Shashi Shekhar, Editor, Amar Ujala

Shashi Shekhar became an editor at the age of 24 at Aaj and hasn’t looked back since. With 27 years of editorial experience, Shekhar, Editor of Amar Ujala, is forward thinking, ready to take risks and adopt the latest technology to stay ahead.

Shekhar has wide experience in successfully spearheading new editions of newspapers and news channels. He introduced the concept of ‘Live’ news in Amar Ujala with his experience in Aaj Tak.

He joined Amar Ujala in 2001 and under his guidance the paper has undergone a radical transformation and with a dramatic improvement in the quality of content, there has been a positive impact on circulation and readership. His hands-on approach towards work and leading by example has led to this paradigm shift in the product.

In a free-wheeling discussion with exchange4media’s Shanta Saikia, Shekhar speaks about vernacular journalism, sprinkled with several interesting anecdotes, and the journey of Amar Ujala to the big league of publications in India. Excerpts:

Q. You became an editor at the age of 24!

Even before I had completed my MA from the College of Indology, I had started writing for Dharmyug and Hindustan, which were reputed publications of that time. I had also written a lead article for Navbharat Times when I was only 16 or 17 years old.

I had never thought of becoming a journalist at that time because journalists were not very well paid -- that was the late seventies and early eighties. I was deeply interested in ancient history and I topped in the subject at the College of Indology. While I was doing my MA there, I started working with Aaj, then a leading newspaper, for a lark. Within three months of joining I was made the Sports Editor. I told by my Editor that I was a man of literature and wrote about current issues, I hardly knew anything about sports. But he insisted that I cover sports and I wrote some stuff those days that should have been ridiculed, but they didn’t take that too seriously. They used to change my seating place every two months or so as I had a very modern outlook that they didn’t know what to make of me.

Another unusual thing those days was that there wasn’t a single journalist in Varanasi who used to ride a scooter! I was the only one to ride one.

Q. What was the journalism scene like then? What were the challenges that you faced?

It was a time of great flux in the 1980s, when not just Hindi journalism, but journalism per se was progressing in India – Bhindrawala was flexing his muscles in Punjab, terrorism was rearing its head in the state, and it was an unusual thing for the Indian psyche when activities were taking place against national integration. Some people were sitting in Punjab, in Amritsar, and challenging India’s sovereignty.

At that time Mr Gupta, who was the owner of Aaj, thought that there should be a multi-edition newspaper and asked four-five of us, who were very young at that time, to join hands with him in this endeavour. He said, ‘I will give you a good career growth, just work hard’. Aaj made rapid progress under his guidance and till 1993 Aaj was in very good shape. We had the maximum number of editions. However, he didn’t pay much attention to content and consequently we couldn’t manage the growth.

Q. Then you began your stint with the audio-visual media just as it was picking up in India. What was that experience?

I was with Aaj for 20 years. And at the age of 40, I realised that there was a lot more progress taking place in Hindi journalism and the paper was not keeping pace with developments. I then joined Aaj Tak and was part of the core team of the channel. I handled all the input work of the channel. While there, I tried to give a new definition to television. For instance, if you remember TV news eight years back, the lead news invariably used to be of Kashmir, where crying children, blood, violence were shown – it seemed as if news was a calendar of mishappenings.

I believe news is much more than that, but what is more important is that life goes on, overcoming all mishappenings. It’s true that untoward incidents do take place and they should be covered thoroughly, awareness should be built about them, but what really matters is life. So when Aroon (Purie) asked me what different things I could do for the channel, I replied I wouldn’t like to show the usual stuff on Aaj Tak. Television is the language of camera and through the camera I would like to focus on images that put this thought in the sub-conscious of the viewer that there is law and order despite the mishappenings. Aaj Tak was the first channel that began this process and viewers’ fatigue regarding news started to disappear.

We were able to make news a saleable product and make Aaj Tak a successful brand because we focused on hope amid despair. We didn’t shut our eyes to the grim realities of life. What we did was also highlight the good things in life and asked our viewers to also look at life with more hope and joy.

Q. How did you tackle this problem? What major steps did you take to improve the content?

I told my team that we won’t wait for the news, we will go to where the news is, and Amar Ujala was the first newspaper to do this. When asked how we would go to the news, I suggested drawing up nine core issues every morning, right from the correspondent sitting in a small hamlet to the seniormost level. These nine core issues are related to our lives like education, health, crime, telecommunication, transport, etc., things that affect our day-to-day life but we don’t give too much thought to. We then decided to follow up on each of these issues like removing the layers of an onion and keep covering them till their logical conclusion.

