Bloodbath at The Telegraph // Hundreds of Indian journalists lose their jobs // Manisha Pande - Telegraph Lay-offs: The End Of The Era Of Field Reporting?
Two months after the
Kolkata-based ABP Group announced that there would be around 40 per cent
job cuts in its English daily The Telegraph and Bengali
flagship Ananda Bazar Patrika, the axe has finally fallen. On
Thursday between journalists and other members of the staff from The
Telegraph clubbed with those from ABP, over 120
were asked to resign.
Among the hardest hit
in the bloodbath was The Telegraph’s features bureau. Senior
members of the department were asked to go and nearly all state correspondents
axed. The political bureau also saw several sackings — at least three in Delhi
and many others in state capitals. The paper’s photo and web departments have been
denuded as well. The sacked journalists include both wage board employees as
well as those on contract.
Pages of both ABP and The
Telegraph were reduced drastically from December last year. The
Telegraph’s popular Sunday magazine Graphiti was also
scrapped. However, ABP has been
extremely generous in its severance package to journalists. While younger staff
are being given a few months’ basic as compensation, those who have put in
several years of service with the company are getting anything between 75 to
100 per cent of a year’s CTC. Journalists who have been with the company for 20
years or more are also going to be paid their basic salaries up to their
retirement age.
The layoffs and
extreme cost-cutting measures at ABP come in the wake of rumours that The
Telegraph may be up for sale. Sanjiv Goenka, chairman of the RP Sanjiv
Goenka Group, is one of the names being thrown around in Kolkata as a
prospective buyer. In 2015 Business World, ABP’s business magazine,
was sold as well. The shocking spate of
job cuts in ABP is the second big story of media retrenchment in recent months.
HT Media also cut a 100 plus jobs early this year, shutting down editions of Hindustan
Times in Kolkata, Ranchi, Bhopal, Indore, Varanasi, Kanpur and
Allahabad. HT’s business bureaux in Mumbai and Delhi were also shut
down and the work outsourced to the staff of its sister publication, Mint.
The pressure of
dwindling ad revenues, especially in the aftermath of demonetisation, is being
cited as the principal reason for job cuts in media houses. The Times
of India is also said to have put in place a freeze on hiring — after
complaining in a lengthy Op-ed about the way wage board revisions in the pay scale
of journalists and others was eating into the viability of running media
organisations.
However, the
layoffs in ABP have a dimension other than a purely economic one. It is being
seen as a culture shift in the Group after owner Aveek Sarkar stepped down as
Chief Editor in June last year. His younger brother Arup Sarkar, who helms the
group now, is regarded as a more practical owner who is keen to shed flab and
make his publications more cost efficient.
Insiders say that
Aveek Sarkar has been entirely marginalised now and has no say whatsver in the
running of the papers. Meanwhile, journalists at ABP who survived the culling
are keeping their fingers crossed. Not everyone believes that they have seen
the last of the layoffs. Morale is at rock bottom and the future looks
tense.
http://www.thehoot.org/media-watch/media-business/bloodbath-at-the-the-telegraph-9929More reports on the recent lay-offs
Telegraph Lay-offs: Is It The End Of The Era Of Field Reporting?
The news of lay-offs
at ABP Group first started trickling in on social media last week, but the
extent and number of job losses still remain in the realm of speculation. Speaking to Newslaundry,
ABP Chief Executive Officer Dipankar Das Purkayastha placed the total figure at
close to 300 employees across the group’s print publications. “The
[retrenchment] exercise is still going on and the number may touch 300,” he
said. This figure refers to all of ABP’s print publications including The
Telegraph, Anand Bazar Patrika and Ebela and
doesn’t factor in stringers associated with the group.
Purkayastha suggested
that the decision to review the group’s staff strength across its print
organisations was taken back in September 2016 (about three months after Arup
Sarkar took over as group chief editor). He said while demonetisation has impacted
print revenues, the lay-offs are not a direct result of it. “We want to move
towards being a leaner organisation and work more efficiently. Where ever we
found duplication, we removed it,” he said, adding that those laid off were
offered generous severances.
Neither Purkayastha
nor ABP Group Associate Vice President (Human Resources) Shiuli Biswas would
give us a break-up of the lay-offs so it is difficult to gauge the exact number
of journalists fired from each bureau of The Telegraph. However,
speaking to employees across its editions in Kolkata, Ranchi, Jharkhand,
Guwahati, Patna and New Delhi, the general pattern seems to be of cutting down
on district correspondents, or ‘contributors’ like Sarkar. For example, in Bihar,
reporters covering eastern Bihar, districts of Gaya, Munger, Bhagalpur,
Muzaffarpur, Motihari and Chhapra were taken off the payrolls. One
photojournalist, Deepak Kumar, who had been working for Patna edition for about
12 years was asked to leave, along with four other photojournalists who worked
as stringers. Kumar was to retire in June 2018. His annual salary came to Rs 5
lakh. “I will be receiving CTC of nine months as severance but now I will have
to start looking for a job before retirement,” said Kumar.
