World Statistics Day, or, Shooting in the Dark

20 October 2011 is World Statistics Day and I am tempted to comment and to provoke the industry with which I have been associated for over forty years — as a printer, publicist and publisher. These days I am not as isolated as I once was. I am not the only person decrying the lack of social conscience or a practical sense of community in the Indian printing industry.

In our research company IppStar, I often comment on the unreliability of government data, even GDP statistics and the RBI data, but I do not speak too loudly since my area is the print industry where I am more sure of the numbers which are based on a huge amount of face to face interviews of expert informants, as well as a healthily sceptical analysis of secondary data. I must admit that the general scepticism comes from our detailed work in the printing, packaging and publishing domain. The particular seems to give insight to the general and so we largely ignore the almost daily announcements of GDP projections and industrial data ups and downs.

On 17 October 2011, a young colleague who is an avid reader of the Economic Times brought me a clipping from the morning’s paper of an article by Mythili Bhusnurmath titled Economic Policy: Shooting in the Dark. She writes, “What was India's gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate during the first quarter of the year? Is industrial production rising or falling? What about services? What is the inflation rate? Is it rising or falling? The list can go on and on. For, the truth, unpalatable as it might be, is we really don’t know. “As a result, economic policy formulation has become more like a game of shooting in the dark. Policy authorities don't know which way to turn in a scenario where the three pillars of a sound statistical database — credibility, timeliness and adequacy — are absent.”

Bhusnurmath goes on to point out that even monetary policy decisions on serious issues such as inflation are being made on the basis of very poor data since there is very little real investment in the actual ground research. She writes, “Garbage in, garbage out! The RBI, in fact, has paid a heavy price for its reliance on dodgy data. As RBI governor D Subbarao pointed out in a recent speech, ‘Policy is framed real time and if the provisional data that these are based on are inaccurate, the resultant policies can turn out to be suboptimal choices.’”

So the printing industry is not alone in its ignorance of real data or its lack of investment in data collection, compilation and research. Nevertheless, to me it seems a miracle that bank loans for print projects upwards of Rs. 40 crore are approved mainly on the basis of relationships and trust since the data available is really quite sketchy. Of course our multi-client industry research has subscribers but in our current project every subscriber is a multinational company. Not a single Indian company or organisation is supporting a massive effort that could actually make their projects and growth viable.

What I have written may sound like a plug for IppStar’s research and why not? While a few leading printers actually support IppStar in its work, many more call us up for a few hints about the industry data. And many more ‘borrow’ it without acknowledgement (even for a Red Herring prospectus for an IPO) and sometimes even print our research articles in their association magazines without even a phone call or an email!

Like shooting in the dark, borrowing is our thing. I receive calls from Indian students every month who are doing a thesis in some foreign university. Investing in data and research doesn’t really seem to be our thing whether it is the government or industry or the individual. Actually our industry is vibrant and could easily play a leading role by investing in real on-the-ground statistical work. Perhaps this is something that the so-called leaders of the print industry can think about on World Statistics Day.

 Naresh Khanna editor@ippgroup.in

From convergence to engagement –WAN-IFRA Chennai

Apart from the reflected buzz emanating from hyperactivity of the Tamil and Malayalam newspapers in recent months, the WAN-IFRA conference was interesting. The newsroom summit discussed innovative concepts that can continue to leverage the content leadership of print, and there were many presentations that included case studies and examples from Asia and India.

This IFRA shifted from convergence to engagement. Raju Narisetti illustrated the example of The Washington Post, which a couple of years back had a website that was going nowhere, like many other newspapers and magazines. The solutions were to combine the print and web newsrooms which were earlier across the river — away from each other — into a common web-first operation. This meant a robust multimedia CMS or editorial system instead of the three separate systems that were in place. It also meant a new set of skills and as Narisetti said, “Traditional newsroom skills are not sufficient in the digital space.” He emphasised the need to populate the team with search, social and traffic experts.

As Narisetti illustrated, a print story just pasted into the CMS generally cannot work on the web. The web requires packaging and essential elements to make a story ready for the web. The story is ready when it contains some or all the following elements — hyperlinks, further reading, galleries, photos, graphics, video, database and interaction. He gave examples of how an interesting sidelight of a story highlighted by a blog or a tweet can drive huge traffic and often even displace the main story.

It’s obvious that editors like Narisetti are both intrepid and persistent. In his presentation about the changes at The Washington Post he talked about creating a metrics driven culture — the mere idea of which would have had him laughed out of any newspaper a decade ago. And finally he said that even a measurable increase in traffic is not enough. The goal is engagement and this too is not rocket science. There are helpful open-source tools that can enhance daily stories, and increased social outreach can spark conversation on newspaper websites.

