Sandeep Bhushan - Digitisation and Dumbing Down, or Why the Indian broadcast news industry is staring at an abyss
The recent sacking of 300-odd employees by the TV18 Group has again triggered panic in India’s TV broadcast industry. The fear being: ‘What next?’ And ‘Will it be me?’ From cameramen and video editors to producers (in charge of both news features and shows) and journalists, all have been shown the door by the media behemoth. Those in the know say they saw it coming. A senior editor who protested against the presence of certain names on the retrenchment list was asked to either lump it or leave. At least two prominent primetime anchors have saved their jobs by settling for a 30-40 per cent salary cut. A senior cameraman tasked with forwarding a list of people to be retrenched chose to step down instead of succumbing to the whims of an axe-wielding management.
This is not the first time it has happened. In 2009, an identical number of people had been sacked in the wake of the crippling blow of the financial meltdown. The significance this time round is that ‘load shedding’ has come close on the heels of Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Group ploughing nearly Rs 4,800 crore into the beleaguered company. The move to downsize was initiated by Reliance, and Ernst & Young was appointed to advise the company on restructuring itself.
But the TV18 group is not alone. NDTV, which has been intermittently chopping and changing its staff over the past few years, went through a similar exercise last year when nearly 50 of its Mumbai bureau employees were laid off. Around the same time, the India Today Group also retrenched a large number of people in Mail Today and Headlines Today. In the former, there were a large number of sackings, right from the editor downwards. In the latter, virtually all senior desk hands and reporters were fired—some of whom had served the channel since its inception.
The carnage in this industry, which has been underway in fits and starts since 2009, is explained broadly by two factors. Its existence at the cutting edge of an emerging—digital—technology, coupled with the continuing aftershocks of the global meltdown, both feeding each other. While the latter forces companies to ‘shed flab’, the former is making it happen. In a classic replay of Luddism, people watch in horror as technology replaces labour—though it is a far cry from the sweep already experienced by the Western media.
However, unlike that nineteenth century phase of technology adoption, which ushered in superior technology and productivity in its wake, today’s digitisation at best remains a mixed blessing for the news industry since almost everybody concurs that ‘news’ is simply not just another product.
‘Integrated Newsroom’
The latest elephant in the TV newsroom is the ‘integrated newsroom’, a concept which is in an advanced stage of implementation in Europe and the US. In India, it is still taking baby steps. As Ashish Pherwani of Ernst & Young told The Economic Times on the TV18 Group’s downsizing measures, “There will be a common newsroom to make the processes more efficient. Focus will be on increasing the width of news coverage.”
What an ‘integrated newsroom’ does is flatten the newsroom hierarchy by putting every single operation online, which in turn makes it possible to measure output per head..
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