From the Guwahati edition
of The Telegraph, 11 people were laid off. This included one
reporter each from Nagaland and Tripura, four reporters from Guwahati and three
reporters from the Jorhat bureau. Two “retainers”– or stringers – each were
laid-off from the districts of Kokrajhar and Dhubri.
In the Jharkhand,
reporters from Ranchi and Jamshedpur were asked to put in their papers. From The
Telegraph’s national affairs bureau, outstation correspondents covering
states like Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan and
Gujarat were laid off. In the Kolkata edition, too, it is the district
correspondents and photojournalists that were hit the hardest, according to
most accounts. “I think they have all together done away with district
correspondents,” said one ex-employee with The Telegraph.
No more ears to the
ground: Industry watchers in
Kolkata say the current lay-offs are more course correction after a
particularly indulgent reign under former Chief Editor Aveek Sarkar. “The
Telegraph has always been a very flabby organisation, it hired four
reporters for the work of one and in some sense this was inevitable,” said a
journalist on condition of anonymity. The fact that TT is
able to come out with a newspaper, albeit with reduced pages, after the mass
lay-offs perhaps hints at a certain redundancy in terms of editorial roles. But
what is worth noting is that the lay-off has struck at newsgathering from the
grassroots.
If news’ essential
role is to keep readers informed with stories from across the length and breath
of the country, then cutting down on district correspondents effectively dents
that aim. These are reporters that usually have great networks and immense
knowledge base in terms of a district’s politics, social and economic
indicators and so on simply by virtue of having invested years in reporting
from the area. Put simply, Sarkar’s
17 years of experience in Bihar can not be replaced by a sub editor who relies
upon wire updates and whose chief skill is the ability to rewrite and conjure
headlines to garner clicks.
Losing reporters from
India’s towns and districts makes for an insular newsroom, one that is cut-off
from a vast majority of the disenfranchised and the rural poor. It’s a loss of
perspective that is hard-earned. “Most reporting is done from the desktop
and less and less on the ground,” noted The Conversation, in an analysis of why
Western media wasn’t able to predict Donald Trump’s rise to the American
presidency. “This has meant the antennae picking up and understanding social
change are no longer there. Easy talk has been too often prioritised over news
gathering because it’s cheaper – but not necessarily well informed.” A systematic shift
away from ground reports has particularly daunting ramifications for India with
its diversity of languages, cultures and political complexities that are often
difficult to interpret for those unfamiliar with a region.
Casualties of a
digital future: The other set of
lay-offs that made news were those at the Hindustan Times, which
were attributed to the company looking at a digital future. No such announcements have been made in ABP
for the time being. “We haven’t been told of one new thing or strategy that we
will be adopting in terms of the website or digital,” said a reporter on
condition of anonymity. One of the senior
editors working with The Telegraph says it has become tough to
come out with a paper given its reduced staff strength. Another pointed at the
general sense of insecurity that has gripped the journalist community in the
east: “Journalism was never a good profession in terms of job security or
money. This [lay-off] has made it worse.”
There is, however, a
sense of resignation in the face of news media’s changing landscape, which will
in all likelihood hit the English newspaper segment the fastest and hardest. Sarkar, for example,
does not see this lay-off as a verdict on his journalistic competence but
accepts that his skill as a print journalist may no longer be of use in the
English newspaper industry. “I have created a lot of hungama [stir]
with my stories in Bihar. But now the English language reader is smart, has
smart devices and does not have the patience to turn pages. Newspapers are not
growing as fast as the web medium and we are the causalities,” he said,
offering an explanation for the mass retrenchments at ABP. According to media agency Zenith, print advertising will
grow at seven per cent in 2017, as/ opposed to digital’s 30 per cent. “The
revenue model that sustained newspapers is simply crumbling, with classifieds
drying and advertisers not willing to pay absorbent prices for jacket ads when they
can reach the same target audience via digital news outlets for much cheaper
rates.
It’s only going to get bad with may be even more than 1,000 print journalists losing their jobs this year,” said an editor based in New Delhi. If the job losses in the coming time will mean losing out on news gatherers to make way for news aggregators, then clearly English newspapers and their readers will lose more than just some extra journalists.
It’s only going to get bad with may be even more than 1,000 print journalists losing their jobs this year,” said an editor based in New Delhi. If the job losses in the coming time will mean losing out on news gatherers to make way for news aggregators, then clearly English newspapers and their readers will lose more than just some extra journalists.
