'We Make Mistakes'

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Mrs Sonia Gandhi, Chairperson of the UPA, Mr Rajan Raheja, HonourableMinisters, Members of Parliament, Your Excellencies, distinguished guests:

On behalf of the Outlook Group of Publications, I welcome you to ourtenth anniversary. I am especially grateful to the chairperson of the UPA, MrsSonia Gandhi for having graciously accepted my invitation to preside over thisfunction. Thank you Soniaji. I am deeply honoured by your presencetonight.

Ladies and gentlemen, should a publication which is 10-years-old celebrateits 10^th birthday? It seems slightly presumptuous when you consider thatthere are many newspapers which have existed for 150 years and more.Nevertheless, these days when the print media is supposed to be under threat, wehave not merely survived. But prospered. At the risk of immodesty, I canconfidently say that Outlook is both a critical and commercial success.Happily, we have not dumbed down, yet we have established that good journalismdoes sell. You just need a good editor and not just a whiz-kid marketingmanager. I am happy to report that there is a shortage of good editors and asurfeit of good marketing managers. May that situation never change.

Ladies and gentlemen, Outlook is an editorial-led publishing house andnot a marketing-led one. The editor and the marketing manager walk together,perhaps the editor is a few steps ahead. But we work as a team.

On 11th October 1995 when we tentatively surfaced, no one gave us a hope inhell. On 8th October 2005 we have proved that you can enter and dominate anymarket, however competitive, if you build a better mousetrap.

In ten years as a group we have not grown phenomenally or launched two scorepublications, like Nursing News or Table Tennis Digest. We believe in quality,not quantity. The three other magazines we have launched are brand leaders orvery close to being brand leaders. Outlook Money launched in 1998 isIndia’s only personal finance magazine and it sometimes deflates my ego whensomeone says: "Oh, you are the editor of Outlook Money."

Then in June 2001 we launched Outlook Traveller. Some months later9/11 happened. The tourism industry went into a slump. Everyone said themagazine’s days were numbered. Again, at the risk of immodesty, I say OutlookTraveller is a pioneer. It is a huge success - and it is a success becausewe broke the mould. Outlook Traveller was the first travel magazine inIndia to say no to trade news. In the old days you went to, say, TourismMinister, Renuka Chowdhury, printed her picture - and then said: Renukaji giveus an advertisement from your ministry. Instead, we created a destinationmagazine, in which we gave our readers a feel, a smell, a flavour ofdestinations. The formula worked - we don’t print Renukaji’s pictureand she still gives us ads.

The most recent publication we launched was Outlook Saptahik. I mustconfess the group’s bottom line hasn’t been greatly swelled by Saptahik, butwe are happy that the magazine has upheld the highest professional practices andenjoys a wide circulation.

Next week, Outlook will again do something different. We will belaunching a Delhi city magazine, called City Limits. This will be arevolutionary concept in Indian publishing. There will be no page 3 celebritiesin the entire magazine. And, oh yes, we also won’t tell you where to buy that80,000 rupee bottle of wine.

There is, I know, nothing more boring than an editor in an orgy ofself-praise.But I hope some of you have read our travel books, of which we havepublished 15.Many of these are on the best-seller list.

Altogether, it is a small corpus. Mr Sameer Jain or Ms Shobhna Bhartia haveno reason to feel threatened. But I hope they secretly envy, if that is not toostrong a word, our purposeful mix of irreverent and purposeful journalism.Ladies and gentlemen, I have been an editor now for thirty years and my missionhas been to make serious journalism popular - without trivialisation, but withthe occasional sex cover. The challenge before us is: How do we in the mediaengage with the reader of 2005? This reader is not a moron, but we in the mediahave to reinvent ourselves to regain his attention. The old ways of, say,covering politics will have to be discarded. The new reader is not disinterestedin politics, he is disinterested in the way we cover politics.

Breaking stories is important for any publication, but meaningful andvigorous debate and dissent, and, crucially, a consistency in journalisticquality is even more important. Breaking news and exclusives have anyway becomesomething of a joke. On three channels on the same day, same time, I saw theFinance Minister being interviewed on budget day. All three claimed it was "Exclusive".Some months ago, I enjoyed a breathless blurb by a TV channel. It said: BreakingNews and announced: "There is nothing to add to the breaking news we flashedfifteen minutes ago." Scoop, where is thy sting!

In Outlook we’ve had genuine breaking news: I won’t bore you witha laundry list but three examples should suffice: we broke the cricketmatch-fixing story in June 1997, we broke the Juhu-Centaur sale story which isnow being investigated by the CBI. And most recently, we broke the JusticePhukan story.

