Marketing budgets can’t buy trust on TV news: Sonia Singh, NDTV Dialogues

In an era marked by information overload and the relentless surge of digital media, the once-unquestioned authority of television news in India is facing a formidable challenge – a crisis of trust. The traditional role of television as the primary source of news and information is undergoing a seismic shift, as audiences are disenchanted by sensationalism and bias. 

At the e4m NewsNext Summit 2024 in New Delhi, Sonia Singh, Editor and Anchor of the NDTV Dialogues, got in conversation with Chehneet Kaur, Senior Correspondent, exchange4media to discuss the reasons and remedies for this situation.

She said, “ I'm not here to write the obituary of TV news since I'm always an optimist but television news also has to now re-evolve and look at what the new avatar of it can be.”

Pinpointing the key problem areas, she highlighted in today’s fast-paced world, it’s important for the news and journalism industry to be authentic. “If you're not authentic, viewers are very quick to sense that. Additionally, credibility is a key issue that no amount of marketing or advertising budgets can buy,” she added. 

Most often channels find strategies that evolve around ‘What will look good’ or ‘What will get the most clicks or the most likes’, but trust is not something that one can plan a strategy around. It has to be done with strong editorial backing and must have the content to be able to justify that. 

Singh also feels the revenue models of television networks in the last decade, somehow do not reflect the stories of the 1.4 billion people of India. 

Another key factor to comprehend is news channels should be careful that boring doesn't mean credibility. 

Singh said, “We also have to reinvent in a sense that you are speaking a language which people are and I think you have to be very much in sync with that. It's not about boring people with information and just facts, without a human face to them. In any story, ask yourself ‘Why are you telling the story?’, ‘Who does it impact?’. If you are basically just repeating the same thing which everyone knows, it doesn't really break new ground.” 

Young people today don't mind where they consume news from. It can be anything, from X to YouTube to even meme pages. Singh opines, in that sense, that the television barrier will have to be broken.  

But for this reason, many journalists have chosen to operate independently on Youtube and garner mass views. So how does that impact the business of news channels?

To this Singh expressed, “Journalists are interesting to watch on YouTube, but often they're not necessarily news sources as much as news analysts and I think that's a very different genre completely. It's an interesting genre, but it's a completely different genre from the news networks.”

You will find credible news organisations do make mistakes as well, but the level of mistakes or errors will be much, much lower than any kind of YouTube channel reporting, she added.

The biggest self-correction really is to make sure that every story has multiple sides. Moreover, the news channel needs to make sure that they're accurately reflecting all the multiple sides and complexities of a story,  especially in election season. 

Singh also thinks India needs a media commission because the revenue model is broken for news networks. There should be a way where it is taxpayer-funded in terms of a subscription model which goes across television networks and is then run through that media commission.  

The NDTV Dialogues executive envisions news organisations reflecting the news stories of a new generation and of a changing India in the future.