Broken News

Massive layoffs across news networks reflect the mess TV news channels are in

Barely 3 months after the NDTV episode, another lot of journalists, this time from the Network 18 group find themselves out in the streets, without a job to go to on Monday. I woke up to the news not surprised, but with a discernible sense of having reached rock bottom in terms of how bad things could get for the profession. Friends and fellow journalists in other news networks are being handed out pink slips every month, if not every week. Many have had to make career shifts, take salary cuts, move cities, even compromise on their smug journalistic ideals to work as PR professionals & paid events producers.

Anyone seen as peripheral (the entertainment desks, features teams) to core news output have been the first to face the axe. Entire bands have been disbanded and old shows are being re-run branded as 'classics' while channels wait for  sponsors to put in money on new programming. Some, in a bid to survive  and cut costs have even gone on to challenge the basic premise of employing reporters to get the news, making do only with wire feeds and desk inputs. This is a monumental crisis!

The downfall of TV news in some sense runs parallel to my career as a TV journalist which began some 6 years ago in August 2007.  I was fresh out of university with a foreign degree to flaunt. And those were heady days! The Sensex was hovering around  its all time highs of 21,000, India was growing at 8 percent and  Lehman Brothers was yet to collapse. As many as 10 new Hindi and English language news channels had launched in a span of 2 years and many more were on the way. Kids graduating had between 3 to 5 jobs to choose from and salaries weren't bad at all.(Rs. 17000-20,000 per month as opposed to Rs. 10,000-13,000 today, in some cases after toiling at an unpaid 6 month internship. A 40-50% reduction,  not taking into consideration the real rate of inflation).

The opportunities to rise, provided you had the right attitude and right set of skills were plenty. There was travel, junkets, generous budgets to shoot aesthetic features and sit on laborious edits. We got biannual appraisals that ranged between 30 to 50 percent, performance bonuses, ESOPs and freebies like 5 star holiday packages (airfares inclusive) en famille. We moved into swanky new offices located on premium real estate, partied at Aurus and Olive and popped the bubbly on every questionable TRP number which showed that we were doing well.

These excesses continued well into the slowdown. Emboldened probably after having withstood a global recession and a collapse in the financial markets, News Channels continued in their wanton manner. Editors flew in and out of Delhi and Mumbai twice a week on company funds. I remember being sent 600 kilometers to cover an agitation despite a network reporter already present at location. New hiring was still happening albeit at a slower pace, and several paid-to-do-nothing types lounged around breathing the air of nonchalance, probably too used to the good times to ever consider that they could be asked to pack their bags and scoot.
 

Slowly but surely though, in the past two years as the world economy went into another tailspin and growth slipped to 5 percent, the chickens have come home to roost and the channels have been hit by a barrage of other bad news. While competition has increased exponentially, owing to a slew of new launches, advertising money, which provides 80 percent of revenue for news channels has been dwindling steadily. This is a double whammy! What's more the volume of viewership, particularly of the business channels has apparently halved, and new technology has brought the entire model of appointment news viewing under question. The new TRAI rule of capping ads to 12 minutes per hour is being seen as a death knell to profitability. Amid all of this there are legal battles being fought with ratings agencies like TAM, the only gauge of viewership for advertisers, for rigging data to favor some.

The industry is going through a seismic shift as one CEO put it ! And perhaps the biggest change,  something that's probably closely linked to this cost cutting and disciplining drive, has been the nature of ownership of news channels. With corporate tycoons now controlling large chunks of the mainstream Indian media (Reliance Industries indirectly controls TV-18, younger brother Anil is a key stakeholder in Bloomberg TV India, The Aditya Birla Group has a stake in Living Media which runs channels like Headlines Today and Aaj Tak), another layer has been added to the raging debate on what the  corporatization of news means for its future. As if losing editorial sovereignty weren't enough, will profits now precede over quality journalism? My biggest fear is that in trimming the excess, are we picking at the bones? Can journalism lead a skeletal existence devoid of funds and resources?

They say things will eventually get better. That this shake out was much needed, given how bloated most news channels were. That digitization will, with time streamline things, balance the skewed subscription - advertising ratio and improve quality of programming, separating the men from the boys by shunting out the non-performers.
 

Until then though, a cloud of hopelessness looms, and one wonders what the future beckons. For those of us academically inclined, going back to school till the dust settles could be a good idea probably?

The Phd stipend these days, out-rivals journalism salaries. And by a wide margin!