The big digital news conglomerate in India is still to be built: Sukumar Ranganathan, HT

The exchange4media 40 Under 40 English Journalism Awards were preceded by a conference where, among many other panels, Ruhail Amin, Senior Editor, BW Businessworld and exchange4media held a free-flowing dialogue with awards jury chair Sukumar Ranganathan, Editor-in-Chief, Hindustan Times, around the different media being used in an evolving newsroom.

Amin began by pointing to the immediacy of television news as opposed to the daily nature of print news and asked Ranganathan how print had navigated that sea change in news consumers’ expectations, where they could get news from their screens immediately while their newspapers came in once a day.

Ranganathan held a slightly different point of view, noting, “If you look at most news channels, and even the specialized channels, they have two kinds of information. One is information that is based on real-time. But by and large, if you look at the substantial stories that TV plays out in the course of the day, you've already read it in that morning’s paper. So rather than print following TV, the unfortunate thing that happens in our country is that TV follows print when it comes to the big stories.”

“This is not a print versus TV thing. Some of the smartest people I know work in TV. But maybe it's because they don't invest adequately in research, or in specialists who can tell them the areas that they need to be looking at. So, a lot of TV journalists end up looking at the morning's paper and saying, hey, this has happened and we've not really covered this; there are countless examples of this, especially with an exclusive story. And the good thing in print is still that when you invest in good journalism and good journalists and in allowing them to travel and spend time on stories, you will get interesting investigations and exclusives.”

Ranganathan added that these were the stories that TV news then plunged into and claimed, without giving any credit to the original person or publication that broke them. And then of course, there was the advent of digital media and its upending of the situation again.

“Now, the news is broken on digital media. TV shows you the news and discusses various aspects of it. And print gives you the perspective and gives you reinforcement and that is in an ideal scheme. But given the fact that many of these platforms are not functioning to their ideal requirements, the truth is actually very, very different.”

According to Ranganathan, “The biggest advantage that print has not just in India but anywhere else in the world is the fact that print, unfortunately, is still the only medium that believes in newsrooms. And it's the only journalistic medium which believes in shoe-leather reporting. It believes in the importance of reporting, it believes in the importance of getting people to where the stories are. It believes in having specialists and beats and everything else. TV does not. So irrespective of whether you're looking at an Indian television channel or an international television channel, you have to look at how many reporters they have.”

“If you take the Indian example, it's very glaring, because TV channels invest in anchors. They don't believe in investing in journalists and they don't believe in investing in reporters. They have anchors more than they have reporters. And the aspiration for everyone in TV, unfortunately, is to become an anchor. I don't think anyone wants to be a reporter. And without reporters, what journalism are you really going to serve?” he added.

Pointing to the business model taken up by industry benchmarks like the New York Times and its successful subscription service in the digital age, Amin asked Ranganathan how he thought the story of Indian print media would unfold.

“I know everyone keeps obsessing about the New York Times and The Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. And I think it's very important to understand that especially when you're talking about business models, all business models have a temporal element to them. All the examples that we spoke about started off at a certain period in time. If they were to start trying to do the same thing now, I'm not sure the business model would work. A lot of the Financial Times’ subscriptions, even the digital subscriptions, still go to organizations. So if you're a Unilever, for instance, which is based in London, I think you'll probably take a few hundred corporate subscriptions to the Financial Times digitally and give it to your senior managers. Will they still be doing it 20 years from now is my question, because the entire generation of managers would have changed and they're not people who will probably get their information from the Financial Times.”

Noting that he wasn’t sure if that model would work if NYT and FT started them today, meaning that they definitely wouldn’t take in a market like India, Ranganathan said, “I've said this countless times before and people who've heard me before will probably think I'm repeating myself but at least I'm being consistent. The big digital news conglomerate in India is still waiting to be built. No one has built it yet. The big traditional media companies are still struggling with their models. We have our challenges. We are struggling with our own challenges. But the big digital New Age media conglomerate in this country is waiting to be built.”