Print & digital excellent at providing depth in content: Vikram Chandra

One of the highlights of a day-long virtual conference, e4m NewsNext, was Vikram Chandra, Founder & CEO, Editorji Technologies, fireside chat on the topic ‘Changing nature of video news: Is TV news over?’.

He spoke to Kanchan Srivastava, Senior Assistant Editor, exchange4media, and Simran Sabherwal, Senior Assistant Editor, exchange4media.

The conversation started with an increasing number of viewers consuming news from multiple sources. Chandra noted, “It’s like the saying of being in the middle of the ocean, without a drop to drink. There’s so much information, so much noise and clutter, but you’re not actually informed, and that shows us the system is broken.”

He pointed out that social media also wasn’t a reliable source of actual news, as WhatsApp forwards and Facebook posts were coming from your own ideological “echo chambers”. He pointed out that all these elements had caused a vacuum in the space for actual informed and unbiased news and it is this that industry stakeholders have to address, no matter what the medium.

Observing that he himself had been off TV channels for quite some time now, as he is striving to create a new media product through his foray into digital news with Editorji, Chandra said the reason he had quit television after 25 years is that there were no easy solutions left, “and I realized the only way to be a disruption and cause actual change would be from the outside”.

Chandra said that the areas of focus had definitely changed with the advent of digital content and media, with conversations presently centered around streaming and OTT platforms as the segment to pay most attention to in terms of news, whereas earlier it had been around entertainment and then sports. “Now it’s all about who’s watching what on which platform, and how you can be in that space.”

When asked by Sabherwal about how digital could bridge the difference in the kinds of news stories that lay between TV and print or even traditional news and online portal, Chandra explained that it involved two different aspects. “One is about the depth of content, when you’re going deep into individual issues. The other is the breadth where you, in the news, decide if you’re going to provide the reader with 10, 20, 30, whatever stories you think they need to be informed about.”

According to him, print and digital are excellent at depth, where they go deep into a subject whether it’s through explainer articles or in-depth videos. “To me, what’s more interesting is the breadth. How can you go to bed at night, and be aware of all the major news stories of the day? You can do it if you read the whole paper cover to cover, because print still does a decent job of rounding up the news, but who has time for that. Meanwhile, digital is informing you just about a few things, while TV news is mostly half-an-hour shouting debates around a single issue.”

“That 30-minute round-up on digital, of all the important news, that is also informative and researched, whether in video or audio formats, is what we’re working on creating at Editorji,” concluded Chandra.