While Narisetti is of Indian origin and now heading a leading daily in the United States, Lin Neumann is of American origin with experience in several Asian newspapers. Neumann is the chief editorial officer of an English language start-up in Indonesia, The Jakarta Globe. His presentation at Chennai spoke about using Facebook and Twitter to build up the new daily and its website. Neumann hired a fresh college graduate to get young people to register on Facebook and Twitter through the Globe’s website. His single employee in turn went to schools, colleges and shopping malls to promote the newspaper and its website with the help of college students who wanted to be part of the new social networking media. The eight most active helpers were rewarded with a Blackberry each. Thus by enabling the social networking inclinations of the young people of the city, the new Jakarta Globe quickly gained traffic and importance in their lives. Neumann also concluded saying that now that the traffic is there, the issue is engagement. How long can you keep the reader on your site? How can you mobilise your readers as news sources?

—Naresh Khanna editor@ippgroup.in

Interactivity for print

In September 2010 IPP had started Interactivity in Print, a feature that enables our readers to share any article by sending an SMS with an email address. The article is instantly sent to people the reader wants to share it with. The sender can also include their email id to receive a soft copy of the article. Our readers are requested to make full use of this and give us their feedback.

We are keen on making print a two-way communication activity. When you either agree or disagree with the content written in the editorial you can convey your ratings and leave comments for the author on our blog, helping us to have a dialogue with you and bring more content relevant to your needs. This allows our readers and advertisers to do what they usually do on digital media — rate, comment, and share.

Naresh Khanna editor@ippgroup.in

50 Fastest growing Indian dailies

For the WAN-IFRA India special issue of Indian Printer and Publisher we took some help from our research colleagues at IppStar. Although our assessment of the fastest growing newspapers in India is based on the most recent publicly available ABC circulation and IRS data, we have also taken into consideration the start of new editions, the increase in pagination and colour pagination, the building of new plants, absorption of new technology, innovation in media, and serious attempts to take on the environmental challenges. 

Naresh Khanna editor@ippgroup.in

Breaking boundaries

At one time, certainly before 1990, there may have been a tacit understanding or even an agreement between newspaper publishers not to encroach on the each other’s territories, markets or languages. But the trend that began 20 years ago with what was considered predation then, has now flowered into a great expansion.

The newspaper industry in India over the last 21 years has grown well in almost all respects and matured in many just as the economy has. With a large parallel growth in literacy, it has weathered the privatisation and multiplicity of television news channels, as it takes advantage of the internet and gets ready for the convergent opportunities of a large base of cell-phones and a tiny but growing base of tablets. The key phenomenon has been expansion in circulation, new editions, more pages, more pages in colour, new media such as radio and television and new print media products as well.

In these years the first wave of FDI in newspapers has led to the first wave of foreign direct investment (FDI) and closely held family companies going to the stock market. Some consolidation has also taken place such as Bennett Coleman’s acquisition of the upstart Vijay Karnataka group and Jagran Prakashan’s acquisition of Mid Day Multimedia’s print assets. There have been fissures and cracks among owner families too, but what is significant is that in most cases they continue to work together while facing the market.

There is a new confidence amongst the Indian newspaper publishers which has erased the old linguistic and media boundaries. Every fast-growing newspaper group has crossed linguistic or geographic boundaries in the past ten years. No territory is sacrosanct as newspapers have to leverage their brands to survive.

It is also nice to see that there is a resurgence among some of the strong newspaper groups that had suffered setbacks in the past decade. Amongst these one sees the resurgence of the Rajasthan Patrika and Deccan Herald groups in winning back circulation and starting new editions as a reflection of the inherent strength of the Indian newspaper industry as a whole. 

Naresh Khanna editor@ippgroup.in

Rajivnama — Distasteful self promotion from the Congress party

Indian newspaper readers woke up to a bizarre print spectacle on 20 August, a day also celebrated as Sadbhavna Divas. Page after page contained advertisements issued by the Congress-led Central and state governments, and various public departments to commemorate the birthday of Rajiv Gandhi, former Indian Prime minister. Initial surprise gave way to shock which turned to irritation, and finally anger as the reader flipped through newspapers that carried the late Prime Minister’s handsome face staring somewhere into the space on almost every page.

In response to a similar advertising blitzkrieg on the death anniversary of Rajiv Gandhi in 2010, Ramchandra Guha had written, “A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that on May 21, 2010, perhaps Rs 60 or 70 crore were spent by the taxpayer — without his and her consent — on praising Rajiv Gandhi. Since the practice has been in place since 2005, the aggregate expenditure to date on this account is probably in excess of Rs 300 crore.”

If spending Rs 300 crore of the taxpayers’ money in self promotion through hero worshipping its former leader (incidentally, named in the Bofors scandal and accused of owning Swiss bank accounts) isn’t corruption, then what is? As the Congress-led UPA government struggles to save its reputation in the wake of accusations of corruption in almost everything it has undertaken in its second term in power, such shameless self advertisement can only ruin its image even further.

Pritam Sengupta from sans serif estimates that there were a total of 108 advertisements amounting to 48¼ of the published pages in the well known English dailies Hindustan Times, The Times of India, The Indian Express, Mail Today, The Hindu, The Pioneer, The Statesman, The Telegraph, The Economic Times, Business Standard, The Financial Express and Mint (Berliner).

