Go Forth And Prosper

There is a cure to the Indian media’s allergy to investing in exclusive foreign coverage.

WrittenBy:Indrajit Hazra
Date:
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First, the good news.

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Britain celebrated 60 years of its queen’s reign and the BBC, our single window source for most things British – by which I mean contemporary British, since pockets in Kolkata continue to maintain the illusion of a 1950’s London in Mamata-land – went completely nuts, showing hours of the celebrations live, as if Queen Elizabeth personally has a permanent seat at the United Nations Security Council and owns half of China.

The good news was that here in India, we didn’t care. And by ‘we’, I especially mean the English language media, which can have such a strange view of identifying world news that it deems ‘important’, which it then goes on to milk to the last quintal. And if there was some notable coverage, it was refreshingly critical – such as The Hindu’s London correspondent Hasan Suroor’s nibbling critique of Britain spending about £1.3 billion and “shutting down the entire nation for four full days just to humour the Queen”. Yours truly plans to give his two paise bit this weekend in the Hindustan Times, but let’s see. Because overwhelmingly, the diamond jubilee rumpus has been rightly ignored by the Indian media – despite our being part of that silly grouping called the Commonwealth and despite the ‘international’ news magazine Newsweek pulling out all stops to run a Queen Liz cover story (‘Jubilee Gal!’) double issue last week.

But what about gauging and engaging with the rest of the world? For a country that plans to be pressing all the right buttons to turn itself into a – what’s that catchphrase again? -knowledge economy, India is notoriously insular when it comes to being interested in the world. Well, let me rephrase that: we’re insular to the point of disinterest when it comes to following our interests about world affairs.

On first glance, that looks like a ridiculous statement I’ve just made. Never before have we had access to the world like we have today. I got the news of American science fiction writer Ray Bradbury’s death on Wednesday night minutes after Americans got the sad news. And I got it over the internet – through a Facebook news feed. Even if they don’t have the news on ESPN, BBC or CNN, you’ll get the final score of the, say, Corazon Cup exhibition match between Real Madrid veterans vs Manchester United veterans played last Sunday pronto on the internet.

But I’m talking about something else called perspective. Sitting here in India, we’ve been following the euro crisis and its various forms of collateral damage through ‘international’ TV channels and publications such as The Economist along with reports from The Guardian and The New York Times that most English language Indian papers reprint as part of their content tie-up deals. But barring the odd opinion pieces, it’s more than a bit strange that we don’t have much coverage of our own regarding India’s largest trading partner, Europe, from any European capital that provides the ‘Hasan Suroor’ type of perspective that we got for the British Queen’s diamond jubilee. I don’t know how many news organisations will send people from India to cover, say, the Greek elections on June 17. Sure, many of us interested will follow what the foreign media via television and the internet will be covering.

But forget Europe (although Pranab-babu would strongly advise against that). What about the great bugbear, China. There are only four Indian journalists posted in China (my friend Sutirtho Patranobis is the HT correspondent in Beijing). And there are probably a dozen Chinese journos in India. And yet, much of the coverage that we still get is overwhelmingly via the foreign press. The less said about Indian correspondent presence in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal the better.

I had asked Sutirtho some time ago if there was some kind of a supply-demand gap. He agreed that there was an interest in foreign coverage from editors of news organisations in India, but they would rather rely on foreign news services despite the nuances and the perspectives carried which are obviously catering to ‘their’ readers and viewers. As HT’s correspondent in Colombo during the last days of the LTTE, Sutirtho was lucky to have been ‘activated’. But he did admit that as a system, Indian correspondents worked more like sleeper cells, being ‘turned on’ only when there was a ‘crisis’ or aprime ministerial or presidential visit.

The reasons for this relative apathy towards our reporters covering world news are two-fold: logistics and economics. It’s actually difficult to send Indian journalists to places like China and Pakistan because of our inter-governmental relations. So the Guardian or the NYT reporter’s stories are simply more practical to publish. And then there’s the economics. Sending an Indian reporter abroad to cover an event – as my colleague Amitava Sanyal was when he went to Cairo during the Tahrir Square uprising – is mired with budgetary red tape making such ‘expeditions’ seem as cost-beneficial as a moon mission. Again, the reasoning usually is: Why send someone from among us when someone from some foreign newspaper will be covering it and whose reports we can readily republish?

My smart-assed (but, nonetheless, correct) managerial answer to that: having our own people in or sending our own person to a foreign country brings invaluable branding. An Indian news organisation having its presence in Myanmar when the country conducted its historic bypolls in April this year would have not only brought an obvious India-perspective for our readers and viewers but it would have also said volumes about the paper’s/channel’s core competence: bringing news in its unique way. The same holds for an Indian reporter, instead of an AP or a Reuters reporter, sending reports on Vishwanathan Anand becoming world chess champion for the fifth time in Moscow earlier this month. Even as a reporter parachuted into Kabul and Lhasa for a week each, I knew the value of perspective. Finding posters of Aishwarya Rai in Kabul barber shops and boomtown Lhasa reminding me of parts of Gurgaon aren’t observations I expect an NYT journo to make.

And with the economics of adding pages/time slots devoted to a paper’s/channel’s exclusive world coverage being what it is, exclusive foreign news coverage could be the serious differentiator on an organisation’s web edition – backed up by proactive and attention-seeking displays, pointers and synopses in the print media’s world page(s) and the television media’s foreign news time slot.

At a time when foreign news organisations are planning to sell their foreign coverage content to Indian media organisations with a vengeance, since they have an almost unbridgeable advantage over us in terms of existing offices and bureaus in various spots across the world (even with budgetary shutdowns, they have more presence), it makes sense for Indian news organisations to stop being classic penny-pinchers and send our own folks ‘out there’.

Apart from obvious branding joys (‘OUR correspondent in Shanghai’), we could one day be ready – probably when our domestic media market, like those in the US, the UK and Europe at present, faces a glut and an advertising downward spiral one day in the future – by having a system in place where we can provide news with our consummate news skills for a local foreign readership/viewership. We could sell Americans and other readers across the world a special content section only pertaining to America. Perhaps the platform can be called ‘America Ink: A report on America from the journalists of Hindustan Times/The Times of India/The Hindu/The Indian Express…’? Or maybe, a name a little more original.

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