Nostalgia

Those of you born earlier than me, before everything became computerised and before your music player started weighing 25 grams and became the size of - heck I can't even find a size equivalent for the new iPod Shuffle, it is insanely small. Carrying 1000 songs in something that small just highlights how far we have come. Just take a look at these pictures from the 1970's to get an idea how a newspaper was put together. I don't know about you, but I first walked into a large press and saw the bustle of a typical newspaper office in 1984, as a five-year old. Telex machines, typewriters and the sheer volume, and today people tell me that I type loudly at one-tenth the volume of the 80's. Cell-phones, Google, desktop designing and layouts, the world has come a long way...
And why would I have opinion on Fake IPL player -one of the people I thought could have written it denied it. I still believe the writer is a Bengali, because of a couple of references (and the tortured emotions towards KKR - which is why like the good Delhi boy I am I support Veeru's team), may or may not be in South Africa - a couple of bad mistakes (VJM wasn't in Cape Town for the opening ceremony - he was his cars in Shanghai) and is adept at the medium. I might be wrong here, but I personally believe that the blogger is either a journalist or a member of the production crew. Or and this is highly unlikely, a back-room member of KKR.
On this post, do you really think that we are tarring the organisation thanks to the actions of one man? I don't think so, firstly the editor, or the resident editor does have a say in the news selection, was somebody sleeping? The second and far more nefarious possibility is Private Treaties - ET did go gung-ho in printing Private Treaties news, the inside pages were full of news that really didn't cut the grade. Several leaked memos and reports have highlighted how Private Treaties have damaged the bottom-line, but the SEBI report has damaged the 'moral' line so to speak. How is The Economic Times therefore any different than India TV? Somebody has to ask this question, and I am.
Listen, I have nothing against Bennett, and as I told a couple of people when the shit the fan that ET should have used the SEBI report as an excuse to clean up its act - apologised on the front page instead of ignoring it. Standing up for some semblance of values is 'supposed' to be a bad thing according to some people? What world do you live in? The PR agency involved was deep in the doo-doo also - but the question that needs to be answered - desperately - was this done as a matter of policy? Making people scapegoats doesn't help for too long, just as hiding behind a few semantically challenged lines in autobiographies don't.
The slowdown is pummelling CNBC's reputation in the US, ET is the scapegoat here and believe me, this is only going to get worse, because I'm not sure if people have monitoring the interwebs for what is going on forums. Because there is a hell of a lot of anger, you can see how CNBC TV18 has reacted (a virtual change in their line-up) - I scout around web forums quite often just to see how people react. I don't like what I read sometimes, but weirdly enough, this is what journalism has also become - it is essentially to troll blogs and monitor Google Trends as part of the job. We can't all live in our little f'in cocoons and have stories delivered in small brown packets or over email.
Also, according to certain sources at ET TV, the great white elephant might be further delayed beyond the rumoured May 1 launch date (I can't nor will I confirm this), not helped along by integration issues. Cutting salaries of people in print who are supposed to help deliver the exclusives while the TV guys keep their 2008-peak salaries is leading to trouble. But that is like stating the obvious, and I have a funny feeling a few more reports might make it into the public domain soon.
So just a word of advice for anybody 'leaking' any reports - please 'leak' your report through Wikileaks - for reasons of libel and then link back to the Wikileaks site. Hosting any report which is copyrighted to someone else may not be in your best interests given how trigger happy the legal arms of some media firms might be.

News from America and other stuff

And it doesn't look so good - any one of ten papers or even all ten could be shut down soon. But even in those that are surviving, the new brain trust (with Indian connections, mind you) in some cases is not getting through to the staff? Is the new Blackberry Storm really that good? I found it irritating very honestly, though I really do like the Curve 8900.
And if the BJP wants my vote, please, please tell Arti Mehra to take down her pictures that have been plastered on my morning commute. I've lived in India long enough to be able to tune out of most things, but somehow 'her' face still manages to give me daymares. And if she stands for New Delhi, I'm seriously going to vote for whoever the Congress puts up, most probably Ajay Maken. Heck, I might vote for Maken even if Vijay Goel stands. Plastering adverts and starting blogs won't make me blindly vote, if the BJP wants to be seen as the party of change it cannot be achieved by taking out ads for Advani on The Guardian's website (served up by Google to Indian IP's - though the irony is delicious) but by putting up candidates who truly signify change. Anyway, I know that it all comes down to the guys who put up the best 'Get Out The Vote' campaign fuelled by cheap country liquor on Election day and that casteism, despite everything still dominates our elections. But I'm impressed at the Times Of India's Lead India campaign this year, but lets see what the voting numbers are?
Happy Holi to everyone out there, have a blast and don't get too stoned on Bhang. I'll see you all soon enough though I might disappear for a day or two on work!

