Abdicating your position, HT ishtyle

GROUND ZERO

REVISITING THE CORE

When you draw a concentric circle, you are basically drawing circleswith a common centre. At the very centre is the core. In newspaperparlance, this core is represented by the city that you are in. Youtry and embody, amplify, mirror, typifyand even embrace the city'saspirations andproblems through your pages. This way you connect with the readerswho purchase your paper as part of a daily habit in India. While yougive them what they want to know, you also relay their problems andhassles to a larger audience through the news pages. You become afacilitator for them. You highlight drawbacks in the system, thelassitude and inertia that brings ineptness in our administration andmoreover you empower resident welfare association by giving them avoice. Thus you evolve into becoming the city's lifeline in a mannerof speaking. Cause, effect and panacea all rolled into one. Great citynewspapers have performed yeoman service to the cities in their base ofoperations. Yes, at the core is the Metro and its coverage. Anyway, ifyou are wondering where I am going with this line of thinking, bepatient.
Sometime last year during the height of the epic crisis that crippledAmerica's newspaper industry, Michael Sokolove wrote in the NYT,"Smallernewspapers, those with circulations under 50,000, are considered thehealthiest part of the industry. “They’re not making 30 percent profitmargins like they once did, but most of them are doing fine,” JohnMorton, a newspaper analyst who has followed the industry for decades,told me. Most analysts predict that the papers with anational profile and brand — The New York Times, The Washington Post,The Wall Street Journal and USA Today — will find a way to survive andstay in print. (It must be noted that few can say exactly how thiswill happen.) The most endangered segment is the one occupied by TheInquirer and other big metro papers that once dominated their regions,in some cases had national and even international reach but now struggle tofully staff bureaus in their state capitals. Among those currently inbankruptcy are the papers that are a part of the vast Tribune Company,including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The BaltimoreSun, The Orlando Sentinel and The Hartford Courant. What the bankruptand most at-risk papers have in common is that they recently changedhands and the new owners took on debt — immense debt, in the case ofthe Tribune Company, which listed obligations of $13 billion when itfiled for bankruptcy in 2008."
Along with my morning cuppa, I need to read a paper which gives mewidth and depth of news coverage. Tastes and preferences vary fromMetro or City specific news to politics or sport or business, but thebottomline is that I should be informed daily of what is happeningaround me. The Metro-centric model is the one that has resulted inoptimising efficiencies; a confluence of energy, effort and time ongood, solid city based stories. Stories which inform and make thereader aware. No, this is not a masterclass in news coverage, thoughit might sound like that. It is a reiteration of a simple credo - onewhich several large newspapers seem to have forgotten. But the Timesof India has redoubled its efforts and energies into zeroing deeperinto this concentric circle or core.
Bingo, as one former editor of mine used to say (and all of us wouldquietly chuckle), the perfect recipe for success in the city. TakeThursday for example, ToI led with two great city stories written bythe same extremely 'busy' reporter. Andwhat did competitor HT do, it led with the banal Nitin Gadkari (whoincidentally I saw singing at the Indore conclave with an orchestra inthe background, if you please - Zindagi, kaisi yeh paheli - what nextfrom the partywith a difference, I guffawed?) had Hockey teams seek allclear on terror with a box - Delhi boy is 11th Pune blast victim, aninterview with Omar Abdullah, Indians eighth most attractive peopleand of course the token city story - Warrant out: Sajjan faces arrest.
ToI had a gangbuster Metro lead - Hyper security: Faridabad areas cut offfrom Delhi - Many don't reach office, road to be sealed for 10 dayswith a pix of a barricaded Surajkund Road. A small box accompanied thestory - 17,000 cops on 3 km for hockey tourney. High handedness,overzealousness, nervousness - call it what you will - "Residents ofthe swanky apartment complexes around Surajkund, in Delhi's backyard,got a rude shock on Wednesday morning when they found themselvesabruptly cut off from the national capital. Working under the shadowof terror, the traffic police blocked Surajkund Road, the main arterybetween this area and Delhi, without any prior notice for theCommonwealth Shooting Championship beginning at Dr Karni SinghShooting Range in Tughlaqabad on Thursday leading to total chaos.
