WHAT do people read? Particularly the young? And what do they watch? The answers are not very clear. There was a time when reading the daily English newspaper was mandatory. You read it to improve your language skills (truly! people of a certain age will remember their parents telling them to read the Hindu or the Statesman). Also to gain knowledge and insight and also to pass certain competitive exams like the IAS. But today, with print media booming, and TV channels sprouting every other day, there should be a knowledge explosion.

But go talk to college kids and you will know that we are occupying completely different spaces. I was asked to talk to the undergraduate students of a women’s college in Chennai. This was the day after the Employment Guarantee Bill had been passed by Parliament. Enough space had been given to the subject both in print and television, but when I tried to discuss the subject, I drew a total blank. I was not talking to a bunch of airheads. The girls were very articulate and sharp on subjects which interested them. As it was a college in Chennai they were worried about aspects that concerned them, such as moral policing, dress codes, ban on cell phones in colleges and so on. Interestingly, not one of them wanted to get married after finishing their studies. They all wanted careers, the more exotic the better. And they were willing to read up on how to get there. Little surprise that the publishing industry is thriving by bringing out self- help and management books. Fiction accounts for barely 20 per cent of the books published.

Obviously we are dealing with two Indias here. The urban upwardly mobile young capable of shutting themselves out of the problems of the rural poor or the lower middle class in smaller towns. And others. While the English media focuses mostly on the young urban Indian (21-45 being the preferred age group for marketers) they tend to ignore the other India. But the other India wants to read, wants information. The New Indian Express (the media group I work for) gets more hits on the sites of its language newspapers. For instance, readers of Kannadaprabha.com, the website of Kannada Prabha, want to read more and more news from Shimoga, Belgaum, Hubli, Madikeri or Mysore. The same is true of readers visiting Dinamani.com, a Tamil media website. They want to read reports emanating from Salem, Erode, Tirupur and Tirunelveli.

 

Most of these news reports are not published in the Chennai edition of Dinamani or the Bangalore edition of Kannada Prabha, because they emanate from areas beyond the distribution basin of these newspapers. However, the websites of these newspapers go to great lengths to access and host these reports. This shows the reach of the net, and the way it is redefining news priorities. Online journalism in India, however, continues to be dominated by the traditional media, which not only generates news but also shapes the online perspectives.

In itself this may be a good thing for the Indian print media. In the West the newspaper habit is declining because of the growing use of the internet. The young in the West turn to the net for their everyday information. They scan the headlines, decide how to spend their evenings, book their movie tickets, do everything online. Classified advertising, a major revenue earner, is rapidly shifting to online. As a result print media in the West has been facing a steep fall in circulation, advertising revenue, and readership.

This has not happened in India yet. In fact, the situation is quite the reverse here. Despite the fact that the ‘preferred’ target audience does not seem to be reading papers, India has seen a healthy growth in the print medium as compared to the developed countries. This is really the effect of a growing literate population. Traditional media, however, has to remember that we tend to leapfrog technologies and do not necessarily follow western trends. Just look how easily the country has gone mobile. Right now our per capita computer and Internet usage is very low, but the numbers are growing fast.

 

We still have several untapped areas like the potential in the vernacular media. The reason is that the returns on ad spend in vernacular media is much lower in comparison to English. But several interesting things are happening in the language press, particularly in the South. In Tamilnadu, the market leader in the visual medium, Sun TV, has launched two Tamil papers; one, an evening tabloid, and the other a revamped daily which the group took over. The afternoon tabloid was introduced with many freebies thrown in. Buy a paper and get two shampoo sachets and so on. The daily, a more recent launch, has been priced at one rupee. Both have seen healthy circulation numbers. The eveninger has settled down at around 4,00,000 from its editions across the state. The morning daily too seems to be a runaway success, although it’s early days yet.

