Saturday, January 10, 2009

Cost Cutting?

I was at a bar last night (or tonight if you're reading this in the next few hours) along with quite a few people from Undie TV and around midnight some of them were all getting frantic calls, it seems a late night mailer went out from Radika and Prannoy Roy. It contained the dreaded word - 'cost cutting'. What it said along with the fact that all NDTV senior management are taking 20% pay cuts are some rather ridiculous things - including advising employees to mind phone calls. Now call me a penny pincher - but there are better ways of doing things. I understand that travel budgets need to be cut at every major news organisation and trust me I work at one and we are trying hard and thankfully doing rather well, or so I'm told. At least my business division is. I understand that cost-cutting is a reality, but the best part of the NDTV mailer was about 'floaters' - some people work very hard but there are many people who 'float'. Now I wonder what that means?
Given that Metro Now is probably shutting down, I have received a couple of mails from panicked employees about what is going on, and not just with interns, but even full-time staffers, I don't think the next three months are going to be great. In fact, the media industry, particularly listed companies have been great practitioners of 'creative' accounting and might indirectly suffer the fallout of the Satyam saga. even though Ramalinga Raju surrendered so that he could avoid SEBI questioning, and I think he seriously underestimated the media fallout, but the media fallout might be rather bad both for him and the listed media industry.
More tomorrow, when the Grey Goose wears off.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh! that was coming anyways. Though its tough to digest when the cat is out.

So do u have the letter, i wanna read it, please mail it to me at sam.kocher@gmail.com.

BTW, V I have become a big fan of your yaar. Keep up the blog.

Anonymous said...

"In fact, the media industry, particularly listed companies have been great practitioners of 'creative' accounting and might indirectly suffer the fallout of the Satyam saga."

Great point there k, from Chandra at Zee to Undie and even Udayan's own company, all are fraudsters.

Udayan should be the last one to complain. A friend at CNBC told me that TV18 once had an analyst meet a few years ago and never had one again after they realized how embarrassing it was that they didn't have any answers. I think one analyst put out a report too which specifically mentioned the hypocrisy in running a business news channel that questions everyone else while yourself having awful corp governance.

Anonymous said...

HA HA! Vir Sanghvi has the last laugh...the NewsX ship was bound to sink after VS threw up his hands and walked out.

This is terrible..wayward owners in short skirts ruining so many journalistic careers.

Serves the Mukherjeas right!

Tart wife doesn't even wear a sari,so that Peter can wipe tears of defeat in her pallu..

Anonymous said...

Check out coverage of DDA Scam.. Mail today breaks the story, and TOI says they did it.. how ridiculous

Anonymous said...

What happens to INX now? Their much touted #1 music channel 9Xm has petered out and 9X has NO new programming of any sort. I don't think they got much money for the news channel personally and Peter has blown his reputation. I wonder if WSJ would still have put IM on their women to watch issue if they knew about all this.

Anonymous said...

Hey man, you probably meant NDTV Metro Nation shutting down.

Anonymous said...

Which time zone are you in? 6:13 PM isn't "late night".

K said...

Erm, Blogger automatically resets time zones, I wrote the post at 0220 IST, thats late. Well, for me nowadays any which way.

Anonymous said...

NDTV Metro Nation is closing down...

Anonymous said...

"NDTV Metro Nation is closing down..."

finally that stupid push red button on the top of the screen will go away...

Anonymous said...

I think anonymous was referring to the time the email was sent out by the Roys.