Vinod Mehta, Editor-in-Chief, Outlook

I really don’t know. One of the things that I have not been able to do is to pay much attention to my own writing. I am a hands-on editor; I’m not an editor only for show. And I can’t do both editing and writing. I may not be the initiator of the change on some of the issues that I have raised today, like the reinvention of news journalism because I might not be around, but I certainly hope that the next generation of editors will take up the challenge.

When I die I would not be unhappy if they put on my tombstone: “Here lies a print journalist”.

As I told you, the industry is at a crossroads. I am not just talking about the magazine business -- I am talking about the entire media industry. There is a big challenge which the industry is facing: the challenge is of credibility.

Increasingly, one of the things that is happening because of excessive competition is that people are desperate for “exclusives”. On many occasions they trip up. I think that Indian media has great credibility and the debate over editor is king or the marketing manager is king is a phoney debate; it doesn’t exist because no editor will tell you that selling is not important. You have to be crazy to talk like that. That there is a war between the editorial and marketing departments is phoney too -- because we have to survive together.

However, the real test for the media is the test of editorial credibility and how we reinvent ourselves. You know people are bored with television because television keeps doing things the same old way. You get representatives from three political parties into a studio, and the role of the compere is to provoke them to shout and scream at each other. You get three people with completely antagonistic points of views to ensure that this happens.

Now the rules of the game are changing because readers and viewers are changing. And, I must stress audiences are not dumbing down. This is again a phoney debate. What message is the audience sending? The audience is asking us to change the way we present news. “I don’t have time” -- that is what he is trying to tell us. “I want to know but I don’t want to read 18 pages to find out.” That is not dumbing down; that is a creative challenge. How does one present news that is succinct, that is not trivialised? I am not making a plea for trivialisation, I am making a plea for clarity.

Yes! We did not know or we did not anticipate the size of the need for such a product. We talk about the approximately 3.5 million people who come from abroad; but there is no accurate figure on the number of domestic people who travel, about the number of domestic travellers. But when you go out on a holiday you see the number of ordinary people who are travelling. The middle class has money and disposable income, so that six-hour drive in your Alto, an eight-hour drive to Mussourie or Nanital is very much in the realm of your financial capacity. I think we didn’t realise the extent to which that was happening.

Sure. You cannot run away from the fact that the problem in the Indian media is that the advertising cake is too small and there are just too many publications. And those numbers, be it electronic or print, don’t seem to be reducing. So the market -- number of media offerings -- is increasing at a much faster rate and the advertising cake is not increasing anywhere close to that. The quest for a piece of that cake has resulted in a number of unprofessional practices creeping in and that brings down the whole profession. We cannot say that we have not been contaminated by it.

But we are working in an environment where I am told that there are publications which do not even have a rate card! You know what that means? That means that if you are an advertiser and if you go to a publisher, they ask you to sit across the table and negotiate like you are buying potatoes. That is the compulsion of this absolutely crazy, illogical growth in the number of products. We have had to compromise too. But I think we have compromised less.

All of us who work in magazines need to remind ourselves that we have to reinvent our products. Everybody reads one newspaper, everybody will watch television -- magazines are optional reading. Now the old ways of presenting news that we used for many, many years needs to be re-looked. We have to reinvent our products and we have to make our products compelling to the reader. Major surgery is required.

Magazines are slowly being moved to the margins because news is moving so fast. Newspaper editors tell me, “My god! These television people get away with murder simply because they are there on the spot.” They commit terrible blunders but they get away with it because they are covering it ‘live’. So it’s my belief that the big challenge for any magazine in the future is for it to somehow reinvent the formula and to see how it can become relevant again. And that can only happen by looking at editorial content. The same old way of covering politics, the same old way of covering features, the same old way of doing things will not work. Like they do on television, they put a table and two chairs and then they make two guys fight and generate a lot of noise. More heat than enlightenment.

Two people shouting at each other is not good television. Good television can also exist where a logical, sane argument is made quietly. Shouting is not the acid test of whether a programme is good. So, in magazines also we have to see how we can make the reader feel that there is something in magazines which no other medium provides. I think a number of editors and proprietors don’t realize that news has become an extremely complex business. For example, people will say climate change has affected the monsoon. I think no electronic media has the capacity to explain climate change. We have the unique possibility in magazines to actually explain climate change, but unfortunately we also do it the TV way. We have to find new ways to engage the reader and to explain things that television is inherently incapable of. And that is the reinvention I am talking about.

