At age 11, I decided to publish a family “newspaper”. The motivation was less filial affection than an urgent need to augment frugal monthly pocket money. Fashioned out of the middle pages torn from a geography exercise book, it was a no-cost operation in which the roles of editor, publisher, reporter and designer were vested in myself.
The content included a front page of “news” and a smorgasbord of excruciating “poetry”, and worse “art”. The lead item was: “S B Datta flies to Delhi” and the second lead: “Goonda ill, visits vet”.
This was, of course, an appalling display of news sense. My dad’s trips to Delhi were a routine occurrence whereas any visit by Goonda, the kooky black Labrador, to the vet was a momentous family occasion, so he deserved lead billing.
But I had cunningly prioritised the news to suit my needs. The business model was predicated on a pay-per-read basis, the calculation being that a high paid readership would buy me two packets of chilli chips or a bilious pastry from Kalimpong Homes. S B Datta could pay for the publicity he received whereas Goonda couldn’t.
As it turned out, S B Datta parsimoniously paid 50 paise to cover the read by both him and my mother, and my sisters basely read it without paying at all. After this single edition, the paper folded.
Many years later, starting out as a professional journalist I was told of dizzying potential rewards from writing, not writing or placing angled reports — houses, cars, champagne (all hard-to-access commodities in pre-liberalisation India), gold, watches, overseas trips. But in the lefty world of Kolkata newspapering, where fast-growing business journalism was viewed with suspicion, the practice attracted enough opprobrium to detract most. And company policy, in keeping with most media houses, strictly disallowed gift-taking.
Later in Delhi, a reporter wrote a factual, front-paged account of a businessman who distributed gold coins to journalists covering a press conference on an IPO for a doubtful project. The next day the entrepreneur concerned wrote a matter-of-fact rejoinder saying he’d been advised to do so by his public relations company.
The concept of paid coverage has, of course, been around as long as the profession. But in the past, the motivation has been mostly ideology. Any history of the KGB or CIA is replete with accounts of how much money was paid to this or that journalist to write slanted reports or opeds (KGB archives display a touching partiality for India because of ridiculously cheap rates for such services). For the most part, however, it remained a small, informal market. This businessman’s letter suggested that paid information had acquired a mainstream, amoral dimension.
Newspapers have always served conflicting sets of customers: readers and advertisers. Growing competition saw subscription rates stagnating — they have been unchanged for over a decade — so the pressure on advertising revenues grew acute. A media baron once said no one owned a newspaper to make profit. By the nineties, though, some proprietors started referring to their publications as “products” and viewing information as marketable entertainment. Their need to make money converged with economic liberalisation that saw the rise of the stock markets where a growing number of companies were headed to raise money for all manner of industrial projects.
So it was perhaps almost inevitable that the paid news practice was extended to contractual ads- and/or equity-for-favourable-stories swap deals, transforming the gains of individual journalists into institutional profits. In some regional media houses, journalists often double as space sellers.
Judging from the surging circulation many media houses proudly publicise every year, the growing trend towards paid news is less of an issue with readers than its anti-campaigners make out. According to the latest KPMG-Ficci survey, the print media grew 8 per cent between 2006 and 2009 and is expected to grow 9 per cent in the period till 2014. These are respectable numbers in a business that is dwindling elsewhere.
The trouble is, in going down this road of easy money, the print media is missing a unique long-term opportunity. The dynamics of the information business are changing swiftly; “consumers” are increasingly being hit by TV, blogs, tweets and fly-by-night websites where authenticity is always in question. In this maelstrom, the print media has a unique opportunity to provide reliable reporting by accredited journalists. That’s an ethical way to build the business but, as always, it will be the tougher way.
