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She has been the face of business news for over two decades and has been on top of her game day in and day out. Despite the complexity of handling the country’s biggest business newsroom and large teams that beam out 24x7 programming, you will never see any sign of worry or stress when you meet her.
Our series Headline Makers, which profiles the thought leaders behind the country’s most successful newsrooms, takes a closer look at the career journey of Shereen Bhan, Managing Editor of CNBC TV 18 and the person behind the celebrity news anchor and editor.
Here are some excerpts from our recent interview with her.
From producer to anchor and now being the face of the channel, what has been the journey like?
The journey has been very fulfilling and very interesting. It has been a great experience to really watch the country change and the landscape that the media operates in change.
The opportunities that have opened up; and to be able to chronicle all of that, has really been interesting and satisfying. You know when I started in the year 2000, and this is right after I finished my masters, and while I was doing my masters, I decided to get into broadcast journalism. I was doing a program that Siddhartha Basu was producing and Vir Sanghvi was anchoring, and my job was really to come out there and rally the audience. It was a current affairs program which had a live audience and I had to sort of get the audience up to speak about what we were debating and tell them about the pros and cons and so on and so forth, and I really enjoyed that process. When they saw me do that, Vir and Siddhartha said—have you considered broadcast journalism? If you haven't, we think that you have a flair for news, you have a sense and smell for the news.
And that really was the start of the love affair with broadcast journalism, with the news media, and I haven't looked back since then. So much has changed, some for the good, some not. When we started at CNBC TV 18 we didn't have OB vans. We were literally pushing tapes using VSNL, and today you are able to broadcast using your mobile phones anywhere in the world. So from a technology point of view, from a distribution point of view ,so much has changed.
What's been interesting is also the fact that I have multitasked my way through this journey. So I didn't start out only as an anchor and I haven't been just an anchor. I have produced, I have written and I continue to produce and write my own shows. I continue to work with reporters on their stories. I continue to work on my own stories. So it's really been an exercise in versatility, and I think that that has also helped me become a much more consummate television news professional today.
How do you stay on top of the game, and that too consistently, for the last 22 years?
You know what motivates me is the fact that we don't take our leadership for granted. Because we enjoy over 95% share of the market, it is incumbent on us to keep disrupting ourselves. So we are not waiting for somebody else to do something new or somebody else to go out there and innovate.
I truly believe that it is our role and our responsibility to keep ourselves relevant to the audience that we are beaming out to. So what does that mean? That means looking at new spaces, looking at improving spaces where we already exist in, looking at creating new communities around content, because I truly believe that that is one of the core areas that we must focus on.
It's also about looking at how we get the audience to view business news differently. From the time that I started at CNBC TV18, for the first 10-15 years of our journey people viewed it only as a stock market channel. Today, we are much more than that. Today, we are a channel that provides you with actionable, credible information that you can use to make smart life choices, smart life decisions, whether it's education, healthcare, insurance and stock markets. It is core to what we do, but we are so much more than that. We are about corporate India, we are about business, we are about balance sheets, we are about aspiration and we are about entrepreneurship.
We have expanded the business news genre, and as leaders, it was incumbent on us to do that. A lot of people have now followed suit and are looking at business news differently. And so, you know, my challenge to myself is how do I walk into this newsroom every day and get my team to feel excited about what they are doing and get my team to think about new ways of doing things.
I have always been a believer in excellence, but you know, the road to excellence doesn't happen by accident. The road to excellence is built on daily improvement, and that keeps me motivated and you know I am fortunate to be passionate about what I do.
Very often in life if you get the opportunity to marry your purpose, for me the purpose that I have had is storytelling, and marry that with my passion, I am fortunate to be able to do that. Yes, of course, you get frustrated, you feel tired, you get weighed down by the chaos of it all. But the goal is very clear, that we want to be a purposeful brand. We want to be a purpose-driven brand. We want to continue to be relevant to the audience that we reach out to. And that's what motivates us and keeps me going.