In politics too, things need to be done differently. Take the employment guarantee scheme: 100 districts to get Rs 15,000 crore. These are complex pieces of information, and magazines can make them comprehensible. When people say they are not interested in politics, it’s not true. People are not bored with politics; they are bored with the way politics is covered. I do not have a solution. I too am looking for an answer on how to change the rules of the game, on how to make current affairs and news more palatable.

And then, there is the question of attention span. It has become much smaller, people want clarity quickly. We have to find ways to make complex news simple, whether it’s graphically or through photographs or words. Making serious journalism popular has been my lifelong mission.

It’s again based on the same thing. The editor, first. We took some time to get the editor. Once the editor was in place, I said to him that there was only one brief for this magazine, “no trade”. We will not publish the photograph of the Cargo Manager of Japan Airlines and then go to him and say, “Give me an advertisement”.

This is going to be a destination magazine reflecting the flavours, colours, the feel of destinations, that was my brief. We don’t do any trade news, we don’t print any news about appointments. Again we broke the rules because every single travel magazine at that time worked differently. For example, they did a six-page interview with Bicky Oberoi and then you would go and ask for ads from Oberoi. That was the old way of doing things. So we said that we would break the rules -- and the travel industry itself said, “Thank you very much.” The cargo manager himself said that he was embarrassed that his picture appears because there was a quid pro quo involved.

A lot has changed now. I think sexual attitudes have changed and there is much more openness and nudity in the media -- print media and electronic media. But it is a very difficult balancing act. The editorial content is not a problem; it’s the pictorial content that’s the stumbling block. How do you get really attractive women, the so-called aspirational women – say Sushmita Sen?

In Debonair, more than half the time -- and I have no hesitation in confessing this -- we had prostitutes on the centrefold because no one else was willing to pose in the nude. I once got my own girlfriend to model! She noticed that I was very depressed, and asked me why. I told her that my deadline was approaching and that we had no centrefold – and she volunteered! She left me soon after.

Photographers were not a problem because they themselves wanted to do this kind of photography for which they rarely got an opportunity. It’s getting the models, it’s getting the girls that’s a problem. Look at the girls that Playboy gets; they get such beautiful women because a) it’s Playboy and b) they pay generously. You can’t pay someone Rs 10,000 for posing for a centrefold; today, we are talking in terms of lakhs.

Yes, of course. I have meetings with the entire team and I am involved in all the main decisions. But I would say that I spend 90 per cent of my time in editing and 10 per cent of my time in major marketing decisions.

I have written about it. I will not mention any of the papers but I think you could write a book on “how not to launch a newspaper” looking at some of the efforts! There is no great mystery about launching a product whether it is a magazine or a newspaper. You first appoint an editor who has some credibility and who can deliver the goods. But you can’t start a newspaper upside down without first having an editor! Unless you have an editor, you are not going to build the team. A team is not built around the publisher; a team is built around the editor - however good the publisher may be. That is the fatal error that has been made.

One of the new players thinks that there is a magic marketing formula that will help sell their paper. I have been in this business for 30 years and there is no magical marketing technique, except the fact of producing a paper which people would like to read. Unless there is a pulling power from the reader, no marketing miracle can work. You can take your distributors to Las Vegas for a good time, but unless you have a readable newspaper which people want to buy, no marketing can work.

A bad product can never be sold by good marketing; only a good product can be sold by good marketing. I do not know any instance in the world where an indifferent publication or a mediocre publication has been pushed by aggressive marketing, but I have seen a good publication pushed by good marketing. That is the combination to strive for.

I was lucky. In 1981, when I launched The Sunday Observer, I was confronted with the situation where I didn’t have anyone to invest in a Sunday paper. No one understood what a Sunday paper meant. I had some Rs 50,000 which I gave Ashwin Shah who was bankrolling the project. Obviously, this led to my being very much involved in the commercial side of the publication.

I would say that I have been one of the few editors who have been very conscious of the fact that to enjoy real editorial freedom, you have to be commercially viable. All those publications which are commercially weak, are also editorially vulnerable. If you have a weak commercial publication, for example, politicians or advertisers can tell you, “Listen, either toe the line or I am cancelling that two-page spread.” If your publication is doing well and is commercially viable, you can say f*** off!

So I believe that commercial success and editorial freedom actually go hand in hand. I see no inconsistency between standing up for your fundamental rights as an editor and wooing advertisers. I will give you an example. Recently, one of my neighbours, a very well known golfer called Gaurav Ghei, came to me and said that he had been to Kolkata and had bought a bar of Cadbury chocolate in which he found worms; he had kept the bar. I did a story on that. Then I found two more people calling in saying to me that they had a similar experience. Then the whole Cadbury team came to Outlook and they were very nice and, of course, they gave the usual explanations, but during the course of the explanation, it slipped out that they had greatly strengthened their storing methods. And they said that this happens to other international brands too. I said, of course it did. By the time the story came out they had sealed and double-sealed their storage methods and were being extra careful. I saw that as a small victory for us: we were able to protect the consumer. Not that we antagonised Cadburys.

