Overview

A reality check on the year gone by

Pradyuman Maheshwari

When we got into 2009, we hoped that the new year would usher in prosperity and blow away the slowdown. All of it made for good reading, but in reality, none of it happened. As we entered 2010, there were some indicators of recoveries, but happy days aren’t here as yet.

It’s ironic that despite the severe liquidity crunch, there were several good things that happened. The launch of Real and ET Now, the rise and rise of Colors and Zee, too, making its presence felt among the general entertainment channels (GECs), a general election and Season 2 of the Indian Premier League, new print media properties taking off and loads of money being pumped into media and entertainment.

However, Real failed and though it’s on air, it has suspended fresh programming. ET Now has been attempting to make its presence felt, but hasn’t really been able to knock out competition so far. Star Plus is now clearly not the No. 1 (though the gap with Colors has narrowed in the recent past), Bollywood has a mixed year with a series of flops, a long face-off with the multiplexes and only a handful of big hits at the box-office.

Phew! But beyond all of the above, the underlying sentiment was that of doom. There were many jobs lost, and many of those who were happy to not lose had their earnings shaved. Wage hikes were few, possibly under duress. It was naturally not easy for businesses to bear the same overheads as they did earlier. Part of the problem is that there were many media companies which expanded indiscriminately in the past. Those who didn’t, faced fewer problems in the last 18 months.

Even media and creative advertising agencies faced the heat with clients spending less and renegotiating fees. Though there was some movement of clients and people, the attempt was to keep the fires burning and hope the crunch doesn’t last forever.

We had a new Information and Broadcasting Minister in Congress veteran Ambika Soni, who has been reasonably content-friendly. So, all attempts by politicians and vested interests to get Soni to damn programmers were turned down. Ditto with news television players. Soni was clear that she would rather play the role of a facilitator, if at all, and not a participant on television regulation. The onus was hence, on the news channels to not fight amongst themselves and keep themselves under check.

There has been much brouhaha about public service broadcaster Doordarshan completing 50 years of existence. Although the reach of the network is high, the quality of the content on air requires urgent attention. The network that once attracted the cream of talent from across the land is now crying for top notch fare. With the Commonwealth Games around the corner and all energies trained on that, I doubt there will be much done to improve the mass- and news-based services.

Getting news in lieu of monies has been a common practice around the time of the elections. The issue has now reached the offices of the Election Commission and the Press Council of India, and while the two bodies may spew venom at the concept, sadly, one can’t see anything emerging out of it.

The year (and decade) ended with the growing of the social media and microblogging. Although restricted to a section of the intelligentsia and the affluent, Orkut and Facebook in the networking sites and Twitter for posting short, 140-character updates have grown to turn into potent media vehicles.

So, was it a good year for the media? No, it wasn’t. In fact, it was awful. However, that didn’t mean we were down and out. There’s a fair amount happening in the industry. The last quarter showed early signs of a recovery. The much-delayed Dainik Bhaskar IPO was a huge success.