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Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Selling editorial space
Responding to my post yesterday ("Decade of the Swimsuit Special") about the Times of India, Ravikiran Rao writes in:
Hmmm. I remain skeptical, because the kind of events the ToI sells its editorial space to are mostly those who wouldn't be considered newsworthy otherwise: the launch of a publicity showroom, of a new brand of towel, and so on. So instead of people competing to report them as news, as Ravikiran envisages, you might well have people competing to sell editorial space to them. That will make it a buyer's market, which hardly makes things better, because that damn market shouldn't exist in the first place. Let's see.
Selling of editorial space will be the first thing to go when there is competition. I have secondhand anecdotal evidence for this.
I'm sure you'll know that selling of news did not really begin with the Slimes [some bloggers refer to ToI this way]. They just institutionalised it. My aunt is a Bharata Natyam teacher and I learn from her that it is apparently standard practice to pay the journalist who attends a performance if they want a good review. This is true for both English Language and regional newspapers. But it seems that with the cutthroat competition for news among Kannada newspapers in Mumbai, that practice has stopped among them.
This is not to say that the quality of the news will be any better. The Slimes will probably just stop getting paid, but it will still print the same crappy news - if readers want to read it.
Then again, I am not sure that the Slimes is publishing all that trash because its readers demanded it. It is more like the expectations men have from movies. They'd like it to have a good story, decent acting, etc. But if it doesn't then they wouldn't mind it if the chick takes off her clothes either.
Hmmm. I remain skeptical, because the kind of events the ToI sells its editorial space to are mostly those who wouldn't be considered newsworthy otherwise: the launch of a publicity showroom, of a new brand of towel, and so on. So instead of people competing to report them as news, as Ravikiran envisages, you might well have people competing to sell editorial space to them. That will make it a buyer's market, which hardly makes things better, because that damn market shouldn't exist in the first place. Let's see.