We then decided to do away with run of the mill stories like covering the routine visit of a district magistrate to some place. What we were interested in covering were developments that had taken place between his previous visit and the current visit.

Following such coverage people felt that we spoke their language, and Amar Ujala, which was the No. 8 newspaper four years back, now stands at No. 3. We haven’t undertaken any big brand campaign or taken special steps to push our circulation. We improved our position on the basis of our content alone.

Q. How many editions does Amar Ujala have today?

We have 15 editions. And we matter in each of our markets. It’s not like we have 50-odd editions but are fruitful in only five of our editions. Except Punjab, we matter in all our markets, we are the No. 1 in almost all our markets or very close to the market leader.

Q. Then you joined Amar Ujala. From the time you joined the paper till the present day, how has the paper changed?

When I joined Amara Ujala, I had a tough task ahead on my hands; right from Chandoli on the Bihar-Uttar Pradesh border to Kupwara on the Indo-Pak border, it was a vast network. However, it was the editor’s call all the way. When I joined I made it clear that I wanted to decentralise thoughts, I wanted the thought process to travel from the lower level to the top and not the other way round. The Editor should be the ‘master blender’ and not play multiple roles himself.

It was a difficult task. I personally went to each and every district from Kupwara to Chandoli and tried to educate people. I will give you an example. There is a very small hamlet called Kulpahar in Banda district comprising 350-400 households. I found that 144 bottles of Pepsi and Coke were available in shops, there were 60 bikes and a total of 72 copies of three newspapers – Aaj, Dainik Jagran and Amar Ujala – were sold!

I realised that there was something lacking in our product, we had not been able to become a utility product or we hadn’t been able to convince people that if a family consumed six bottles of Coke or Pepsi priced at Rs 10 per bottle, for the same amount they could read our newspaper for the entire month. They bought bikes, drank Coke and Pepsi, but did not buy our newspaper. That definitely was a problem.

Q. How do you manage the entire news process – right from story idea to news gathering to presentation?

One major step that we took was that apart from decentralisation of thoughts, we also set up a central desk so that we could take those decentralised thoughts, centralise them and again decentralise them. For instance, suppose some district correspondent or a small town correspondent has given a good idea, it comes to the central desk and then before 1 PM I ask my team to work on that story idea in the way they think is best. We are the only paper to send the day plan to our entire team at 1 pm daily, that this would be our lead story or these would be the pictures to be used, and we send the agenda of the day by 5 PM to the entire team. Now suppose there is a blast somewhere at say around 6 PM, then that is a bonus – but my newspaper is well planned. Even if there are no major incidents we are clear about what we are going to carry in our paper the next day in the morning itself. We start work on the paper in the day and print it at night. No editor of mine has to stay back in office after 9 PM, his day’s work is over by then.

Q. This calls for a lot of man management and coordination. How do you manage it all?

We have organised our manpower like a relay team, one person hands over the baton to the next one, and so on. And from 9 PM to 2 AM at night, everyone has his respective role to play. As a result of this, productivity has gone up, people who were senior sub-editors four years ago are today News Editors and Resident Editors. This is because they shed their complacent attitude and became more actively involved in the news process. I told my team that a Desk person is not a traffic policeman. When a news report comes in he does not just blow his whistle and clear the copy, he does value addition to the report. And in order to add value to a report the Desk person has to be up to date and aware of the latest happenings.

Secondly, people in my network are very prompt about alerting their Editor about the latest news right from the hot spot and send me an SMS about it as well. This keeps everyone in the loop and the flow of information is maintained and we work on it accordingly and can react quickly.

The process of decentralisation of thoughts that we adopted has had positive results beyond our expectations. No other newspaper has done it so far. In most places, the paper runs on the whims of the Editor. I have freed the paper from the shackles of the Editor. The editor is not a superman who does everything himself. I want to talk to my readers in their own language; hence, despite having different editions, Amar Ujala has unity of content – like unity in diversity.

Q. How did you come up with the punch line ‘Taki sach zinda rahe’? When did you devise it? How do you imbibe it in your paper?

When I joined Amar Ujala four years back, I was aware that it is a high credibility newspaper. The first paper that I read was Amar Ujala, even when I was working for rival newapapers I was aware that Amar Ujala was a credible newspaper and never published incorrect news.

But the paper rarely used to advertise this fact or even about itself. And whatever philosophy that the paper had was not very apparent. So, at a meeting with Atul Maheshwari, I came up with the line ‘Amar Ujala: Taki sach zinda rahe’. One important thing to remember is that news is news when it tells the truth, remove truth and it becomes just a story. So, the difference between story and news is ‘Taki sach zinda rahe’. We don’t print stories, we print news and news is always truth.