Your role has a certain complexity to it? You are leading teams and yet being hands on, how do you handle it?
You have to understand that this is a people business. So that's your core asset. I mean, the equipment and the stuff is on top of that. But at the end of the day, if you don't have reporters breaking stories, if you don't have producers being able to write good scripts, you are not going to be left with very much.
So you have to acknowledge the fact that this is a people-centric business. Now, as leaders, we have to ensure that you have a motivated team. We have to ensure that you create an organisation that listens, that takes feedback and acts on it. You have to ensure that you create a newsroom that is accessible, that's open, that gives space to people to voice and air their opinions. I feel particularly proud of the fact that we have been able to create an organisation that is not hierarchical.
Many of our star performers today who have really jumped in in their careers have done so in the last few years. You know they may have started off a year ago and today you see them anchoring shows, you see them doing events, doing special programming and so on and so forth.
I truly believe that you have to create a space and a culture that is merit-based. If you allow meritocracy to flourish, you will be able to get the best ideas as opposed to focusing only on a set organisation structure.
I have always believed that structure cannot define function and that has always driven me to place who I believe are the best people for that particular job, irrespective of whether they have been in the organisation for five years or ten years. I think you have to look and place people based on the skills that they have and what is the function that they need to deliver on. So I think that's really the challenge as far as leaders are concerned.
As leaders there are also questions like: How do you remain agile? How do you remain dynamic? You know, the world is changing not every day, every minute but every second. How do you ensure that you are on top of that? How do you stay nimble? So how do you also stay humble? You know, as leaders, I think you sometimes tend to believe in your own myth. And I have been very clear about the fact that I am not in love with my own voice and I am not in love with the fact that I want to be seen on every show.
You have to create a space that is accessible to people within your team so people feel they are equal custodians of the brand and it becomes an equal opportunity workspace. Also, you have to empower people. You have to allow people to make decisions. Some decisions may not go as per expectation, but that's fine. And your job as the leader is not to then come out and say, oh, look, I told you so. Your job is to say, what can we learn from this? How do we make this better? You have to stand by your people. You can't throw your people under the bus, that I'm very clear about.
How has business news changed over the years?
I can speak about the changes from a CNBC TV18 perspective. So as I pointed out, you know, we started off being seen as a stock market channel, because a large part of the programming was based on what was happening in the markets.
Today we are much more than that. So if I were to tell you that, you could split us up into two halves. So from 7 in the morning to 4 o'clock in the afternoon ,which is when the markets are trading, we are squarely and sharply focused on the markets because that is what is relevant to our audience at that particular point in time.
So we will give you the best analysis on what is happening in the markets, both domestic and global, and of course we have innovated significantly there. The other aspect that we have built is access to management every quarter talking about their results. That was something that CNBC TV18 created. Making managements, making company boardrooms accessible to you and me, to the retail investor or to just a regular viewer, that is I think something that really changed the way of business reportage.
And post 4 o'clock, as I said, you know, that is the second half of the channel and it has its own identity. We look at everything that matters to us as a country. So if the morning is about the balance sheet of companies and the profit and loss as far as the markets are concerned, the evening is about the balance sheet of the country. So we look at what matters to consumers, what are the reforms that are working, what are the reforms that are not working, what needs to be done in terms of prioritisation of capital and so on and so forth.
So the evening is about policy, it's about politics, it's about, as I said, entrepreneurship, it's about aspiration, it's about lifestyle. We have sort of channelled our energies into two halves again ,driven by what is relevant to our audience. I find it very hard to believe and I get this question very often that -you know, why are you doing stories on tomato prices not like your audience cares about that.
How does my audience not care about that? You know, would the management of Hindustan Unilever, which I believe is our audience, not want to know what's happening with tomato prices? Would the consumer not want to know what's happening with tomato prices? So why should it not be my story? Why should Manipur not be my story? It impacts the balance sheet of this country. Why should we stay silent on a story that is of national importance?
