National

An Endangered Species?

With newspapers turning marketed brands, the editor is climbing down from his ivory tower

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An Endangered Species?
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SOMEDAY someone will write the history of the post-Independence Indian newspaper editor. Those doughty warriors of 'the daily truth' whose thundering prose once sent morning cuppas coursing through the veins like adrenalin. He or she will write of the days of the freedom struggle when journalist and political worker were almost a single entity, united in the battle to expel the imperialist. There will be a chapter on the Fifties and Sixties—'the age of governance' when Nehruvian temples to modernity were acclaimed or critiqued in editorial columns emanating from bustling Indian fleet streets. The Emergency of the Seventies which divided the opportunists from the idealists will surely figure as an important section. And then the study will find its way to the Nineties, where the long shadow of the hyper-market and the satellite footprint will have fallen over Old Lady Newspaper. Today, as new media 'brands' roll off the printing presses, the fate of the editor-in-chief must make Tyrannosaurus Rex sigh in sympathy.

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In a world of executive editors, associate editors, editorial page editors, Sunday supplement editors and senior editors, the editor-in-chief is virtually extinct. "The editor's role," says Arun Shourie, former editor of Indian Express, "is much diminished, in some cases it is even erased." Part of the fault, he says, lies with the editors themselves who have "buckled under" the writ of the proprietor and part of it has to do with the obsession on the part of certain proprietors to put the editor down. "And as the position of the editor has been devalued," he notes, "so the quality of the newspaper has declined. Although there are some very active pro-prietors. The Asian Age, for instance, is an example of what an active editor can achieve; most of them as a class are not interested in public issues. They flaunt their superciliousness, they have an overriding obsession to put others down."

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 There was a time when editors like the larger-than-life Frank Moraes or the intellectual Sham Lal, or the quasi-historian Girilal Jain or indeed the socially committed B.G. Verghese, put their unabashed imprint on the publication they led. "There was," as Sham Lal, former editor of The Times of India, says, "a relationship of trust between the editor and the proprietor. The editor had a certain moral authority. He could appoint who he wanted. Now, newspapers have become a big industry for which you need colossal investment. As a result of this, commodification has taken place. So marketing of a newspaper has, in some respects, become more important than its quality."

Nineties marketspeak says that in order to 'sell' you can't be 'serious', that one Grand Old Man can't possibly know what MTV-India wants to read every morning or every week and that to be a creature of ideological convictions means to sacrifice one's competitive advantage.

Samir Jain, vice-chairman of Bennett Coleman, is widely credited with pioneering the 'marketing' of the English language newspaper. Scion of the house of Jains, Samir, fresh from an American business school, came into what by all accounts he perceived as an altogether unacceptable state of affairs. Larger than life bylines strode the narrow world of newsprint and editors often functioned as de facto advisers to the government. Newspaper proprietors in those days were reportedly in awe of the editor-in-chief, high-profile and politically well-connected as he was.

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And where was the poor advertisement-hunting, marketing man in all of this? Nowhere. So, Jain determined to redress the balance. "Samir Jain wanted the marketing of a newspaper to have equal importance with editorial functions. He also, to some degree, wanted to cut some of the older journalists down to size. Thus in pursual of this, the powers of the editor became comparatively less, although it must be said that he never interfered with the editorial line," says a former journalist of the Times. Jain started Response, TOI's marketing division and the nature of the publication began to change. "In my time," says Sham Lal, "Sushmita Sen would have got one-tenth of the space she now gets."

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Since Jain, other proprietors too have begun to accept that to face the challenge of television adequately, the newspaper must be redesigned. "The newspaper today is a more complete product than before. And just as the product has changed so has the nature of the job of the editor," says Shobhana Bhartiya, proprietor of The Hindustan Times. "An editor today must have certain managerial functions, there are different aspects to a newspaper now. The design, the supplements that go with it. Earlier there was a preponderance of politics, editors took a high moral stand on the happenings of the day but now the balance has shifted a little. Politics is still important, but there are important sections on food, sports, entertainment, which would appeal to different age groups. Yet I wouldn't say the powers of the editor have become less, they have only become different."

