Monika Halan shows what’s wrong with the Indian media

If you haven’t already, read Outlook Business’ editor Monika Halan’s resignation letter at Presstalk.

She makes three points:

The OLM Awards are being used to fulfil the advertising goals of the Group. In fact, we were all part of the meeting where we were told that the award should have gone to LIC despite it not making the cut since it is a large company with many readers as policyholders. In a subsequent mail from the President, I was told that the concern is that LIC has withdrawn all ads to the Outlook Group. Edit is being blamed for falling circulation. When we were doing 1.5 lakh copies a fortnight there was no sharing of credit with edit by the management. But in the middle of a global downturn when the circulation of a market-linked product like OLM slips, edit is being blamed. There is direct management intrusion into edit now. We are being asked to get our cover stories cleared by the publisher and send our stock picks to Outlook Profit for clearance.

Now let me kick this off by saying I don’t know Monika, and have never had the pleasure of meeting her. But in one fell swoop, and a few hundred words, she has identified all the reasons why traditional media is doomed (across print and television).

Here’s how most media houses think of the business: profits in media houses are directly linked to advertising, and not subscription revenue. Advertising is related to circulation numbers and rarely to quality content. Circulation is related to distribution muscle and the best content doesn’t help management deal with labour issues and the distribution mafia that controls access to news vendors etc. In newspapers and magazines, the only thing that content does is use up valuable newsprint.

Old fashioned journalism has very little to do with the business of journalism. In fact, reporters and editors have increasingly become incidental, though lip service continues to be paid to the importance of good content. Whether we like it or not, most reporters today fill the spaces between the ads.

Further, business newspapers and magazines (and to a certain extent, television channels) cannot afford to antagonize large advertisers. This post-Satyam world is crying out for unbiased business reporting where hard questions will be asked. The only newspaper in the country that comes close to doing that on a regular basis, IMHO, is Mint. But, for how much longer? Costs there are amongst the highest in the industry, and I don’t see how HT Media can continue to afford to bankroll them, considering their revenues are tiny. At some point of time, a decision will be taken to either shut the paper down, or shut the journalism down and bring in the money. Till then, its a paper worth reading.

Recovered from the site’s WordPress archive, where it was published on 2009-01-15.