Indian Media Ownership - Waiting for Bezos!

Part II 

Is something like the takeover of the WaPo by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos the solution to the extreme polarization in Indian media? Maybe, but the question is who among the Indian tech tzars is willing to dish out the moolah and let go? Or are the new generation "platishers" the answer for a polzrized Indian media? 

A casual conversation with a senior colleague at the office set my thoughts rolling on this. Why is the Indian media so polarized? And what is the solution for it?

While the why was perhaps addressed in the previous part of this post, the how of it is best answered by looking at what is happening in the rest of the world today, particularly the USA.

Very interestingly it is the tech honchos who seem to be eager to fix a broken media with the debate around fake news and a polarized mainline media gaining ground in the wake of the election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency. Several of them have come forth with their own solutions hoping to provide an alternative to traditional media and often with broad-based participation. And as is their wont, many are also looking for salvation in these solutions for their businesses hoping new models for reader oriented news and content will turnaround their businesses.

Prominent among these is billionaire CEO Ev Williams, the co-founder of Twitter, and founder of long-from blogging platform Medium.  Williams has already spent five years and raised $134 million for the project valuing it at $600.  He re-launched in March this year with a new business model and pitch. “MEDIA IS BROKEN, IT NEEDS FIXING”, he said making it a members-only platform for premium articles. 

Putting out a justification of Williams’ plan, M.G. Siegler a former journalist, VC and investor in Medium, said: “The obsessive political coverage. Questions of curation and bias. The rise of fake news. Things are simply not heading in the right direction. And the problems seem to be accelerating.” Going by online analytics Medium is a success. Two billion words written in the last year, 7.5 million posts during that time and, 60 million monthly readers, shared Siegler. (since then the number has gone up to 85 million monthly readers and interestingly India accounting for the highest traffic after the US, though the gap between the two is quite vast.)

And such concerns are driving others too on this path. The latest entrant into this game is Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, who created a buzz announcing the intent to launch Wikitribune, a news platform to bring journalists and a community of volunteers together. “THE NEWS IS BROKEN AND WE CAN FIX IT”, he said as if in response to Williams pitch, announcing the re-launch of Medium.  

But Medium and Wikitribune are poles apart in their approach to the solution. The former is a writer-oriented platform for opinion and personal blogging with paid access to some of the content, whereas Wikitribune will be a kind of a crowd-sourced platform for what Wales says is “evidence-based” news. “We’re bringing genuine community control to our news with unrestricted access for all. We’re developing a living, breathing tool that’ll present accurate information with real evidence, so that you can confidently make up your own mind,” Wales said.

There are at least a score other commonly used platforms for long-form blogging and writing beginning with Atavist, longreads.com, Shorthand and Storyform to name just a few. While many of these “platishers” promise an alternative to traditional print journalism and provide genuine reading to readers, what is interesting is that several leading print publications themselves use these platforms to enhance their own online presence which perhaps is an endorsement of the potential for this very new model of journalism.

But all said and done, the moot question still remains. Can they fix the broken media? And how will this change journalism and print, which still constitutes the core of the media, catering to owners’ interests at the cost of objectivity and reader interest?  This is a concern as much for India as it is for America.

Some hope and perhaps a model to address this issue however is available from the 2013 acquisition or bailout, if you may, of the Washington Post by another tech billionaire Jeff Bezos. Forking out $250 million in upfront cash for the acquisition, the Amazon founder and CEO told employees, he would not be involved in the running of the newspaper and would not interfere with the journalistic process. “The values of The Post do not need changing. The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners,” he assured journalists and other employees at the first face-to-face. One change which he did of course promise was to bring the organization up to speed where technology was concerned and that is exactly what has happened over the past four years at The Post.

Clearly, an approach like this is what the media everywhere needs. An owner who swears by editorial values and seeks to uphold reader interests though not necessarily at the cost of the bottom-line. So, the question is will a Jeff Bezos emerge on the Indian media scene? For instance will a NR Narayana Murthy or an Azim Premji fork out the needed moolah to either set up a new publication or for that matter acquire an existing one. 

No doubt some of them, mostly former senior tech executives, who are now involved in non-tech areas, have funded a few online properties but mostly dealing with niche content and by no means big enough to make an impact on the national media scene. 

Conservatively speaking it could cost anywhere between Rs 100 crore and Rs150 crore to launch a news channel, depending on its scale. A full-fledged national daily with four metro editions would need close to Rs 300 crore. It is uncertain which Indian tech tsar would want to fork out that kind of money, particularly given the uncertain payback.

Thus it is a long shot to expect anybody from the Indian tech sector, either current or the past, to be coming forth to fund a full-fledged media venture as purely a journalistic endeavor. The alternative of an overseas investor like a Bezos, too going the whole hog and pumping in money, is a far cry given the FDI rules in India.

Clearly it could be a long wait for either the online platishers, or somebody like a Bezos, to come and rescue Indian journalism.