CBA General Conference - 2004
NEWS AND SPEECHES
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What Makes News?
Narayan Rao, NDTV
Friends... I am from India. A few words about my country to put things in the right perspective. India is huge and we have a population of a billion people. Here is a statistic. We have more people in India than the rest of the Commonwealth put together. We have 16 official languages, each with its own script. Cable and satellite television reaches about 200 million people and terrestrial television another 200 million. Our TV audience of 400 million is more than the entire population of North America. Radio reaches out to virtually every Indian. I come from a massive market.
I work for New Delhi Television. We run two news channels ... one in English and the other in Hindi.
Ladies and Gentlemen, news is a report on current event in a newspaper or on radio or television or the internet.
The motto of the New York Times is: All the news that's fit to print. So it is not just a report on current events but reports that are fit to print or, in our language, carry, in terms of the highest editorial standards. Basically news needs to educate and inform. It needs to be independent of government and MUST always be impartial. Two sides equal a story. It is not our job to evaluate the validity of either side or look for consensus.
News needs to be speedy, accurate and completely reliable. The currency of news journalism is credibility. No news organization can survive without it. Those of us in private television who run news channels also know that we must earn our revenues and yet ensure there is a Chinese wall between financial realities and editorial decisions. No credibility eventually means no viewership and no viewership means no revenue. It also means we are not doing our jobs the way they are meant to be done and our broadcasts can hardly be said to perform a public service. Our survival depends on being wholly credible at all times. On this issue there is no compromise.
While credibility is the very essence of good journalism, the fact remains that we must be innovative to attract and retain our viewers. It is not only what is communicated that matters but the manner in which the story is told. When the entire world was covering the war in Iraq and had massive resources to allocate to this coverage, we chose to see things differently by going into what the people central to the war, the Iraqis, felt about things. So we conducted an opinion poll in Iraq. A massive survey involving a 1000 people in Baghdad was carried out in April last year soon after the war was officially over, under terribly dangerous conditions as there was violence in the streets. It turned out to be the first opinion poll in Iraq in 25 years! The findings made news in India and on a number of networks all over the world.
Television moves. Print media can accommodate a wide array of stories. To be effective on television things have to move, change colour, transform. Yet it is important that news has an impact. It is our job to carry the news and raise hell if need be.
Novelty is news. It's called 'news' for a reason after all. As John Bogart said as far back as 1918 - 'when a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.'
What is of prime importance is the fact that the viewer must be kept in sight at all times. The greater the distance between a station and its viewer, the less are the chances of being a successful channel. Therefore, if it means going local, go local. If it means providing news they can use, give it to them. If it means entertaining the viewer, entertain him.