Brainstorming over paid news
Dipped in Witriol
AJITH PILLAI
We all know that a rival’s rival is a friend. So it was that top marketing execs of media houses who are usually competitive and daggers drawn, set aside their differences and decided to meet at Chill Station, a cool dhaba-like resto bar on the Delhi-Jaipur highway. The venue was chosen because it was far from the madding crowd and also because the owner of the eatery – Cuckoo, an engineering graduate who realised he could serve the nation better by offering good food instead of working in a marketing consultancy – agreed to reserve all the tables to facilitate the secret meeting. He also assured the organisers that neither he nor his staff would repeat a word of what would be discussed. This was a promise that would not be kept.
That aside, one may wonder what compulsion made this strange congregation of conflicting interests a reality? The opening remarks by a portly gentleman from Mumbai (who believed that alluding to Mark Antony’s speech was still fashionable) spelt out the reason. “Friends, Times Roman (oops I meant Romans) and brand-builders,” he thundered, “lend me your ears and your calculators. We come here not to bury paid news but to ensure that it lives on. For in its survival will all of us grow and earn our riches. But what comes in our way of future success is a villainous Parliamentary panel. Those Brutus-like MPs have demanded the Union I&B ministry take punitive action against publications guilty of fair trade like carrying paid news. And almost as if to rub salt to the wounds, a six-month deadline (as if a five-year plan wouldn’t do) has been set to draw up a concrete set of corrective measures. Friends, we have not come here to merely whine and dine. We are here to fight united against a common enemy – unpaid news and all those who champion its cause and run us down. So, let us set our minds thinking. Let ideas flow and at the end of the evening let the minutes drawn up prove that we have not wasted the ensuing four hours...”
With that the proceedings began. A super-efficient executive assistant, who had a way with words, condensed long rambling speeches into pithy paragraphs on his laptop. However, by the end of the evening, all the whisky that was going around made him tipsy and he unwittingly transferred all that he had keyed in on a flash drive and gifted it to a friendly waiter. He in turn passed it on to friends in the media. So that’s how we have a copy of ‘Jab Rivals Met’. Excerpts:
FIGHTING FOR PAID NEWS: SUGGESTIONS
Your Paid News (PN) Is My PN: The much-applauded first suggestion came from a representative of a Chennai newspaper. Her ingenious formula: publication ‘X’ carries publication ‘Y’s paid news and vice versa. At the same time ‘Z’ collects the money in black and routes it back as bulk shipments of high-grade basmati and pepper. In fact, this is how the lady explained it: “I know this is an I-scratch-your-scratch-and-you-scratch-my-scratch situation, but we have no choice. Just imagine if an AIADMK-friendly paper carries positive news on the DMK and a publication known to be close to Karunanidhi praises Jayalalitha! That’s when PN will actually be seen and recognised as objective reportage. This will silence critics even as the money comes in through the rice and spice route.”
Full Covertibility, Full Confusion: A diabolical process which renders genuine news into a PR handout. This concept was presented at the meeting by a former finance journalist-turned manager from Delhi. According to him, through innovative editing, day-to-day news can be made to look like news that has been planted. For example, adding dollops of poetic praise can convert a PIB release or an Opposition statement into sponsored information. To achieve this, a friendly desk would be essential and brand managers must be given editorial powers to oversee convertibility. As he saw it, in the long run, the lines between PN and non-PN will thus become blurred. Also, he added, conversion works both ways, thus making PN and non-PN interchangeable.
Presents and Living in the Past: A team from Mumbai took strong objection to the Parliamentary panel objecting to “gifts, sponsored travels, direct or indirect payment of money (to journalists)...and award ceremonies by media houses where regular advertisers are awarded.” It was felt that the MPs had “gone over the top” and in their old-fashioned way had mistaken perks/presents for gifts. It was put on record that in today’s world the former was like a payment in kind for a job well done while the latter was something given for no rhyme or reason – like a birthday gift. As for sponsored travel, the men from Mumbai felt that if TV news shows featuring politicians could be funded by advertisers, what’s wrong with a little holiday for a journo in Miami courtesy a corporate?
A New Readership Survey: In the new feeling of togetherness and bonhomie, a new method of gauging readership was unfurled which will benefit all publications. Print Audience Measurement (PAM) and Media Rating Points (MRP) are concepts developed by an amateur inventor and scientist whose thesis that a takeoff is pre-requisite to every landing was rejected by several scientific and aviation journals. He spent years after that feeling depressed and sorry for himself but nevertheless managed to build prototypes for two readership preference gauging instruments.
The contraption has several terminals which can be connected to a set of newspapers/ magazines given to the household being monitored. Each time a publication is read, a button allotted to it has to be pressed and a meter records it. Similarly, particular pages in a newspaper can be tagged to assess their popularity through the MRP recorder. The main USP of the instruments, according to its inventor, is that data can be manipulated to show increased readership and certain pages can be shown to be more popular than others in a paper – for example, ad supplements could be better off than the edit page. More importantly, since the 923 families covered by the survey are given an honorarium for pushing the right buttons, they can also be paid for showing a preference for paid news.
When asked how the new system would benefit all publications, the inventor clarified that through a mutually agreed system, the top-paying subscribers in each city will be shown in turns as being number one. He illustrated this with the example of a paper being number two in one quarter and number one in the next. As for content, data indicating popularity of one page over the other could be used to justify scrapping of pages and increasing the space allotted to other, more paying, segments.
The meeting concluded on a note of solidarity with a pledge of allegiance to fight ‘political interference’ and to ensure that paid news does not end up being just two four-letter words. As a parting shot, the gentleman who set the meeting rolling said, “If full pages of ads praising politicians can be carried, then why not three columns of news that has been paid for? The only concession we can agree upon is to give PN the tag – ‘someone will pay for this’. That’s provided unpaid news comes with the slug ‘God knows who is paying for it’...”