Concept toh interesting hai...

In my other role, the one as a journalist that is, I cover a lot of things but somehow and I guess this happened by accident rather than anything else - "You're the youngest, you MUST know about all these gadgets", I cover technology. Now, I'm no geek but I meet some pretty cool people along the way and one of them, last year was the head of Hewlett-Packard's printing division Vyomesh Joshi and he spoke about 'Print 2.0' which frankly was a very interesting concept.
But how, you must be asking, does all of this fit in with the media? Well, one aspect of Print 2.0 as articulated by Joshi was 'printing on demand' and the creation of technologies and systems that will allow you to take an incredibly small run of books or magazines. And according to this NYT article that system has begun in the US. basically, the idea is that anyone can start a small magazine, and then pay the company that does the printing just 20 cents a page. Now, that might still seem like far too much in India, a 10 page magazine would cost Rs 100.
But prices, historically, have always gone down right? And what is the biggest barrier towards starting your own newspaper or glossy magazine? The cost of printing, small runs were never possible and a small run of even a ten page glossy magazine on a traditional press would be extremely expensive, much more so than this MagCloud service. I doubt that MagCloud will ever replace the massive printing presses for high-circulation magazines but it could give the little guy a forum, and if costs come down, even if they get halved, a lot of people will be able to produce their own magazines. I wrote about the concept for a 'best of the web' self-printed paper that is doing the rounds in the US earlier, but these are all intriguing concepts.
The old medium isn't dead just yet, but it is evolving in strange ways.
PS: And I'm sure Pakistan is on his mind, but...

Previously Dileep

Regarding the headline - it was a great name someone gave AR Rehman yesterday, I don't quite remember who it was mentioned it, but anyway, now for my daily rant...
I was complaining to a couple of senior editors about the massive reams of newsprint wasted on Slumdog coverage, even The Hindu went mad, possibly because Previously Dileep is from Chennai. Three of the eight Oscars the movie won are coming back to India and that is great. But the movie is a British movie created admittedly by a lot of great, highly professional technicians and film crew in India. The acting is rather ordinary, but I still believe that Danny Boyle takes on Bollywood quite well by using total unknowns instead of the sons and daughters brigade.
Back to the story, one editor told me that if relevance to India was a concern then rural poverty and agriculture would be on the front pages all the time. The sad thing is, he noted that the middle classes probably don't give a shit. Though we will when we get saddled with the casteist idjits that will be voted in shortly and we will ask why even though few of us will vote and because we wouldn't have read about the crisis we won't know why they voted the way they did. Anyway, I guess the Slumdog hype is partially because the movie was made in India using Indian crews and also because it is a happy story. And that story is made even happier in a time when the middle classes are getting hit. We don't care about the problems of the rural poor and rarely did even in the good times, but Slumdog coverage is like Bollywood. A state of denial. Something good has happened, lets report about that rather than the constant stream of bad news.
The media, print and television is for the large part taking the tried and tested method of Pakistani politicians - dig your head completely in the sand, and because you don't hear anything nothing is happening. Honestly, things aren't that rosy, and I'm not fear mongering. Good on Slumdog Millionaire, but the coverage today was far too over the top in times when I would want to know what else can go wrong.

Beyond the headlines

A delegation of print media bosses went crying to the I&B Ministry asking for a bailout. Mind you one of them was at Davos a couple of weeks ago talking up the Indian print media industry. Evidently, things are not that hunky dory - but you can see that in basic page-counts nowadays. But here is my question - those three went, but look at who didn't go - the biggest newspaper group in India and the biggest magazine group in India. Which leads me to one rather obvious question, are things worse at some places than in others? One of my friends in the plastics industry told me a sobering truth of meltdowns - they actually look forward to some players dying out. That is a nice and pragmatic way to deal with a slowdown - the other buggers are shutting down.
Then again, the print medium anmd actually television for that matter have become gloried ad-delivery mechanisms and maybe all people were asking of the I&B Ministry was to dole out more 'Bharat Nirman' adverts. Or maybe, they were promising to bend over backwards for Rahul Baba - you know since he represents 'change' and all - fifth generation of family - generational changeover et al. Sigh! At least, they do have some 'younger' leaders, the BJP's idea of youthful are a bunch of 60 and 70-year olds and guys whose idea of 'Indian-ness' is purdah! I sometimes wonder if people actually read religious texts or even interpretations of religious texts. One of the more fascinating books on Hindu myth and legends (and true to the shastras) I have read is by an Italian.
Did anyone survive Undie's 'Greenathon' bore-a-thon? I wonder how many diesel generators were used on location? Mind you, DG's don't have to conform to any pollution norms. But, I'm being my usual cynical self.

Crazy idea!

Measuring print journalists contributions on a column-centimetre (or column-inch) basis? Sound frikkin' batty, doesn't it? Well, according to this article, the Tribune Company, owners of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times has come up with this brainwave. With increments at a certain media group already hitting rock-bottom here in Delhi, imagine if this had been factored it. But why am I giving management ideas? Because I'm evil.
There i said it!

So is the Broadcast Bill a bad thing?

The TV channels keep on harping about how bad the 'Broadcast Bill' proposed by that slick-willy, Priya Ranjan Das Munshi is like a draconian act that even the Gestapo would not have thought up. However, yesterday when 'India Live' the latest incarnation of 'Janmat' a channel that virtually no-one watches managed to create a riot in Old Delhi, you wonder if even sting operations in the 'public good' need to be regulated.
While, there is no doubt that this sting operation weeded out a person who has no place in civil society, should the channel have gone live with the sting before it informed the local authorities? I think it should have. Of course, the said channel was proudly thumping its chest - 'Hey look, we caused a riot! Yay!'
Listen, to repeat I do not believe that what these guys did in itself was bad, but before airing they should have informed the police, even gone to the Delhi Police Commissioner or someone at the Central Government and had this woman arrested. Plus, the Police should have been warned to give them time to react. Should the school not have been identified? Maybe yes, but that is debatable.
At the same time, while the 'premier' English news channels have harped on about how evil the act is, the fact remains that through the day some of non-English channels could not care less. Watching TV in the afternoon is like watching a comedy show if you put on certain channels which really care more about Katrina Kaif visiting Salman Khan than anything else. Heck, the outburst of judges on India's cacophonic music shows makes for an half-hour special! So where does news end and where does entertainment begin?
So should channels who have lost the plot when it comes to news be held accountable? I think they should. Either that, or they become news channels again. I'm not saying that there is no room for entertainment, but create special channels for such reporting and with stings, at least co-ordinate them when you are exposing something that will rankle the public. Don't keep shooting yourself in the foot and then start frothing at the mouth.
Oh yeah, and NDTV has sold its soul to Kingfisher - Vijay Mallya is the lead sponsor of their new lifestyle channel which will be called NDTV 'Good Times'. Don't know what to say! But VM had this to say...

The Kingfisher brand has come to epitomize a lifestyle that encompasses some of the finest things in life and is today synonymous with delivering a premium experience. The NDTV Good Times channel would leverage from the editorial credibility and quality of the NDTV group and the strong lifestyle appeal of the Kingfisher brand and icon, to offer Indian viewers a world-class television entertainment experience. The shared values of the Kingfisher brand and NDTV Good Times - a great lifestyle, the good times and living in style are highly complementary.

Didn't know that really...
And if you haven't ever read this fantastic blog called Guruphiliac, do so now!

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!