Late night

I was sleepy a couple of hours ago, but I rode through the 'sleepy hump' and now I'm wide awake chomping down on Classic Milds and staring at inane stories linked through my Twitter feed. I'm probably numb in the brain - that kind of reflects on the music playing - I've circulated Death Cab for Cutie, Pink Floyd, Led Zep and have somehow ended up with ABBA. I think my current low-carb diet has something to do with this, I swear all I've had to drink are two glasses of Australian Shiraz. Anyway I'm too bored to comment on the state of the Indian media and write long, boring lumps of text on the internet, and I'm sorry if this makes no sense, because I can't be bothered right now about making sense. 

Anyway, Time's Walter Issacson argues that micropayments are the future of the newspaper industry. Er... I don't think so. Not because of the fact that newspapers are not even the worth the paper they are printed on. Really. Currently, with existing newsprint prices, it costs between 5-10x the stand price currently. Blame that on the futures contracts that some of the highly paid managers took out - but then again even the master hedgers at Southwest Airlines, Ryanair and even Reliance got caught out with falling commodity prices. Other than some people I know who bet on gold in October 2008 and are now worth a lot more than they were. 

Anyway back to the point, the price wars that started in the early-90's in Delhi when Times' began its assault on Delhi are hitting hard now. True, no-one wants to pay to read the same story twice, thrice or even four times. Heck, even on television I don't quite get the point of ten channels telling me the same thing. But subscription-only websites that deliver what you want and then you pay for it through a decent micro-payment mechanism such as an SMS won't quite work here (though there have been rather cool experiments with text messaging and micro payments in India). Because a premium SMS costs more than a newspaper. Not just that, while you could contemplate paying a decent sum of money to read something you wish to read, will you do that?

You would pay decent money to read a novel, but even three rupees for a 800-word article? The problem is that news has become so devalued thanks to the fact it costs next to nothing every morning and Rs 10 to get a bunch of channels you never watch every day. The unholy nexus between advertising and editorial exists because of this, and while some bloggers would like nothing better than to expose that, it would be impossible for a daily to raise its price to Rs 5 let alone Rs 10 to cover newsprint cost. Such a product could become a 'thinking man's/woman's' paper but would not survive. Maybe I'm being too cynical. 

Really I should get some sleep. And before that, read Valleywag's retort to the Time article. See you the other side of sunrise IST.

Steve Ballmer

I've interviewed a fair few Fortune 100 CEO's over the past half-decade with my current employers, but my most entertaining interviewee has to Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, not including the time when thanks to over-reliance on technology I discovered to my horror that my office's digital transcriber was full (and thus learnt never to trust office equipment, unless they were in your own possession) . However, I will hark back to my first interview with the man that Fake Steve Jobs politely refers to as Monkey Boy back in November 2004.
I will try and find the transcript in the archives, but I remember asking him about Google and he dismissed the threat of the Mountain View company, calling them just the 'current hot thing' of the internet (this made for an interesting second interview two and a bit years later). Anyway, since I am generally feeling unemployed today and was surfing all over the interwebs, I came across this interesting conversation that Ballmer has with the editors of the Washington Post.
"...there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form..."
Now, while this obviously means the US and other developed economies, this is an interesting statement and unlike his rather crazy dismissal of Google back in 2004, this is rather more serious. I do believe that things will not be so dramatic in India, but lets be honest, I am very sure that over 99 per cent of the readers of my publication have access to the internet, and sooner or later will find consuming information from the internet a far easier proposition than spending money and buying the 'offline' magazine.
I have said time and again, the main reason I hopped onto the blogging bandwagon, what some 300,000 pageviews and 700 posts ago was because I had to be online. I realise that the future is not in paper. Ballmer is right, you know, he might have no clue how Microsoft will leverage this paperless world, and the newspaper may take longer than 10 years to die out in India, but we're in for interesting times over the next few years.
Oh, and if you want to know why fake Steve calls ballmer 'Money Boy', you have never seen this YouTube classic.


EDIT: Microsoft India seems to be in serious crisis.

Tomorrow evening!

