Uday Shankar, STAR India CEO, was at the Express for an Idea Exchange. In this session moderated by Senior Editor, Media, Archna Shukla, Shankar speaks about the role of the broadcast media, the tyranny of TRPs and the ?dumbing down? of news
UDAY SHANKAR: I started out as a journalist. I ran Aaj Tak and Headlines Today for a few years and moved on to Star News. Then, purely by accident, I was asked to take over the Star Network in 2007. Star India is a favourite of Rupert Murdoch because unlike a lot of other western media owners, Mr Murdoch was convinced from the beginning that the Western media and China were not going to be a story for a long, long time, if ever, and so when everybody was headed towards the Chinese borders, he decided to take a chance on India and it worked for him. I remain a journalist, something I?m very proud of.
ARCHNA SHUKLA: How did you make the transition from journalism to management?
The transition from journalism to management wasn?t difficult. As a journalist, I was looking at what concerns a society and what concerns people who live in a society and how they respond to an external development. That?s exactly what you do as a manager whether you?re selling soap or content.
LEHER KALA: What about choosing content for entertainment and for news? Was it difficult for you in the beginning?
I thought it would be very difficult and I was very intimidated when I walked into the newsroom equivalent of Star Plus, our entertainment channel. But I realised that it wasn?t at all different. The news editor, the producer or the reporter isn?t different from the person who creates a big saas-bahu soap. They look at stories just as we do, and the characters are as real for them as they are for us.
Just imagine, there are viewers who, day after day, every Monday to Friday, for 52 weeks and then for several years, watch a certain show at 9 pm. It requires a huge amount of commitment. That connect does not develop unless they see the characters as real people even though they know they are not real.
In news, we talk about a government?s new policies or what Sonia Gandhi said or what a minister did. It is exactly the same thing as what a TV character is doing, how her husband is behaving, etc.
ASHISH SINHA: Star India has been in this country for close to two decades. Yet it is often thought of as a foreign company. Have you managed to change the image?
The perception has changed but not everywhere. It?s convenient for people to maintain that perception. One of the sad things about the Indian media is that a very phoney division has been created with respect to Indian media and foreign media. This division has been created, packaged and sold and the government, the politicians have bought it.
As far as our viewers are concerned, they see as a completely Indian company. Given the volume of Indian content that we generate every year, given the kind of relationship we have with the Indian consumer, given the fact that our entire advertising comes from India, all our employees are Indians…who can have a greater claim to being an Indian? But this debate is not about that. It is about certain people in the media securing their business interests. One or two media companies are paranoid about losing their share of the market if that debate were to go away and so they try very hard to keep it alive.
RAHUL: Within six months of entertainment channel Colors making its debut in 2008, it became very popular. Did you have to change your strategy at Star Plus?
What Colors has done has been remarkable?there aren?t many examples of a channel coming in and doing so well in the entertainment space because typically, consumer preference is difficult to change. So they?ve done a great job. But the comparison between Star TV and Colors is unequal because you?re talking about the Hindi entertainment space alone. Today, only 50% of Star?s share comes from the Hindi segment. The rest comes from other languages?the four south Indian languages, Bengali and Marathi. These have been very successful.
Colors was the third channel to be launched in a span of 14 months, after 9X and NDTV Imagine. We were prepared for very strong competition. We knew we would take some hits. This is also a cyclical business?channels go through phases. From 2000 till the middle of 2009, Star was the number one channel. From 2006 onwards, the same viewers who had been very loyal began to develop a fatigue. There was almost a compelling desire to try out something new. When we first got overtaken, it was very unpleasant and disappointing but it did not come as a surprise. I took over with a very active regional agenda to promote Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil and Kannada.
We also went beyond traditional broadcasting into home shopping, into Fox Star Studios movie production. We knew the market had changed dramatically: when Star Plus first became number one, the total number of cable homes was 10-11 million with Delhi and Mumbai accounting for 50% of those; when Colors came, the number of satellite homes had gone up to 85 million and Delhi-Mumbai together accounted for 20%. The primary viewership for entertainment had shifted to small towns. Star?s leadership was built on the educated, urban middle class. But suddenly, stories from remote parts of the country, of the lower social, economic categories began to connect with audiences. The writing was on the wall. We knew we would have to undergo a phase of renewal. Also, when you work for a global company like News Corp or Star, it helps because you learn from experiences elsewhere.
AMITABH SINHA: Why does every TV channel in India seem to be doing the same kind of programming, even in the news business?
