Saturday, January 10, 2009

Floaters

You know what they are, they're those gas filled turds that refuse to go down no matter how many times you pull the flush. No wait... Well, actually they're the useless idiots who like making loud noises and pretending to be important while the rest of the office works. Actually, in many media offices they're quite a few 'floaters'. people who don't do any homework and just pass on, getting a pay cheque and hoping no-one notices. Recently, a colleague told me the story of a girl, the business reporter from a very fast Hindi channel who pointed at the promoter of the channel and asked 'Who's he?' That is just one example of a floater. Anyway, what the Roy's letter yesterday says that floaters won't be tolerated anymore. Now, I don't want to read between the lines but I'm wondering if there will be a performance audit within the next few weeks and 'non-performance' will be used as an excuse (well, valid though) to lay off people.
And if NDTV starts laying off people, what about the other channels. It isn't as if the problem of floaters is restricted to NDTV. It is an industry-wide phenomenon. Payroll management will become the flavour of the next few months. Oh, and if you are a media school graduate looking for a job, you've picked a horrible year to graduate. But you knew that already.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is Barkha going to be sent out?
Oyeeeeeeeeeeeee

Anonymous said...

Better late than never. A lot of newspapers have so much deadwood in their ranks, that they should have got rid of them a long time back....

Anonymous said...

Roys will not chuck out any of the so-called prime time "star" anchors b'coz they are sons and daughters of media and govt bigwigs.

Prannoy Roy will create "floaters" out of the hard working employees of NDTV who came in thru the proper recruitment route.