Modern eruptions

"Newspapers are like tea and toothpaste. Brand loyalties are hard to shake since they're part of the ritualised awakening routine." Confession: having gained this "gyaan" early in my professional life, and having happily compounded the blasphemy by nodding in greenhorn assent, I was merely intrigued by news of the newspaper's metamorphosis into a soap. "It's for strategic purposes, y'know, not literally." That was the buzz I clasped in the early years of the Nanosecond Nineties. But still. Soap? No kidding. And which soap""the holy river brand or the unholy bikini brand? And in bright pillowcase packs?

The Indian newspaper market, all agree, is led by The Times of India. It is a brand, many agree, that has adapted itself in lurid ways to the frantic forces of an edgy environment in its survival bid. In reward, it makes lurid sums of money, reports Vanita Kohli in one of the 36 essays in Making News. But it makes rival papers' editors gnash their teeth, and Vir Sanghvi expresses his dissent in a disarmingly frank piece on what the lead brand has done to his job by trivialisng the newspaper. "You are producing a consumer product and it does not matter what the quality of that product is," he sighs, accusingly.

Yet, for all that, others grumble that papers are not commercial enough, that they are too enamoured of their importance to behave like regular businesses. The possible globalisation of legal services ought to justify enhanced coverage of judicial processes elsewhere in the world, but few papers do such market planning. So alleges a lawyer who resorts to reruns of LA Law.

Is that because intellectual products, like branded software, enjoy the privilege of laziness accorded by what economists call "infinitely increasing returns to scale"? Big circulation gets big advertising revenue, which means big resources for bigger circulation and bigger revenue, and so on, till the big turns monopoly.

It's not clear. But for a fascinating account of how tough life could be for the non-aligned newsman on a "tightrope" in a virtual war of image and truth, read Ajai Shukla's essay on "War Reporting". It gives a feel for informational warfare: "America's overwhelming military superiority allowed it to prioritize international legitimacy over operational security. It no longer mattered if the Iraqis knew where American forces had reached and what they were doing." When it begins to matter, though, transparency gives way to fog, with its first casualty left gasping for air. Shukla writes on war risks, "embedded" reporters, "rescue" missions, and much else that gets investigators ushered furtively into Iraqi desert huts only to have TV sets pointed out as "WMDs" (Weapons of Mass Deception, you see). And he concludes with a quotation from Bob Fisk of The Independent. "Journalists sit at the edge of history as volcanologists might clamber to the lip of a smoking crater, trying to see over the rim, craning their necks to peer over the crumbling edge through the smoke and ash at what happens within."

And Fisk is not talking about an upheaval 74 millennia ago (relevant though it might still be to life), nor anything frothy in intimate daily use (and if that describes your news, don't blame the ad industry, argues Suhel Seth). Fisk is talking about eruptions of man's own making that go into making news.

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MAKING NEWS
HANDBOOK OF THE MEDIA IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA

Edited by Uday Sahay
Oxford University Press
Price: Rs 675; Pages: xxii+282