But what I really treasure is the fact that we have created an "open"magazine. I believe that dissent is the life-blood of good journalism and youmust admit that for a card-carrying pseudo-secularist, I invite and print thosevehemently opposed to us. We are the argumentative magazine. I don’tparticularly enjoy self-flagellation, but I know Outlook would becomedeadly dull if those who disagree with us do not get a look in.

Ladies and gentlemen, the myth about journalists being unbiased needs to beshattered. In my thirty years in the profession I have yet to meet an unbiasedjournalist, someone who is an ideological eunuch. Outlook makes no effortto hide its liberal-centre-left stance. But we are part of a matrix. Theplurality of the Indian media - and that is our free press’s greatest strength- ensures that biases get cancelled. And finally the reader gets anapproximation of the truth.

Biased or unbiased, I believe the political class in India takes the mediafar too seriously. Listen, we are just a bunch of guys and gals sitting around atable pretending to decide your fate. And remember, we have deadlines to meetand we have to be first with the news. We make mistakes. Mistakes of judgement,mistakes of fact, mistakes of prejudice, mistakes under competitive pressure.Hype is part of our business. It is not part of yours. For us every disagreementis irreconcilable, every verbal spat is an all-time low, every small turbulencein government means the government is falling, every change in foreign policy isa sell-out.

But you must ignore this frenzy. This hysteria of turning every scrap of newsinto a do-or-die situation is confined to a small patch of turf in New Delhi -starting from Raisina Hill to the India International Centre. And all mediacrises last for 24 hours.

I am not unhappy that the Indian political class takes the media soseriously.That is why some editors and journalists believe their words arewritten on tablets of stone.By the way, I acquired a puppy dog 12 months agoand when my wife asked me some weeks later what we should call him, I said "Editor".She said why? I said "Because he is stubborn, obstinate and thinks he knowseverything."

The infallibility of the media is a sedulously created myth most vigorouslypromoted by editors themselves. We are not always wrong, but we are wrong quiteoften. Outlook has yet to live down its prediction that Mr Narendra Modiwas going to lose the last election in Gujarat.

You should take us less seriously. Perhaps some benign neglect is called for.I’ll let you into a secret. If you really want to get even with a journalistor editor, tell him when he meets you that you did not read his last piece, orbetter still, never read his pieces. Nothing hurts a journalist more than thefact that his words of profound wisdom have not been read.

Politicians and journalists need to forge a new relationship. Thisrelationship shouldn’t be based on cronyism, neither should it be too cosy. Wemay not be natural adversaries, but we are also not natural friends. We shouldmake politicians feel just a tiny bit uncomfortable.

I was at a party where some politicians were having an animated conversation.My entry caused a minor frisson. One of them told me: "I am not comfortable inyour presence." It was a remarkably candid statement, and I told him, "Thatis the way it should be."

So, ladies and gentlemen, we come to the mother of all questions. What is therole of the media in India? What is our responsibility? Clearly, oneresponsibility is to monitor how the government works and how those who ruleperform. But there is another role, one less remarked.

Our pink papers tell us we are an economic superpower, we compete with China,and might even overtake China. Yet, 400 million of our citizens live on lessthan Rs 40 a day. This is a rank obscenity. Indian democracy has receivedwell-deserved praise, but to its eternal shame we have created two Indias.Shining India and An Area of Darkness. India’s grotesque and shaming povertyis not hidden away in some tribal, far away district. It is available forinspection on every traffic light of Delhi. You have to have a heart of stonenot to be moved by the little kids who beg with such great and good humour.

I would like to take this opportunity to commend and congratulate the MrsSonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council for attempting to make a directassault on this sub-Saharan poverty in the face of stiff opposition. The media’srole on this is clear. We must constantly remind Shining India of the otherIndia, however unpretty the pictures and ugly the facts. Until this shame iswiped out our democracy remains a failure. If we can spend Rs 15,000 crores onFrench submarines, we can spend Rs 12,000 crores on the employment guaranteescheme. This is not an ideological issue, this is not a left-right or centre vsstate issue, this is not globalisers vs the jholawallas issue. This is a humanissue.

Finally, I am happy to inform you that I am going to complete 11 years in Outlook.This is a record for me. And I would not have lasted this long had it notbeen for my proprietor, Rajan Raheja. Friends, I could write a book longer thanthe Mahabharta on the editor-proprietor relationship. On Mr Raheja that bookwould have a single page. He is a dream proprietor, who gave me both resourcesand editorial freedom to shape Outlook. Mr Raheja, may your tribeincrease.

When I go and meet the supreme editor-in-chief in the sky I will tell him:"Lord, I committed many small sins but on the big issues I remained totallyprofessional." And I will also tell him: "Lord, despite the blandishments ofTV, I never became a TV anchor.I remained loyal to print, I remained loyal tothe written word." Ladies and gentlemen, I think God will send me to heaven.