Those are the things that really drive the decisions that we make in the newsroom in terms of prioritisation, in terms of what we talk about, what we take up, what we report on. And as I said, you know, we have clear boundaries that the brand has given us. So even when we look at politics, we look at it from a different lens. When we look at reforms, we look at it from a different lens. The lens is different, but business does not run in a political vacuum. We cannot abdicate spaces only because we are seen as a business news channel. We have to ensure that we occupy those spaces and make them our own and tell stories there using our lens.
I will give you many examples that I would hold as significant contributions of the brand CNBC TV 18. So 21 years ago, we started a program called Young Turks. It is today one of the world's longest running programs on startups and entrepreneurship. 21 years ago, nobody was talking about startups, nobody was talking about unicorns, nobody was talking about any of that, but we made that bet. That is part of the kind of thought leadership that I was telling you about.
It's a different matter that I didn't expect it to run for 21 years but we created that space, we provided that platform, we gave regular kids the ability to dream big. We have also learned to hone our gut instinct to see what are those next big bets that we can make that really connect with the audience, that connect with our viewers and continue to keep the brand relevant in the market.
This may be a tough one, but I want to know which are your most memorable moments on TV?
Well there have been so many moments over the last two decades it's hard to sort of pin down some of them but you know I treat every interview, every every show as something that I hope to learn from, that I should be able to take back something from that and I should be able to give something to that as well.
I'm very clear about that, which is why I don't take my interviewer's time for granted. I remember something that my first boss, Karan Thapar, taught me and you know, he's very meticulous about research and due diligence. And those are the things that I hold very close. As principles they drive our newsroom as well. And so for me, I don't walk into an interview saying– kuch nikal ke leke aayenge. You know, I don't go in there with a set of questions, but I go in there with– okay, what are the issues that I can talk about which could be interesting, where can I lead that conversation.
I go in there well prepared, and I continue to do that, I make the effort because I don't want to take the interviewer’s time for granted and I certainly don't want to take my audience's time for granted, because if anybody is is investing 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes of their life watching your show or sitting down and having a conversation with you, then as I said, they need to feel they take something back from that experience.
I need to feel I have taken something back from that experience and the audience needs to feel that they have benefited in some form or fashion from watching that program. That has always driven my process as far as putting a show together, doing an interview, etc. is concerned. And there's so much I have learned. I mean, you know, from the initial days of being able to interview people like Bill Gates; never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that as a 20 something year old, I would be sitting down and having a conversation with somebody like Bill Gates or with somebody like Benazir Bhutto, which was very early on in my career.
I think those are the experiences that still stay very fresh in your memory because you look back and say, what gave you the confidence? How did I do that?
I also remember walking through the Infosys campus with N. R. Narayana Murthy and Nandan Nilekani, a show that they did together for the very first time. It's just so many wonderful experiences with all kinds of different people in India and abroad that it's hard to pin them down.
When it comes to global share of voice in business journalism, where does India stand, what can become better?
India is playing a larger role as far as the global map is concerned whether you talk about the growth of the economy or you talk about regional partnerships, bilateral partnerships and so on and so forth.
In the last few years, especially post-COVID, where we are seeing this global move towards reframing the global economy, a change in the way that people are looking at supply chains and so on and so forth, that does bring India back into significance as a destination that people are considering. Of course, it is one of the world's largest markets, so companies want to be here. It is a large addressable market. So any multinational doesn't have the luxury now of saying India and / India or, you have to have an India strategy.
For us, how do we take that forward? I run a program called Global Dialogues, for instance, where we talk to global CEOs, the effort really is to understand how a global company is looking at the India opportunity, what are the changes that they have seen, what kind of investments are they going to make, which will also help a global audience understand the India story.
I do believe that we need to focus on content which will make India accessible to a global audience and people will also be able to relate and understand about the changes that are taking place here in India. For instance, we've just commissioned a whole series on the large infrastructure changes and infrastructure projects that we are seeing and so we are really capturing that story. We are capturing the story of what's happening on the tech side, on the policy side. So I think these are all things that a global audience will get perspective from.
