I am almost never asked the question “Why are all Pakistani media houses losing money?” What people do end up asking me is, “Is it true that your paper isn’t paying its employees?” My answer to them is always an honest, “Yes, that is correct.” But when I am pressed for more information, I cannot give them any, because, to be honest, it’s been nearly a year that I last set foot in a newsroom.
But even when I was in the news business, I didn’t really understand why newspapers didn’t make money. Sure, there are mitigating factors, such as a circular debt in the revenue stream stemming from a lag in payments from advertisers; a lack of ads to be begin with; or even a dearth of creative ideas to keep the thing going. But one can never truly have the complete picture as long as one is on the inside. To find out what the world looks like, you have to be on the outside. Fortunately for me, that paradigm shift came sooner rather than later. So today, when asked why paper X or channel Y shut down or is on the brink of shutting down, I have something to tell people. Something which makes sense, at least in my head. I don’t know about you though.
You must understand that there are two kinds of mainstream media institutions in this country. By saying ‘mainstream’ I seek to exclude the two-penny eveningers and the one-room studio broadcasters that clutter newsstands and the airwaves. The first kind is the ‘conglomerate’, which is a euphemism for ‘Big Money’. These include the truly multimedia groups, such as Jeem, Red and White, The Nationalists etc who deal in both print and electronic and have multiple publications/channels operating under one umbrella. These are usually backed by corporations that have even deeper pockets than their ‘journalistic’ sister concerns. Interests such as shipping, manufacturing, banking and what-not, all of whom do make cartloads of monies, serve to supplement the revenue stream of said groups, thereby enabling them to absorb late-payment shocks and allow them to continue managing the day-to-day running of a newspaper or a TV/radio channel.
Then there are those minnows that put all their eggs into a few baskets. These include the now-comatose Hard Times group, the Morning News network and, incidentally, the newspaper that you hold in your hands right now. These publications/broadcasters, while viable and established in their own right, do not have the kind of financial resources or the competence necessary to sustain themselves in the post-Musharraf world. Where these publications and channels owe their existence to our erstwhile military head honcho, they also curse him for opening the floodgates for every Tariq, Daud and Haris who has some cash to spare. Or needs a front for shady activities. More on that in a later column, though.
Far more current and relevant to our discussion is lay-offs. As of late, it seems that more and more people are being fired from news organisations. Everyday, the parallel media (such as Internet websites and media watchdog-type publications) is awash with horror stories of mass firings and en masse resignations. Most of these exoduses are money-driven. But some, such as the one that gave you this newspaper, are also ideological. That a group of professionals would dare to separate themselves from the institution that made them what they are today is a notion that would normally be unthinkable to most of us. But given the success (or lack thereof) that such ventures have enjoyed, this initiative is not an ignoble one, i.e. that you seek to cut out the businessman and try to establish a newspaper which is designed for the reader by the people who know how to do it best. Unfortunately, however, this leads us to one of life’s greatest ironies, i.e. the media is, after all, a business. No one, not even the most open-source of paid journalistic publications, can claim to be completely free of corporate control.
So when you cut out the business minds and rely solely on the petty sahafi to work his magic with content rather than circulation figures, you’re clearly missing a key ingredient, i.e. sustainability, which means that you will be able to pay your staff even if last month’s ad revenues don’t come in or that you will be able to continue publishing even though your seed money is all but exhausted. This was the model that everyone strove for, in the beginning. It was supposed to be a purely journalistic enterprise. But we later discovered that there is no such thing.
People are always telling me to lose weight. Something about an increased life expectancy. In the past, I would never pay any attention to such haters. I always believed that they were out to rob me of my mojo. But as I look at the news publications and channels of today, I see a metaphor emerge. For too long now, the old guard have been retained by organisations as a sort of Jedi Knight squad, paid to do nothing but watch over the young knaves who now populate newsrooms. These knights, battle-hardened and weary, are unfortunately the relics of an era long gone. They are from a time when newspapers had a whole department known as the ‘Pasting Section’ and when footage was edited manually. Now, thanks to Mac and Adobe, the publication process has been made far cheaper. This means that now, such media can pay more attention to content and devote less funds to expensive printing and broadcasting solutions. But this has, somehow, not happened and media houses find themselves paying mammoth sums to dinosaurs who do nothing but rant, harass staffers and sip tea in their offices all day long.
This is the excess fat that media organisations now need to cut. ‘Down with the moneybags’ should be the battle cry. Leading the charge are the young professionals: subeditors, layout designers, producers, editors and copywriters who do all, repeat, ALL of the donkey work, while some fossilised animal takes all the credit. It is time employers woke up and smelt the curry. Dump the extinct animals. Before the country takes a dump on you.
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