Caught in the slough of mammon

Media industry in India was badly hit by the global economic downturn and yet it is only their greed and ignorance that is to blame.

On a sultry February evening, the high and mighty of print media in India, namely, Indian Express’ Shekhar Gupta, HT’s Shobhana Bhartia, and TN Ninan of Business Standard dropped for a visit at Shashtri Bhavan to meet Anand Sharma, then the MoS for Information and Broadcasting.

The meeting was unusual as the triumvirate of Gupta, Bhartia and Ninan were meeting the Minister not as condescending journalists but as supplicants pleading for a bailout especially for the newspaper industry due to pressures borne out of the economic slowdown.

Apparently, the minister gave them a kind ear and promised to look into their demands. Within a few days, the government announced a stimulus package that comprised a waiver of 15% agency commission on DAVP advertisements and a 10% increase in rates for the ads released by the DAVP.

Certainly, it must have been a major embarrassment for the proud Czars of the Fourth Estate to mollycoddle the very government they are prone to stick a knife into. But ever since the tide turned in the US markets and thereby the rest of the world, the media industry in India and elsewhere has been under severe pressure in terms on increase in input costs and a massive reduction in revenues.

Not such a fine print’

Indeed the inputs costs in terms of newsprint prices have really ballooned over the past year so or so– by around 60% since 2007. According to recent study done by FICCI-KPMG, the sudden escalation in newsprint prices is one of the primary reasons why the newspapers have suffered.  The study estimates the print media industry to be collectively worth around Rs. 17260 crore for 2007-08, and due to the pressures from within and outside the collective growth of the industry has been pegged at a paltry 7.6% and projected to grow by some 6% in the current year. Continue reading

Hundredth Post!!!

Any batsmen worth his salt will tell you, that the most disconcerting and nerve-wrecking time at the crease is not when one opens the innings, but when the personal score is in the edgy 90s. More so, if it is 99; just a single required to cross over into the triple digit club of 100. Usually most falter that this very edge, even the mighty and so do the lowly. That’s the power of 100, it can daunt anyone. But, if you do manage to cross into the club. It is a indeed a very exhilarating experience. The feeling of being a centurion!

Thus, eversince I saw my WordPress Dashboard tell me that I had 99 posts on this blog, I was stumped. It was a great a feeling to know that in spite of all the odds, the biggest one being my own laziness and tardiness, I have indeed managed to somehow keep this one venture of mine alive, when so many others have vanished in the realms of time.

So, when it dawned on me that, I too will be a centurion blogger, namely, who has written 100 odd posts, I was all caught up in thought. It took me many many days to decide on what would be that 100th post. Since, it was to be special, I thought that I’d indeed make it very special. So, I begin thinking over it, should it be my favorite published article – but then there aren’t many of them, or should it be an unpublished one – there are just so many of them. Should it be a feature, comment, short story, interview, etc. I just kept ruminating over it.

Every passing day, whenever I would find some free time on my hand I would think on that special 100th post. It almost took me a month before I realised that in the process of trying to make my post special, I was steadily returning to my old self, wherein there is much thought and little action. Like a bolt it hit me that the 100th post will not be special because of its structure or form, but simply because it is 100th. Nothing more and little else.

So this is my 100th post, and it kind of is an announcement of my committment to shashwatdc.com. Continue reading