With so much digital around, how is News TV maintaining its relevance?
I don't see us as a TV brand anymore. I see us as a 360 brand. I see us as a news provider, as a content provider and the distribution is up to the consumer whether they want to consume us on TV, on their mobile phone, on Twitter orYouTube. That is a choice that the consumer is going to have to make.
I have to ensure that whatever choice you make, you find me there, that is our job. The world is changing, people may not necessarily be sitting in front of a television screen. So does that mean that my brand is no longer going to be relevant? I have to ensure that wherever the viewer is consuming news, I have to be present there.
The challenge for us is one of distribution. The challenge for us is not content creation. We continue to create content. The challenge is customization of that content. What works on television doesn't necessarily work in exactly the same way on Twitter or on Instagram. We have got a great team that looks at customising our content, our television content and hosting it across different platforms. We are now focused on digital first content, so things that are specifically made for YouTube, made for Instagram, made for Twitter, made for you know CNBCTV18.com etc.
I think the challenge for us and for brands in general is one of –how do you ensure that you are relevant in the areas that the consumer is moving to. So it's less of a content problem. As I said, it's more of a distribution issue. And so that's something that we've been sort of doing now actively for the last two or three years.
I don't think anyone in India or globally has the perfect playbook on how to address this. I think it's all trial and error at this point in time. Some bets are working, some are not. But it's an exciting time because it's a time that challenges you. It's a time that also gets you to go back to the drawing room, unlearn some of the stuff that you had taken for granted and learn new ways of doing things. So I think that's really the future at this point in time. I think it is going to be a mix, it's going to be hybrid; TV coexisting with other mediums as well other platforms. But you have to engage with the audience where the audience is going, you cannot expect the audience to come to where you are.
What does Shereen Bhan like to do when she's not hosting?
I don't really have a long list of things that I like to do or not. I mean I'm focused on food, which is my passion, so that is where I spend my time finding new places to visit and eat at. Also spending time with my friends and with my family and yoga, I think that's pretty much the sum and substance of what I really do outside of work.
Most of the people I met describe you as humble, approachable and down-to-earth, how do you manage to stay like that?
I don't take fame seriously. I don't take the trappings of glory and success and all of that that comes with this seriously. Of course, I respect it. I value it. I enjoy it. But that doesn't define me.
It doesn't define who I am. I'm very clear about the fact that it's all transient. Going back to the philosophical side of it, I truly believe it's transient. I mean, you know, people, the fame, the adulation, all of that comes with the fact that you are visible on TV. Tomorrow, if I'm not visible on TV, it will be a different story. So if you start to believe in your own myth and start to believe that I am the greatest gift to mankind then I believe there's only one way to go, and that's downhill
I have always been very clear about the fact that I'm doing a job. One of the privileges of this job is the fact that I get to wear a microphone and I get to sit in front of a camera and I get to talk to the world, but that's my job, that is not who I am. And tomorrow if this job doesn't exist, then it will be a crisis of confidence for me if I were to sort of place everything linked to my identity to this particular job. I have been mindful of the fact that it is transient. It is a privilege and a perk of the job that you have. And life is too short to take this stuff so seriously. So yeah, I don't do that.
Who is your inspiration, who do you look up to in your profession, what do you read to stay updated?
The reading is really transactional. The reading is because, you know, so much of it is linked to the interviews that you are doing or the shows that you're doing.
I struggle with finding time for non-work related reading. I still try to do that, but it's becoming less and less. I find inspiration from people like know Karan Thapar, Siddhartha Basu, Raghav Behl, Senthil Chengalvarayan, Mr. Murthy, I mean all of these people have taught me so much in my professional life. I'm a firm believer in staying open to ideas, in staying open to what you see, what you read, and learning from that. I get inspired by a conversation that I might have with a five-year old, or a conversation that I might have with a 90-year-old. And I think that's what keeps me alive, and that's what keeps me sort of going and growing.