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Nor does a change in the powers of the man at the top necessarily imply that the profits of the product should suffer. If the circulation figures of TOI are anything to go by, in the late '90s, media is a sunrise industry which attracts a great deal of big money. However, as newspapers become money-making ventures, journalistic values, according to B.G. Verghese, former editor of Indian Express and The Hindustan Times, sometimes suffer. "With the emphasis on targeting the 'best people', you lose out on what the 'little people' are saying," he points out. "And this is precisely what an editor can ensure does not happen. This unfortunate trend, whereby the position of the editor is being usurped either by aggression or by default, is a great loss to professional journalism."

In Verghese's view, the editor is an institution, he is the point at which all the strands in the profession come together. He is the one who can communicate something more that just the sum total of all the parts of the organisation. "Designations, in fact, are not important. I remember I actually abolished the 'in-chief' title after editor. Designations are simply a matter of form. It's the substance of what the editor does that matters," Verghese states.

So in the aftermath of the transformation of the newspaper from a largely political broadsheet to a colourful digest of news-as-entertainment, the individual who presided over its political identity and 'serious' reportage has become a bit of an anachronism. Editors have become, as the first press commission noted, the literary agents of proprietors.

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These are times when politics has become a backward sector, as writer Martin Jacques pointed out recently in an article entitled The End Of Politics. Politics, says Jaques, no longer captures the public imagination, it is the preserve of the old and, in most cases, the boring. It is culture, the environment, and gender relations which now occupy the chattering classes. And as politics has ended, so has the pre-eminence of the chief political analyst of a newspaper.

"But I don't think anything has changed," objects Aveek Sarkar, owner of the Ananda Bazar Patrika group of publications. "All that The Times of India has done is gone over from the British model to the American one were there is a clear separation of news and views. The whole concept of change is erroneous. If there are some editors today whose behaviour is less than professional, I'm sure it was so in the past. Sure, there may have been incremental changes, the younger generation of editors is perhaps more technocratic, but that's about all. And as far as the relationship between owners and editors is concerned, there is complete freedom on the editorial line."

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Indeed, certain proprietors say that the head of any media organisation should still be a professional journalist. K.M. Matthew, the proprietor-editor of Malayalam Manorama, points out that the need today is for a managerial editor, a professional journalist who also understands the marketplace. "Of course, the managing editor should be a professional journalist and should not always think of making money. There should be a clear dedication to the task," he says. "But an editor has to understand all aspects of the newspaper. He should know what the reader wants. Ultimately he has a responsibility to his readers."

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So the days of the pen-pusher in his ivory tower, incessantly lecturing the public on how to vote, implacably opposed to the market and aloof from administrative duties, are over. But the point is, did such a creature ever exist? After all, could there not have been a powerful editor-in-chief who was also savvy about public cravings? Are editors-in-chief, by definition, disdainful of the need to run a profitable organisation? Or is the 'end of politics' simply a convenient slogan used by proprietors to marginalise the alternative power centre in their corporations?

"The truth is that media is big bucks these days," says a senior journalist. "And the owners simply do not want somebody who may interfere with pursuing the bottomline. Basically, with so much money around, journalists too want to keep themselves in with the big investors in the press. We have already seen how corporate wars have been fought in newspaper columns. Investors want to start newspapers because they want to be kingmakers or because they want politicians to dance attendance on them and certain journalists play along with their game. Naturally, this leads to sacrifices of journalistic integrity."

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But not all proprietors simply concern themselves with the bottomline. There are some who consider themselves bound by journalistic values and pride themselves on cerebral preoccupations. "Some proprietors, like Aroon Purie," says Shourie, "are also active editors." N. Ram, editor of Frontline, too is widely regarded as an active journalist-proprietor. Says Ram: "Although more and more specialist areas are coming to the fore, it does not erode the editor's prerogative as a final authority about what should go and what should not go."

But then perhaps one has to be a proprietor-editor to enjoy the status of Final Authority. The fate of the editor-in-chief is an indication of the historical evolution of the print media in general. In the Forties, the crusading Young India or Amrita Bazar Patrika needed a general at the helm to lead the armies of editorial righteousness; in the Nineties, the age of 'infotainment', requires a behind-the-scenes manager who must ensure that the 'product' is far greater and glossier than his own byline or personality.

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