used, so many quotes not used and so much more than the 4,000 words that were written. Heck, equip everyone with a Nseries phone or suchlike and put A/V content based around the story. Think out of the box, Fortune is.

You know the biggest problem with the media internet in India. A lack of people. It is the same group of idiots who hop, skip and jump from one group to another. There has been little in the way of fresh thinking or communicating to the core assets. Internet newsrooms don’t work, your core assets are still the main reporters – get them to contribute – make web reportage part of the job.

Rumour Mill

Now that everything is done and dusted politically - well other than ome random sulking here and there from the DMK, the media is back in business. And the media news is not that Raghav Behl seemingly went ballistic at his anchors on air, ballistic or excited I really don't know, but the magazine is ok. That it, Forbes India isn't bad, but ok, and I'll want to wait out two-three issues to see how it really is. The issue test is important because while Open has retained design integrity, content is haywire after a couple of months. Anyway, as I was saying one Republican has his product here, the other (former) one, is getting his product here too. And much, much sooner than you think because it won't be a bootstrap channel rather a rebrand of an existing one. Wait and watch.