Reporters or actors?

We have changed and the icon of change is none other than the Times Group. They are now recruiting actors under the disguise of reporters. With huge salary cuts already announced in the group, they may have to engage such tactics to pay salaries, it now seems to reveal.

Investigative journalism is long gone, enter theater journalism. With the advent of television, we saw many under cover stories. Some of them very professionally done and in true public interest to bring out the corruption and nepotism, while some just for TRP ratings.

Rajat Sharma is India’s number one actor who marauds as a journalist. His Aap Ki Adalat was nothing more than a drama and he ventured out with his own entertainment channel which he calls as news channel. Except him, nobody else – not even his own reporters – considers it as a news channel.

Now comes the drama of making reporters as beggars and to see how much they collect each day. Ahmedabad Mirror did this trick and managed a little below Rs 100 from three beggars, I mean reporters.

A much better idea would have been to follow a real life beggar and see how much do they collect. That would have been more genuine and authentic by all standards. But with television impact on the background some newspapers are stooping to any levels.

For the reporters, it is a great change as Times is on a retrenchment drive. If these reporters are asked to go, they can get some solace that Times have trained them in another profession for survival.

And read into the story and you will find that it is done with no penchant for local culture or international trends of begging. We really don’t know whether Amdavadis bestow the beggars with alms compared to other cities.

Having done such a vast exercise, if you are doing no research into the story, it goes down the gutter which this one did so easily.

A kilo of newspaper is worth just an SMS

Imagine the cost of sending a text message to your friend next door replying to his message with ‘OK”. It is a whopping 2 Rs in most cases unless you have a fixed monthly subscription. So in other word each word is costing Rs 1.

Now imagine the newspaper delivered at your doorstep, in most cases, more than a kilogram in weight and at least 30 pages in size. It is also the same price.

But newspaper industry produces this very newspaper at unimaginable cost to both the company and the environment and is yet delivered in time at your door step at these throwaway prices.

Now the mobile operators incur nothing to deliver the message but yet take a huge sum for delivery.

Welcome to the world of shrinking readership. India, like any other part of the world, is facing a severe readership crisis of print articles – whether it is a newspaper, magazine or a book.

The more it shrinks; the newspaper industry goes more into red. Many of them goes into the closure mode since they have no other way to survive than advertising, which again is shrinking like readership.

Now has the television viewership or online readership for digital content increased because of this? There is no concrete survey to establish this. Online readership has always been on the rise because of the advent of internet in new areas.

But television channels in India have made a travesty of its journey from good journalism to bad reporting to now sensational reporting. We now see more stars in television anchors than the news they present.

So can this be revived? The answer is a plain NO. It is very difficult, or rather impossible, to bring back lost readers.