Innovation is still very poor in entertainment and in news. For several reasons: one is creative laziness. Coming up with a new idea is not easy and the risks are very high. If I try something new, it may or may not work. If it doesn?t work, I carry the stigma of delivering a dud. Secondly, it?s about the way the industry has grown. In 10 years, TV has created 550 million consumers and we have not had time to develop the infrastructure to support this kind of growth. We may have 500 channels but even today there is only one production company which has the capability to produce more than three shows a week?that is Balaji Telefilms. Most TV producers consist of one-or-two people shops, husband and wife, and friends just coming together. The business has not been developed along solid business lines, so taking risks is minimal.
Our biggest challenge in developing new concepts is the lack of writers. Most people in our industry have not seen a place called Gorakhpur and then suddenly they start writing on caste matters. It comes out as comical. There is a huge tendency to create stereotypes because to go beyond stereotypes, you need real understanding. And the writers really don?t know how much India has changed. If you consider the last year or so, almost every successful story is a very convincing portrayal of reality. Of course, there is drama and a theatre input but a Balika Vadhu or our new serial on caste, Pratigya, these have been written by people who are capturing their own experience. That kind of fresh input is still very limited.
In the case of news, the crisis is indicative of the business model of news. No news channel makes money. Many of them have not made any money in their entire life cycle. A bulk of the profits comes from cash lying in their books; not from their business. This is the only country where news runs as a standalone, independent business. Today when you say news gathering, people talk of OB vans. Those are just a piece of machinery; they don?t pick up the right news. Nobody is investing in identifying the right story; nobody has time to spend on reporters.
AMITABH SINHA: How real are reality shows?
As far as I know, the broadcasters or the producers do not fix the outcome of the reality show. When we did Voice of India, there was a singer, a Sikh, who was the winner. He was clearly not the most talented person on that show. But there were two ways of judging. There was a panel of judges and then there was the public voting. I have never seen such passionate voting. Almost everyone who had a mobile phone in Punjab was sending messages and voting for him. He had less that 50% of the judges? votes but he had 95% of votes from the viewers. He came out a clear winner. That kind of thing happens.
It amazes me that 12- and 13-year-old girls and boys appear on these shows and their parents are obsessed about ensuring that somehow their child wins a reality show. They don?t do this for hollow pride; they actually think there is a great career ahead, that the child will get famous. For them the whole thing is very real.
Coomi Kapoor : How would you explain the dumbing down of news on television?
I think the process didn?t begin with TV; it began with newspapers. Some newspapers created a set of readers or content consumers who look at only frivolous content. That is where the model came from. We legitimise a piece of mindless fluff as news content. Today, there is no business news on any Hindi or English channel: you have to go to business channels for that. When we think of security concerns, we report on terrorist bombings or shootings. There is no other form of security concern that gets expressed. Politics is only about who ran into the well of the House; there is no other form of political discussion. News has lost a lot of its credibility. In a country like India, where most people are so disempowered, where access to information is limited, we actually don?t realise how seriously people take us. TV news channels do disappointing things and they are killing the credibility of a whole profession. They are leaving huge gaps in the lives of people. That?s the sad part.
LEHER KALA: Should there be a self-regulatory body for broadcasters?
I was involved in setting up the News Broadcasters? Association (NBA), which is the body of self regulation. All broadcasters will have to do that. We do play a very important role in society. We have to be responsible; we cannot say we will promote all kinds of irresponsible behaviour. But the government should not discipline us; we have to discipline ourselves.
ASHISH SINHA: What do you think of the television rating system of TRPs?
The ratings have played a sinister role in the evolution of content. Every industry needs to measure how it has performed. But what TAM does in this country is really disturbing. Seven thousand monitoring boxes cannot accurately represent what people are watching. Frequent ratings are totally unnecessary. They are responsible for a lot of the distortions in broadcasting behaviour. Earlier, nobody in a newsroom discussed ratings. Then suddenly, the competition came in and everybody started looking at the ratings. Now we have either weekly ratings or programme-based daily ratings, minute-wise ratings.
Nobody understands how the ratings system works. It?s totally opaque. Even if you assume it?s been done scientifically and is error-free, there is no reason to do it every minute, every hour or every day.
What it has done it to take away the focus from creative aspects of content building. A good story, a good plot, developing a robust, long-term engagement with your viewers?that has been replaced with whatever seems to have worked. So somebody does the story of a ghost, that story rates well and the next week across news channels, there are ghosts. Broadcasters are not happy with the ratings system but this is not in their hands.
ARCHNA SHUKLA: It was the TV industry that came up with the idea.
As a company, News Corp has been fighting a pitched battle against AC Nielson (the ratings agency). I think there is a role for ratings but it should be used to guide long-term behaviour, tracking what people want and what they are responding to rather than making it like the stock market where every minute you are buying or selling. That is what it is doing now, which is extremely damaging. I think the feedback is fine, but feedback on a minute-to-minute basis does not help.
?Transcribed by Alia Allana For the longer text, visit http://www.indianexpress.com