Well, at 6.30PM (i.e: 7.30PM) tomorrow evening, in a banquet hall of a Delhi 5-Star, the newest entrant into India's burgeoning English daily space will be unveiled at the launch of HT Media and WSJ's new 'Baby'. The invites for the Presser are already out and according to it, the Presser will be addressed by Christine Bernard (MD Asia, WSJ), Mario R Garcia (Newspaper Designer), Shobhana Bhartia, Raju Narsetti and Rajiv Verma.
It is safe to assume that January 31/February 1 will be the launch date for the new paper. Given that the ability to subscribe for the early-bird subscription scheme ends tomorrow, I would go with the former. From initial (hazy) reports the paper has signed up quite a few people in Delhi, but Bombay numbers are still on the low side after the main paper launch didn't particularly enthuse two years ago. Anyway, it will be some time before this baby will make money, but I would really like to see what this paper looks like. If they have dummy copies tomorrow evening, I'll give you a rundown straight away.

Publications I miss.

One of Dhirubhai Ambani's nicer experiments, or well rather one the times he let his younger son have his way with the loose change was The Sunday Observer. Now, I don't lament the passing of the Sunday Observer as a journalist, I was far too young to have worked there during the good days, but the paper, whatever you say about it - even call it the Ambani's propaganda rag - much like a certain television channel is today was usually - particularly during the time of the first two editors, very good Sunday reading. And for me, as a pre-teen kid those days, despite going through a fairly troubled part of life (my pre and early teen years were more screwed up than most peoples, thanks to my parents' marriage going haywire) was fairly good reading for children in the 12-16 age group in a regular newspaper. And that is something I do not see in ANY Sunday newspaper today.
None whatsoever, because they try to outcompete each other in being cerebral and lifting ideas from GQ. Talking about lifting from GQ, this month's UK edition has an article called 'Absolute Insanity' about chillies and 'hotness' (of the chillies not of the models in the Kingfisher Calendar), a few days after I read the article in my bosses cubicle, the country's self-proclaimed 'best' food writer does an article on chilles. Now, this gentleman is a great writer (no doubt about that) and no part of the aforementioned GQ piece was 'copied' per se, but information was copiously used. I was not the only person to notice the timing, at least three other people I know who read the UK edition of GQ mentioned this me, just finding the timing a bit ironic. Anyway, inspiration can come from anywhere and I am not making an accusation of plagarism - that is exclusively the terrain of two-bit and half-wit movie reviewers.
You might argue that DNA makes an attempt - but DNA is going after the Cartoon Network crowd, not 'TweenAgers'. A year or so ago, maybe less, a former colleague had done a story on this market in India and how it is booming, but somehow, despite the massive explosion in the media, there seems to be almost no reading material - rather daily or even weekly reading material targeting the 8-18 market, and that seems to baffle me.
I'm fairly sure that I am not alone when I say that the early years of India Today's Target magazine were brilliant. Of course, the magazine did lose it towards its later years and its second avataar as 'Teens Today' was one of the Group's more colossal publishing disasters - because it tried to go after both the early-teen and late-teen market. As any marketer with half a brain will tell you, the 13-14-15 age group is quite a different proposition from the 16-17 age group and the 18-19 age group is a different kettle of fish altogether. target actually had value propositions that appealed - thanks in no small part to Ajit Ninan's great cartoons and I hope that Times of India asks him to restart some of his strips - or maybe start something new altogether - to a wider variety of readers. However, in a fragmented market like today, such a scenario is not possible.
Now, the reason many magazines and newspapers don't start publications for this segment of the market is because they feel that the market is either too small or that they will not get advertising. The latter reason is more crucial - publishers will tell you that they're competing in the age of TV and the internet and people don't read. They don't? That is news to me, I read when I was young, and by the time I got to middle school, cable TV was in India in all its glory - I mean I had MTV with VJ Nonie and 24x7 of Rock n'Roll.
Yet, by the time I got to that stage I had finished most of Gerald Durrell and started out on Wodehouse and I was still buying Hardy Boys Casefiles books (I discovered much to my surprise I still have a lot of my Hardy Boys books along with their impossible and improbable plots - but they were fun, and in a cupboard in Calcutta I still have some old Target and Indrajaal comics lying about). Those were good days!
But young people read, maybe less nowadays because of blogs and the internet, but I've said this before, a well-produced and well-written newspaper or magazine will give you in half an hour what most people take half a day to find on the internet. I mean, the printed word or page, whichever way you look at it still has the ability to surprise. After all, I plonk down a significant amount of money to read GQ, even though I can find a lot of the content online, because I want to. I like Nerve, but Nerve would be cooler if I could hold it. And no matter what you say, a Playmate in a three-fold foldout in Playboy, looks a lot nicer than scrolling down on a monitor, even if you have a 19-inch LCD. Maybe I'm old-fashioned or maybe I'm like this because I get my genes from a journalist on one side and a publisher on the other, or maybe I'm environmentally callous and like the feel of paper.
Maybe I'm just growing too old! I have to drive a car at 200 ticks to put a smile on my face nowadays! But thats just me!