‘Sadbhavna’ in Hindi refers to noble thoughts and having good feelings for others. But sadly the action of the Congress party at the centre and across some states displayed little nobility of thinking or action even on the day it has set aside to entertain noble thoughts.

For more on this, please visit
http://wearethebest.wordpress.com/2011/08/20/rajiv-gandhi-birthday-108-ads-across-48-pages/
http://www.wahsarkar.com/2011/05/saare-jaha-se-accha-gandhistan-humara/
http://charts.medianama.com/indian-governments-print-advertising-spend-2009-2010-part-2/
http://sahaas.blogspot.com/2011/08/sycophancy-at-taxpayers-cost.html

- Avinandan Mukherjee

The Murdoch effect

Phones have proved to be the nemesis for Britain’s oldest newspaper — News of the World (NoTW) — and the news of the world is that the symbiotic relationship between phones and journalists has become cancerous. That the latter cannot exist without the former has been the joke in the journalistic world for long. Talking on phone is easier than trudging up to meet somebody in person. It also saves time. Once cultivated, sources usually divulge the big news on phone and stories carrying information about one part of the world can be written sitting in another. But all is fine as long as we tread within the ethical domain and do not turn news gathering into eaves dropping, or worse.

NoTW, which published its last edition on 10 July after 168 years of existence, did just that. In its zeal to be on top of news it got inextricably enmeshed in the process of creating news. It hired services of investigative agencies which would hack into voice mails of people to gather information. In the case of a then kidnapped teenager Milly Dowler, the hacking of the voicemail box led her parents into the false belief that she was alive when she had already been murdered. Stories of the dirty tricks being adopted by NoTW reporters had been doing the rounds since 2005. But it was a whistleblower on the Dowler case published in The Guardian on 4 July that did NoTW in.

The paper had already been incurring losses. The immediate reaction of Rupert Murdoch — folding up the paper — initially looked like a tactical move by the media mogul to save the chances of being able to buy a lucrative television channel BSkyB. It never came to that. The public outrage over the revelations was so great that Murdoch had to withdraw the bid. Several conciliatory and remedial steps were subsequently taken but to little avail. The damage had been done.

The Murdochisation of media (read: thinking only of profits and treating the newspaper not as a medium of social communication but as a product which can be and has to be sold at any cost just like shampoo and soaps) has not left even India untouched. Though so far no media organization has been accused of tapping phones for the sake of getting stories, that being the preserve of the government and the intelligence agencies here, there have been enough cases of journalists being caught on tape discussing ministerial berths and passing information from one party to the other with obvious implications.

There have been very many other instances as well of Indian media houses entering into unethical barter deals and ‘creating news’ for money or planting biased reports in return for favours. The issue is not of journalists tapping phones but a broader issue of ethics. NoTW used phones to pry into the lives of people for the sake of stories, Indian journalists have been schmoozing with corporate brokers for the sake of personal gains. Some may argue that this is worse than trying to collect information for the good of the paper or making sales grow.
Amidst wide-spread condemnation of the tactics adopted by Murdoch and sons for the sake of sensationalism, there are also some voices of dissent which say he brought life to British media and revived its fortunes. This can also be said for one of the most successful media empires in India. But Indian media still respects the privacy of people’s lives to a large extent and doesn’t stoop to the level that tabloids in Britain have.

The NoTW case also brings to light the inevitability of news gatherers going to extremes for the sake of unearthing something different. In the age of Facebook and Twitter when everything and every information is available at the touch of a button, how does one create content which is exclusive? Cut-throat competition legitimises going to any extent for the sake of a scoop. Reporters are hounded endlessly by desperate editors to bring something different. Discussing private lives in public is what we have learnt from social networking. Is it any surprise then that a media house resorted to tapping phones of ‘news worthy’ people? What would have they learnt by tapping the phone of Afghan war veterans — possibly what kind of excesses were being committed by both the sides on war front. That would be both sensational and interesting. And if in turn it helps bring to light injustice done in the name of war, probably no harm in it either. But the same thing becomes unacceptable if it destroys somebody’s reputation or jeopardizes somebody’s life. As happened in the case of Dowler. If the girl had not been murdered or if the tapping had led to the murderer, probably it would all have been for a good cause.

Media houses which engage in sting operations take this risk all the time. It is the ultimate thrill for a reporter to be present at the scene of ‘crime’ while it is still being committed. There would have been nothing better for the ‘rogue’ NoTW reporters, when they were eavesdropping on phone conversations, than getting the story from the horse's mouth. Even if they had been able to see the outcome of their actions some years later, it is unlikely that any of them would have liked to trade their places with someone else. It is only when a sting goes badly wrong that everybody's wrath turns on the third person who had been trying to pry too deep rather than on the actual culprit. There is ultimately a thin line between right and wrong here.

(Aside: Etymologists would find an uncanny similarity between Murdoch and murder. Co-incidently, the name is also close to Mordor: the fabled dwelling place of the evil one — Sauron — in JRR Tolkien's mythical universe of Middle-Earth in Lord of the Rings).

- Shalini S Sharma