Truth is always neutral. And there has never been any pressure from any quarters.

Q. What other steps did you take to stand apart from the competition?

We then decided to make Amar Ujala a ‘breaking news’ newspaper. By ‘breaking news’ I don’t mean carrying the news of a train derailment ahead of everyone else. Breaking news is news which creates an impact. I will give you an example: President’s Award for Bravery is given every year to some brave kids. A young boy from Kidri had won the bravery award for killing a panther to save the lives of three children. I asked my correspondent to travel to his village and do a story on him, ask the child if he knew what the award meant, what he was thinking while saving those kids.

So, when the correspondent reached the village after traveling 23 km on foot, he found that the brave boy cleaned utensils at some dhaba in Uttarkashi for a livelihood. No one in his village knew the name of the President of India nor the significance of the bravery award. The child and his feat were all but forgotten.

I then asked my Uttarkashi correspondent to trace the boy. We carried the boy’s story as lead in our paper – ‘Brave kid cleans utensils to make ends meet’. But we didn’t stop at that, the very day the story appeared we received Rs 2.5 lakh as aid for the boy from our readers. Pranab Pandya wanted to adopt the boy. We got the boy admitted to a Navodaya Vidyalaya. Unfortunately, the story has a sad ending: the boy was expelled from the school for taking alcohol and is nowhere today.

But we did make an effort and this was not the only breaking news we did; there were several more such news. And the situation is such in my area that if people watch television to get the news first, they refer to Amar Ujala for credibility and confirmation of the report. Secondly, we break regional news which is then covered by television two days later. Thus, we have been able to dispel the notion that television is a faster medium.

I have also instructed my team of photographers to reach the place of incident as fast as possible. There have been times when my correspondents and photographers have reached the place of incident even before the police! Amar Ujala is a ‘breaking news’ newspaper, it is a ‘live’ newspaper and people know it.

Q. Amar Ujala is quite an old newspaper, having been set up in 1948. How has the journey been over the years?

We have been making changes in our paper after a lot of thought. Both Dorilal Agrawal, the paper’s Founder-Eeditor, and Murarilal Maheshwari, another founder of the paper, were visionaries. They launched the paper in Agra with content that was very local. That time Navbharat Times used to sell a lot in Agra as well as quite a few Delhi newspapers. And the general view was that national newspapers were the best, while the rest were average. But when Agrawal and Maheshwari introduced Amar Ujala, they created such a chemistry of regional journalism that it surprised everyone.

For instance, Agrawal printed the first edition containing local news at 4 AM every day and then would scan the news agencies, listen to the BBC till 5 AM and then print another special two-page edition at 8-9 AM, which had several international and national news that even Delhi newspapers had not carried. So, he would give the same paper in two parts.

Since then growth has been rapid. Amar Ujala was the first Hindi paper to have a paperless office, we undertook rapid computerisation, adopted the latest trends and latest technology.

But the most important thing that we always maintained was understanding local requirements and keeping up with them. For instance, if you pick up our Paudi Garhwal edition, you will get the feel that it is published from that area, and if you move to another district, will get the feel of that region in our paper. Today, there is a great shift in attention towards the rural markets, but we are already the kings there.

Q. What are the biggest challenges before the vernacular dailies today? There is the audio-visual media, the Internet – how do vernacular dailies face these challenges?

The biggest challenge for the vernacular press is from the vernacular press itself and not from anywhere else. If you take a closer look, television is not faring that well. When I left Aaj Tak, its TRP was 58, today a TRP of even 28 is considered to be great. Competition has increased manifold. As I have said earlier, TV is the language of camera. The language of camera has ended and has been taken over by ‘talking heads’. There is an explosion somewhere, and you find these young boy and girls standing in front of the camera and reporting from the spot, and they don’t even know what RDX is!

People have become bored of TV. Nowadays, people can’t watch any one channel for more than a few minutes. That’s why we have a channel like Tez, where you can quickly update yourself on the news and move ahead. That’s why you find that all the headlines in different channels have become commercialised. We had started this at Aaj Tak, where we realised that people watched the headlines and then picked up the remote. But newspaper headlines are not commercialised, people read the entire news report. You can read the newspaper anytime, take it anywhere. But you cannot view TV in such a way.

Secondly, given the current condition of television, TRPs are bound to go down further. There is sameness, people have become bored of the ‘talking heads’. An incident happens and all the channels reach there. So, there is the same news in every channel being presented in the same way -- why would people view the same news over and over again?

I am confident about the future of the vernacular press. From 1990 to 2000 it was the era of television. 2000 to 2020 is the era of print. I cannot say anything beyond that, statistically speaking.