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"I am not driven by social media": Arnab Goswami

afaqs!, Mumbai and Shweta Mulki
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"I am not driven by social media": Arnab Goswami

Most Indian households know him as 'Arnab'. Guests are known to return on Newshour, his primetime show, even after being yelled at incessantly. Aggressive on air, he is known to be calm and affable off it, especially to journalists interviewing him. His 'brand of journalism' may have been questioned time and again, yet Newshour remains the most watched news show in the country.

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On the question of the channel being dependent on one man, he says his show is a consequence of what they do the entire day, and that it's about an overall editorial philosophy guiding the channel, more than the person.

It's been 10 years of Times Now, and we have Arnab Goswami, President-News & Editor-in-Chief, Times Now and ET Now, sharing his insights, learning and views on news. Edited Excerpts:

Edited Excerpts

In your launch year (2006), the story of the little boy, Prince, falling into a borewell got you the ratings, and this perhaps influenced your programming vision. You said it needed the kind of sensationalist approach you took. How has your view changed for the news business and the success within it?

I was very raw when I started this channel. I hadn't got the programming mix right and was more involved in the logistics of setting up. But I was constantly searching for stories that would have an impact, and 'Prince' was one such.

Those were the pre-Twitter days and impact was felt in terms of how many people were calling you. In a newsroom, which felt it had low ratings, and a channel, which had collapsed when it was launched, this was validation for us. The viewer responds to impactful stories and there is no complicated science to it. My peers in television and print criticised me then and called that story 'sensationalist'. The big lesson for me was that it was all about conviction. You will see the same spirit in our stories today. There's a common thread between Prince and Rohith, the Andhra student who recently committed suicide. We are putting the person, the citizen, on top. Just recently on the occasion of the 26th anniversary of the exodus of the Kashmiri pandits, we put out a video of Anupam Kher talking about what happened then - some people termed it extreme, but it was about speaking the truth.

Can the channel depend on one man? If Arnab goes on leave, ratings are said to dip - doesn't that bother you?

It doesn't. You can't deliberately make fewer people watch you. We need to balance it out. Also, are any of the other channels stronger? They have single digit viewership between 9 and 11 pm. We have over 70 per cent of the viewership. Will our channel become stronger if we have only 10 or 20 per cent viewership? Indian viewership cycles show that there is a predominance of walk-ins at prime time, heading into super prime time. It is also true of GECs where there is a spike post 7 pm. Indian viewers generally are tuned in more towards evening, while American viewers are tuned in, in the morning. Newshour has done well for 8 years in that slot - there's no plan or strategy here.

The news business is reviled in social media and the concept of 'breaking news' is trivialised even in popular cinema. Does it upset you?

Right now as we are speaking there's a siege in a Pakistan University. That's breaking news. What happened in Pathankot, Rohith's suicide and the political debate that followed it was breaking news. We do serious news as breaking news. I am not driven by social media. It's a useful tool sometimes, but you can't take opinions passed on it with a sense of finality. In our business if you ask a tough question to a Congress person, you are on the rolls of the BJP and vice versa. We've questioned every political party. So, trivialisation is also a stereotype.

I think there has been a return of news on all channels including Hindi. We haven't got viewership by trivialising news, and others have also realised that you don't need to spend 50 per cent of your time on crime and Bollywood to get ratings. Today, I can confidently tell you that news is 10 times more relevant now than it was seven years back. People were beginning to lose faith in the sansani format of news then. What have we (Times Now) done since? We broke big scams, our election coverage competes with international channels, and we have a prime time show watched by millions.We are bringing back confidence in the news industry as a whole. Times Now trends nationally almost every night and globally, many times more than the BBC.

But is the respectability and credibility the same as, say, 15 years ago?

Yes, and those who say it isn't, are cynics. In my business there are a lot of them. Why should we waste

time on them? Do they have the ability to break a 'Lalitgate' today? One thing is to be cynical, the other is to be rationalabout what news has done. In fact, print has followed television in terms of what high impact news has done.

What about audience perception of news? Hasn't that changed?

The viewership we have is because of trust and credibility. The day it goes away, you can do a show about it, rationalise about what you did wrong, but the viewer out there knows. Yes, there are channels that have lost that trust because of certain events, or because of what happened to individuals within them. Channels whose credibility has been affected once, never get it back. Journalists whose ethics are questioned, never get their credibility back. I'm positive about this industry. People believe in the news they watch, they like the formats in which it is presented, and this is a great time to be doing television news.

People are turning to news on phones. Won't online do to television news what television news did to the newspaper business years ago - forced them to move from bare news to analysis? If online brings in the immediacy proposition, where does that leave television?

Digital will be dependent on television. Why? One, digital ventures that are based on news aggregation alone cannot succeed. Two, the amount of original content on digital news is negligible. Three, high impact coverage on digital news platforms has not happened. Four, people want to 'watch' on digital, not just read. The quality of audio-visual content on many new platforms here is amateurish, to say the least. Also, in India, people are not consuming as much news on digital as they should. In the future, digital in India will be driven by audio-video. Right now, these enterprises pick news from everywhere, add a catchy headline and put it up on 10 different platforms. If Arnab does a show that gets talked about they do an article on it, thus cannibalising news. There is too much focus on the vehicle, and too little on the message. But I'm hopeful that in the next 5-6 years, the errors will be washed away, and a new vision will come in for digital, that will encompass and be built upon the power of television.

As the screen gets smaller, ad revenue per viewer plummets. As long as TV profits subsidise online expense, it is fine. But where do you see the TV news business five years from now, after 4G especially?