Another example was the famous Pepsi and Coke controversy on the question of impurities. I did something without telling either Coke or Pepsi. I went into the market and bought one bottle each of Pepsi and Coke. We have a correspondent in London, and I sent the bottles to him for an independent analysis by a world famous lab. We then got the results, which gave both Pepsi and Coke a clean chit. And then I rang up both Coke and Pepsi and they couldn’t believe it. “You didn’t tell us.” Why should I? I was just doing something for my readers.

I think that it was an extraordinarily brave decision on the part of Mr. Raheja. I have no hesitation is confessing that he was the one who was on the lookout for starting something in publishing and then they had zeroed in on a newsmagazine. At that point, there was hardly any publishing house in India which had not tried its hand with a newsmagazine. They all chickened out because the market had a formidable brand leader. Deepak and Mr Raheja at that time were thinking of starting a fortnightly. I said why do you want to compete with India Today on their turf? Let’s create our own turf.

So, I insisted that we create a weekly newsmagazine, to which they agreed. When we launched, there were two things which helped us. First, we caught India Today at a vulnerable time. The leader had almost gone to sleep because there was no competition and there was this air of complacency in India Today. Their cover stories were 24-pages long! Well, they could get away with anything because there was only one newsmagazine.

Secondly, they made a crucial tactical blunder -- they gave us about 18 months alone as a weekly! I would have thought that they would respond much faster to become a weekly. But in those 18 months, week after week after week, we kept exposing them. They probably thought that these guys are too small, who the hell are these guys? They will go away…they will go bust soon. They won’t be here. I think that kind of miscalculation on their part cost them.

I have been approached many times. But, you see, I find TV a trivial medium. I believe that serious people should not appear on television too often. This “rent a quote” phenomenon where one is on every programme I don’t think much of. So I am not interested in television because the kind of skills that I have and the kind of things that I have leant in the last 30 years I can never use on television. To be good on television you have to be a bit of an actor. It’s very unreal.

My benchmark was to produce the best in terms of journalistic quality and to reach a figure which was viable, acceptable and respectable. And also the marketing team told us that if you sell 50 copies in Jhumritilaiya, it doesn’t really matter from a commercial perspective.

We identified about 30 cities and we really concentrated on those cities. It was a slightly elitist attitude, but it was a tactical decision on our part that we did not particularly want a strong presence in the mufossil towns. Even today, India Today beats us about three to one, but in the metros we are neck and neck.

I wanted to shift the goal post and say that let these chaps compete on our turf and if I might say so, it was a good decision. Like I told you, we used the 18 months that they gave us to establish our product. On many occasions people were buying us just because we were more current.

It’s because I have an outstanding proprietor. I have met a proprietor who has lived up to his word. He did two things, for which I admire him. When we had our first conversation, he said, “Content is king…Vinod, you get the best content and I am ready to invest money on content.” I am not saying that he gave me an unlimited budget, but he did give me money whenever I asked for it for legitimate purposes.

Secondly, he gave me the kind of editorial freedom that editors dream of. You know that during the Vajpyee regime we did a couple of cover stories exposing the roles of Ranjan Bhattacharya and Brajesh Mishra. This resulted in not only he (Rajan Raheja, Outlook’s proprietor) being raided; his family was also harassed.

In those days there was a terrible law called FEMA, where they called you into a building which smelled like a urinal and they made you wait for five to six hours and then you were told that the investigation would not happen that day. I asked Mr Raheja when he was called in for interrogation whether he wanted my resignation. All he wanted, he said, was for me to get the harassment stopped.

So I did something that I found both humiliating and something I have never done in my professional life -- I went and asked the Prime Minister for a favour. I went to Yashwant Sinha and Brajesh Mishra, too. All I said was let the law take its course. If you discover that Mr. Raheja has Rs 100 crores under his pillow then prosecute him, but don’t harass him like this. They eased up a little bit after that. So, I’ve stayed so long because of Mr Raheja.

Well, that is their decision. I must tell you that they have increased their price from this issue to Rs 20. That is very strange because when we had increased the price from Rs 10 to Rs 15, I had agreed with Aroon Purie that on so and so date we will go to Rs 15 together. Just a couple of months before that agreed date I heard suddenly that they have reneged on the decision; that they would not increase the price. I was a little angry because they had agreed. So we went to Rs 15 and then they followed to Rs 15. This time, they have gone to Rs 20. We will see.