Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Entertainment or News: Newsotainment?

I have always believed that Aaj Tak and India TV are unique experiments in the field of Indian electronic media. They over these years have transformed themselves from news channels to entertainment (perhaps cartoon) channels.


"Dhoni ki Saloni",
"Baagh-baaghin ka pyaar", "Woh tha sabse alag", "Chudail maange pyaaz" such have been their previous news stories.


Their news stories are mostly a writer's imagination of what can happen and those of them which come close to genuineness comprise of basic facts at best. They are 90% percent of an entertainment channel and 10% of a news channel, which in itself is a very intelligent strategy. They pretend that they are serving news to people, but in the guise of that they are entertaining people, which keeps their investment in reporters, journalists and other reporting resources minimal, but at the same time provides them a nice audience and good TRPs and hence nice advertising revenues. Pretty good business model, no?