If you like watching something, you'll find your way to watch it - cable or Netflix. The challenge is to create formats that will pull people towards it. 4G, 5G, 6G doesn't matter. I have to create a programme that you want to watch. I'm watching OTT platforms with a lot of interest - it's working for non-news channels, and it could work on news too, provided you have compelling content. For sometime though, the revenue will be tilted towards television.

In a utopian world, if you did not have to be driven by ratings, what would you change?

Nothing at all. Am I doing anything on my channel for ratings? Even if there were no ratings I would not make our channel boring. I would not stop questioning politicians. I would not please interviewees by asking them silly questions. I would not have a much older team sitting in Lutyens Delhi delivering news in a 1990s format - right? (smiles) So, I wouldn't change anything. Ratings are not about excel sheets, they follow conviction.

Times Now's foray into the UK - what's your programming strategy there?

The Indian channels which you receive there are the Doordarshans of private news channels. We have a more argumentative style of questioning different from UK or American formats, and our language sensibilities and nuances are also different. I want to take our kind of television outside of India. Also, we are sometimes far quicker than international channels. During the Paris attacks, my guy at Brussels was there before CNN. My dream is to make the world watch global news through a neutral Indian lens. And we should be able to do this by 2020.

It's been 10 years of your channel. Where do you see the trends and challenges forming?

The first year was a tough time, but second year onwards we've been bullish about news, and people have been bullish about us. We are No 1. The gap earlier was 5-10 per cent, now it's 25 per cent and there is no clear No 2. We have a clear leadership - hard won, hard fought and hard defended. The challenge is to keep defending that. Another challenge for me is to marry the success of television with digital. I've also become obsessive about smaller changes that I can keep making. For the next decade, television will continue to climb, and digital will continue to grow. I would put my bets on digital-led television and television-led digital, but digital without TV will not work. Those who are trying to do the latter, good luck to them.

How much do you focus on innovations to make the news process more effective and quick?

My focus is not on innovations and logistics. People think they can spend their way into news. Seven years ago, a channel launched saying they were the first HDTV-ready channel in India, thinking they could impress viewers. It made no difference and never got ratings. Those who understand news can, and without spending money, make it look like a million bucks. Almost all of the technology that we used for our election coverage- which broke records in 2014 - was either borrowed or hired. There were other channels with large rooms and offices, scalability, buses with transparent roofs and drones for coverage. I have a great team and I'm abreast with technology, but money can't make you win the TV news game.

As a genre, analysts are still very sceptical about the news business being a lucrative one. When will that change?

Investors or advertisers look at viewership. We have 12 advertisers on Newshour, and the number is only growing. We have rates over'35,000 and these are only the mast head sponsors I'm talking about. So we are grateful.

Rural ratings have shown support to English news, but even so, are you doing anything specific to make programming more rural-friendly?

The night before the BARC ratings came, I was very nervous, and I had a sleepless night. I thought we were going to be gobsmacked. If you have 60-70 per cent share in urban and no share in rural - or some other channel has more share in rural - that would be worrisome. However, we were delighted that our share in rural was more than the urban share. It's crazy that more people are watching you in outer Ghaziabad than in Delhi. So we'd keep doing the same, but yes, we do use a bit of Hindi and regional languages in our news. None of us expected rural to be a lift-off point.

The four-window format of discussion has been adopted by many other channels. What's next?

I'm going to do something in the next one year, which will change the game in a much bigger way. 2016 will be the year of big change. I'm not here to participate in the game, I'm here to help my team become game changers.

You've said earlier that you've wanted to have a longer interview with Sonia Gandhi. Who else is on your wish list?

Mostly international, as I've interviewed all the Indian guys. Vladimir Putin comes to top of mind. He's the terror of the West right now. I think he's an emerging force and it would be interesting to read his mind.

There are viewers who can be put off by all the yelling, and high-volume debates can lose their way. Does your viewer come to you for information or entertainment?

Viewers always come back and watch. Our most heated debates were during 'Lalitgate'. Do you expect four different political leaders to come together and say nice things - that would be fake! Look at it this from a top-down approach. Netas today are scared to take the citizen for granted, that's enough for me. There's a sense of accountability that somewhere on a television show you will be made answerable. If you were to lose this platform, would we be better off?

A Note From the Editor

Over a year back, I was given a rather atypical assignment; I went to Yash Raj Studios to interview Ranveer Singh. The next day, I felt like a celebrity myself – Everyone in office wanted to know how it went, what he was like, how he looks ‘in real life’, what he said...

Few days back, my colleague, and author of this Cover Story, went to the Mumbai office of Times Now to interview Arnab Goswami for this issue of our magazine. When she got back to office, the reception she got was at par with the one I did. “What was he like?”, “Did he get into a heated argument with you?”, “Did he raise his voice?”, “Did he let you complete your questions?” – The folks in office wanted to know everything.

Turns out, Arnab is surprisingly cool, calm and composed, off air. In fact, the Jekyll and Hyde contrast was even more striking because he was in the middle of reporting on a terror attack in a university in Pakistan, when our correspondent met him.

Recently, at the office of a professional acquaintance, I saw a slide show about the variables that drive the viewership of news channels. An entire slide in that presentation was about how drastically the viewership of Times Now fell when Arnab went on leave for a few weeks; there was a detailed bar graph on this, for crying out loud.

Speaking of loud, at Goafest last year, I attended a session in which Arnab spoke about why sensationalising news is not the worst thing in the world. While that’s all very well, I, personally, have a problem with the tacky ‘fire’ graphics that accompany the words ‘The Burning Issue’ during The Newshour.

Times Now just turned ten. On the occasion, we bring you an interview with the face of the channel about the decade gone by, and the one that lies ahead..

ASHWINI GANGAL

To download the PDF version of the article, click here.

English News Ten Years of Times Now Arnab Goswami Times Network Times Now Bennett Coleman & Co.
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