Investigative reporting is a natural process: Raj Nayak

Investigative reporting is flavour of the season. However, Raj Nayak, CEO, NDTV Media, when asked if the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association award for exceptional news feature that NDTV won was a reflection of an effort to increase investigative reporting, said, “I don’t think there is a conscious effort to do more investigative stories but as a channel, we will continue to do stories that reflect on what is happening around us that makes news.”

NDTV won the award for an investigative report on ‘Education For Sale in Maharashtra, India’. The credit for the award went to NDTV’s Sindhu Manesh, Anand Rao and Srikanth G Rao who worked on the report.

The team used a hidden camera to unravel how seats in top medical colleges were being sold for large amounts of money by state government ministers, politicians, principals and college registrars.

Is electronic media catching up with the print medium in investigative reporting? Nayak responded to this saying, “I think both the print medium and the electronic medium do the job of providing news to its audience in the most credible manner. I see no competition between these two mediums; in fact, both the mediums complement each other.”

Referring to the awards, he said, “They are a demonstration of the quality of work. It is very important to us as it reinforces the quality of talent we have within the organization.”

NDTV has also won the International Broadcasting Conference (IBC) ‘Cost Effective Engineering 2004’ award. The judging panel, while announcing the award, said, “The quality of the presentation from NDTV was excellent and that the achievement is a model to broadcasters in similar situations.”

A team led by Chief Engineer, Jawahar Lal, Deputy Chief Engineer, Dinesh Singh and Producer Shayne P Singh executed the project—Digital Satellite Newsgathering (DSNG) NDTV maintains that it is the first DSNG network relying entirely on MPEG-4 encoding.