Sun TV group, which is already in radio (the still untapped medium?), has been able to cleverly combine its presence in TV and radio to promote its print medium launch. Is this the way the future is going to shape up? Sun TV belongs to the Marans who belong to the founding family of the political party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. Will they be able to keep propaganda and their own prejudices out of their papers and maintain credibility? The Times group has gone into television. Even the conservative Hindu, in the South, is organising various events to promote its brands. Will stand alone newspapers work any longer?

 

Certain things are pretty clear. The more global we become, the more local we get. No paper can do without city supplements. The question one is often asked is whether newspapers are prone to cave in to the dictates of large advertisers. Actually they don’t. It is easier to be critical of a multinational like Coca Cola, or Unilever, than about a local shopping complex. The big ticket advertisers have largely moved to television. The newspapers are supported mostly by retail advertising. Criticise a local sari shop, and you will have your marketing manager breathing down your neck. One just cannot underestimate the power of local advertising. When I ask the younger readers what they read in the city supplements of newspapers, most of them say that they look out for the sales, and also movie timings. They are usually ignorant about the content.

The papers, it is assumed are competing against television. I have never been able to understand how correct this assumption is. Nevertheless, this has meant that the papers have to be more colourful, with shorter stories, which are more product and people oriented. The so-called page three culture, of covering parties and social events is expected to make the print medium more attractive to the young. The young genuinely don’t have much time to read. When they are studying they run from one class to another and spend the rest of their time in coaching classes, studying for various competitive exams. And once they enter the job market, they have even less time to read. Just look around. The bright ones are all being grabbed by the mushrooming Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies. The BPOs have foreign clients and the working hours extend to the wee hours of the morning.

 

The young do not have time for TV either. They hardly ever watch the news channels. They watch late night music programmes and soaps. The other India watches local programmes and news in their own languages. We have a situation of papers and news channels which cater to the English speaking urban population wielding a disproportionate influence than their numbers would indicate. Will this trend continue? Or will the other India assert itself?

In the eighties, investigative journalism and writing on developmental issues came into its own. One can see a decline in both these areas now. The TV channels are currently into sting journalism. With technological improvements, hidden cameras are helping to expose wrongdoings. Whether they are into silly issues like casting couches or more serious ones like ministers promising to run drugs, or members of Parliament willing to ask questions for cash, it’s all quite riveting. However, the print journalists feel that television channels are taking the easy way out. The problem is that no Indian newspaper today has the time or inclination to let their journalists spend months on painful research on a single subject.

So how can newspapers capture the imagination of the young? The reality of our times is that they are confronted with a multiplicity of choices. The choices are also becoming very focused and regional. If you live in Tamilnadu, the news you get is completely local. You can easily miss out what is going on in Chhattisgarh or Jharkhand. A quick survey will confirm that hardly anyone in Tamilnadu can pinpoint the geographical location of these states or the names of their chief ministers. On the other hand, many other things are becoming pan Indian. Entertainment, for instance.

In a state like Tamilnadu, which rejected Hindi in the ’60s, Hindi films are doing pretty well. Clearly the Tamils have become self-confident in themselves and in their own entertainment industry to be tolerant and appreciate talent elsewhere. According to exhibitors, Shah Rukh Khan’s ‘Swades’ did better in Chennai than elsewhere. Bollywood names are better known than the politicians. But then the papers are full of politics. Where are they going wrong?

 

Newspapers and news channels cannot really ignore the other India. Nor can the large youth population of the country remain blissfully unaware of the problems confronting the country. For each high paying job there is somebody committing suicide somewhere because of poverty. There is rampant injustice all over. Women are still getting raped and killed and in many cases before they are even born. Except for a few elite institutions, standards of education are pretty low. One is really stating the obvious. But how does media present all this to the young? How does one package unpleasant facts? How does one convince the growing number of readers that fluff is not all. And more important, how does one get the young to look at serious issues?

While writing this article I asked one of the bright young interns who was spending several weeks with the paper what she was reading with such concentration. ‘I am doing the crossword,’ she said.