I am not through with news yet. Just imagine this has happened within a span of a couple of years make me marvel at how so few people express their surprise at this step change . We as a nation , I sometimes feel, are far more malleable and amenable to change than we appear to be from outside.
With the entry of 24x7 news channels we have entered into a hitherto unknown super market of news. TV screen is the new show window of these proliferating news channel malls .Like the retail revolution news retail itself is still in the infancy of merchandising. In most cases they appear in pot potpourri platter where a kurkure news is served next to a staple news. Similar anomaly is visible in the ways news is being treated by different channels. Some shows value in the speed of delivery. Some believe in recreating, enacting, and dramatizing it. Some believe in threadbare presentation of facts to the so called invited experts and urge them to chew and convert it in to easily digestible pulp for common consumption. In a product parity market the value addition is done through expert interpretation.
Amidst all these changes and treatments there is almost a conscious effort by the news channels to up front and assure the viewers that the essence of news have not changed. Khabar wohi jo such dikhaye. It’s a different story that for some channels the truth of the news is not in the topic but in the process. They take a potent nugget of information and start beating it on the anvil of truth. A breaking news shouts eureka about some silver screen idol’s illegitimate child .The subject is then taken through a mock process of information distillation-special correspondence, latest info, visual aid, expert comment, opinion poll, charts, diagrams .Stretch the truth to its last point of elasticity, wring out the last drop of juicy interpretation a la reality shows which take hours to announce a couple of winners.
The exercise has become more elaborate with news becoming a 24x 7x 365days a year affair. To construct of a day (twenty four hours) through news only is to drive home the point that each and every item is important, interesting, valuable and therefore eminently consumable. You need not have any other passion or diversion in your life and before you realize you have already spent the whole day through camera eye with poor Prince stuck inside the ditch.
From this perspective, news challenges the existing concept of a brand. Brand sets itself in a localized frame of consumption with the consumer; Coke with the mood of togetherness and refreshment, AXE when we are in the mode of glorifying male libido etc. All brand stories has a duration and consumption time and setting. Being 24x7 news channel brands do away with this boundary and demand nonstop interaction with its consumers. Channel will churn out news and value even when you are asleep and you will be poorer in your experience for the amount of time you have closed your eyes.
Where finally are we landing then? In the domain of news or in the domain of another 24x7 TV channel where all programmes are carried under the tag line of news bazaar? Why should we value its news if it emulates the entertainment value of any family channel under the garb of news? At least other channels are far more honest in their intention of providing nonstop entertainment. There is a bigger truth in acknowledging the need of fiction in our life. It is interesting to note that a work of fiction tries to draw its value by coming closer to fact and the fact tries to value add itself being fictional.
The fundamental change, I feel, that has taken place is not in the area of fact or fiction, news or entertainment but in the changing status of the audience for whom these programmes are made and presented. We all have ceased to be a passive recipient of information but have become active consumers of value. And value does not lie with the service provider or manufacturer any more. Today as Prof. C.K Prahalad has said that value needs to be co created with consumers. The news channels can provide the platform around which the consumers can co create their own experiences. For example the reality of a road accident is surrounded by a bigger reality of potential risk that every parent, children, pedestrians and common man on the street are exposed to. They would probably value portrayal of that reality of life with more force, urgency, and drama so that it impacts people who matter to end the problem rather than vivid .What do you think.