Once a journalist, always a journalist

Journalism is unlike any other profession. The great Gabriel Garcia Marquez has gone on record as saying a journalist has the best job in the world. I am in complete agreement. It’s a rare profession in which a salary is immaterial. If I were making enough money through other sources, I would be willing to work as a journalist for free. I can’t think of any other profession that one would be willing to do for free. (Sure, there are exceptions to every rule!)

There is a reason why journalism can be, and most often is, a great profession. And I am talking about good journalism here — that’s the assumption I am making throughout this article. Journalism gives us an outlet to voice our opinions and share it with the larger public. As human beings, we all have an inherent desire to express our feelings and be heard and here is a profession that allows us to do so in a professional way with the added elements of style and context. What more can we ask for?

Journalism also keeps you away — mostly — from the corporate rigmarole of preparing and maintaining unnecessary Excel sheets and PowerPoint slides, and attending routine team meetings, which often don’t serve any good purpose. To me, Excel files and PPTs are good-to-have tools in an MBA class. Beyond that, a waste of time and effort. Journalism, on the contrary, is more real and grounded. You write articles based on first-hand interviews with the people you meet and these pieces have interesting stories to tell, stories that often have an impact on the people, the company, or the issue concerned.

During my recent short stint as a corporate communications professional with a software company in Bengaluru, I spent most of my time coordinating and following up with regard to routine tasks such as pending payments and approvals for a press release. To make things worse, I had hardly any control over what I wrote or said, which is the norm for a communications employee in the corporate world: Everything has to be first approved by the company and everyone has to follow a process. Nothing wrong with that, one might argue and I might agree, but if you are a journalist at heart, it will prick you; somewhere it pains.

Not surprisingly, I got out of that role to become a journalist once again. Yes, once a journalist always a journalist. I am hoping I will now write more than coordinate, and use more MS Word instead of MS Excel.

(This has also been published in The Commits Chronicle
http://commitschronicle.blogspot.in/2016/03/no-150.html)

Is Good Journalism Bad Business?

Is good journalism bad business? It’s a topic I have been obsessed with since college and why not? The topic is as relevant today as it was many years back. The owners of many media houses have always had tough time dealing with credible journalists. The question boils down to this. If company X is one of the prime advertisers with a magazine or newspaper, should the journalist be stopped from writing a negative story about it? Should company X get even an iota of special treatment? The answer clearly is a NO in all caps and bold. Alas, many of those in the business feel the answer should be YES.

There is no denial that revenues are important to sustain a media house or a publication. The big question here is: Will partiality towards company X bring in the required profit? The answer is No. Readers are quick to decipher what’s real news and what’s an advertisement or an advertorial or a PR gimmick. They read a publication because they trust the content and consider it sacrosanct. The moment the reader discovers that you have restrained covering company X negatively or favoured it in any form because it advertises with you, they are bound to stop reading your publication.

Some sales guys also believe that giving editorial coverage is a good way to sell an ad and bring in revenues. They can’t go more wrong than this. Companies advertise because they know it’s hard to find editorial space. The moment editorial coverage becomes easy, which fool will spend the moolah and advertise? So, in the long run, such strategies will only hit back on the face. Needless to say, advertorials and all custom publishing initiatives are perfect examples of brand dilution and will not work in the long term.

Consider this example. Dhirubhai Ambani bought the Sunday Observer from Ashwin Shah of Jaico and launched a daily paper called The Business and Political Observer to act as their mouthpiece. The Sunday Observer was successful in its Jaico avatar but it never worked as an Ambani operation. Why? It’s because our readers are more intelligent than what we assume them to be. The daily paper became an embarrassment and in no way it saved Ambani’s company from all the negative publicity. The publication actually became a liability for the Ambanis and had to be closed down.

Ravi Dhariwal, CEO of The Times of India Group said in one of the forums, “A good product will always sell…Marketing begins with a good product.” I completely agree with him and I am overtly glad to hear such words coming out of a marketing guy.

My final verdict: Good journalism is good business. Media is the domain of the public and people want fair, truthful and unbiased news and views. There is no scope for any hidden agenda here. We should create a strong editorial-driven product and build revenues around it. It cannot happen the other way round where we build an editorial strategy based on the revenue target.

The Fourth Estate and its essence

Rightly called the fourth estate, the Press is as indispensable as the three pillars of democracy: Executive, Legislature and Judiciary. The Press brings forth to the mass anything that is new and worth knowing about. I remember someone saying in one of the press conferences I attended, “The reason why we invite the media is that it forms an important part of the ecosystem we live in.” For instance, a product launch by a company is always followed by a press conference because post-launch, the company has two key functions: sales and publicity, with the former largely dependent on the latter. The three pillars of democracy and the Press therefore are interdependent entities that share the same habitat.

The Press is omnipresent. Don’t question why so but thank that it is so, because without it you wouldn’t have been reading this right now. Without the media, we would have all “survived” in our isolation. I can’t really say “lived”, because living implies something more than merely surviving. We humans by nature are curious beings wanting to know what’s happening on our other side. The media provides us the answer to this need to know. In fact, news, according to me, is giving our audience what they “need to know”. However, in today’s rat race for high NRS figures, TRPs and clicks, news is often being tampered, thereby giving the audience more “nice to know” stuff than what they “need to know”. To pick some random examples, the news about Shilpa Shetty winning the Big Brother is news that is nice to know. We don’t need to know that. We won’t die if we don’t know about it. But the news about hundred farmers committing suicide in a remote village of our country is news which we need to know. This is something that affects us as human beings and we ought to know about it.

The media has played a phenomenal role in many cases. Take for example its active role in the Jessica Lal murder case or the coverage of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. It might have been many accused of usurping the role of the judiciary in the Jessica Lal case, or criticized for telecasting shots that aided the terrorists during the Mumbai attacks, but what can’t be denied is that fact that in both the cases, the media has played a key role. Without the media, we wouldn’t have even known how, when and where the attacks took place.

The Press has its success stories etched in history, but it cannot afford to be complacent. As Henry Anatole Grunwald quotes, “Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air.” Media plays a huge role in nation building and the traditional journalistic elements of truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness and public accountability are sacrosanct to the Fourth Estate.