"With the other access to Delhi from Faridabad areas, Mathura Road,already choked due to construction of a Metro line and flyover — andgenerally given a wide berth — there were massive day-long jams on allthe roads. Several office-goers were forced to head back home. Worse,this is going to be the situation for the next 10 days. "The SurajkundRoad, from Mehrauli-Badarpur Road upto Surajkund (5km), will remainclosed from 7am to 6 pm till February 28 in view of securityarrangements for the shooting championship. Since security is ourparamount concern, commuters are going to face some inconvenience astraffic volumes are very high," said Satyendra Garg, JointCommissioner of Police (traffic). This has left people wonderingwhat's in store during the Commonwealth Games.
"When residents of Charmwood Village, Eros Garden, Dayal Bagh and evenfrom other Faridabad sectors went out in the morning, they werediverted to Prahladpur Road. The result was a gridlock with commuterstaking three to four hours just to get to MB Road. Several peoplereturned home. "I left for work at 8.30 but got caught in one of theworst jams I've ever seen," said Nanda Paithankar, a resident ofCharmwood Village, who works for WHO. "I decided to head back home. Ittook over two hours just to go around the boundary wall and enter thecolony from the next gate."
Now isn't this a story that matters? Isn't it something that affectsthe lives of the readers? It is not an earth shattering exclusive, butit is a story which reflects the ToI mandate of going back to the Core- to its readers and their problems. A paper for the community, onlymore crassly commercial and dabbling in assorted peripheralactivities, yet not taking its eyes of the ball. A ball lying slapbang in thecentre of the concentric circle. It cannot be that nobody in HT was aware of theFaridabad blockade, that Mathura Road was jammed and that a generalstate of disrepair prevailed on the Surajkund Road, the lifelinebetween Delhi and Faridabad. Incidentally Faridabad is 25 km south ofDelhi for the uninitiated. Part of an ever burgeoning National CapitalRegion. It is also the most populated city of Haryana, generating 60percent of the state's revenues. So, I cannot believe for a momentthat no one in HT had a clue about the transport gridlock betweenFaridabad and Delhi.
After all HT does have a credible Delhi edition and Mathura Road andFaridabad are very much in and around Delhi. The woes of the residentsof Delhi will always make news, they could pertain to bi pa sa (no,not the actress Basu) but bijli, pani and sadak. On Thursday morning,I got a couple of callsfrom friends asking whether I had faced problems in Mathura Road. Alasthey had forgotten that I had moved from my earlier office in Mathura Roadto Nehru Place. Anyway, that was the impact of the story. Which meansthat news prioritisation at HT leaves a lot to be desired. Newsmanagement is in disarray.
The second lead in ToI was equally worrisome - "A 44-year-olddecorated Army officer was hit by an unidentified vehicle earlyWednesday morning and left lying on Africa Avenue in south Delhi forhours. The police noticed him there, but surmised that he was dead.About three hours later, he was taken to AIIMS trauma centre where hewas declared "brought dead". The family of Major Alok Singh, who wasdirector administration at KPMG after taking early retirement frommilitary service, is distraught — it feels Maj Singh might have beenalive had not the police been so casual in dealing with the accident.The doctors seem to agree.
"Whether a trauma victim is dead or not, is not for the police todecide, nor are they trained for it," said Dr Amit Gupta, assistantprofessor of surgery who is attached with the AIIMS trauma centre.There is a "golden hour" within which if a trauma victim gets medicalattention he might be revived. The incident has not just brought backthe harsh spotlight on the heartless city which has little time, leaveaside a sense of duty, for accident victims, it has also raisedquestions about the training of police — whether they know the do'sand don'ts of dealing with accidents. Maj Singh left his SafdarjungEnclave home at 6am for his usual morning walk at Deer Park. Henormally returned by 8am, but when he didn't until 8.30am, his wifecalled his cellphone. It was answered by a cop. "The policeman said hehad met with an accident and was being taken to hospital," said RahulJain, a friend and neighbour. "
This moving story was a travesty and fortunately HT had it, but as usual it wasburied on one of the Metro pages. When will HT, part of the city'sfabric and underlying ethos realise that it needs to go back toleveraging its Metro resources. It needs to display an aggressiveintent to regain this space. It needs to ramp up its Metro coverageand win back the readers. A visually distracting design may be good,but content focusing on the city's problems is paramount. This is thebiggest weakness in HT's armour; not that politics, business and sportare any better, but Metro as I have said is Core. And you don't vacateor abdicate the Core. Stand your ground is the first thing taught inmilitary combat, the ground of tactical warfare's rudimentaryeducation inculcates this desire. Crime reporters of the kind thatinhabited reporting apparatuses have practically disappeared. Thenewspaper world has new priorities, but change is the only constant.For HT to make an 'make you sit up and take notice' impression again,it needs to go back to Metro. Of course it will also need to beef upother parts of the content mainframe, otherwise the slowlydisappearing gap between ToI and HT will only get wider.