This is not a nostalgic bugle blast about turning the clock back and a call-out to embrace the old dreary DD days. Thankfully, print already/still exists for the purpose of the news-opinions consumer to take it at his or her own pace, pastry size and form, without eyes being distracted by distractions and ears assaulted by banshees.
But online and TV – and I haven’t watched live online/TV news for ages, unless to tune in to a natural disaster or election result news (same difference), or football coverage – are the main media of news chomping for most people. And by online and TV, I mean even TV outlets that are increasingly consumed ‘online-first’.
But what I’m referring to here is about presentation, style, curation of output. Imagine a news reader reading news, with correspondents joining in corporeally or only through voice-overs accompanied by the corresponding video coverage. No Exorcist-style panelists, no multi-window talking heads, no crawling tickers coming out of each corner of your screen that might equate Kangana Ranaut’s latest expression of angst with the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi. Just a face telling you the news calmly, interspersed with the corresponding visual footage, and the occasional one-on-one expert opinion.
Imagine a storm being described by showing what it’s doing, rather than showing how a person with a mic – usually with multiple graphics displaying weather events ranging from Dorothy’s tornado to Sonali’s tsunami on the screen behind – is being affected. Or visuals showing a politician doing his thing, rather than a reporter asking insipid questions to aforementioned politician about what he or she is doing.
All this sounds boring. After all, 30 years ago that’s why we moved away from one sari-clad lady reading the teleprompter as if on a bad batch of Zoloft. But cameras can be separated from studios. And a sparky script can do wonders even to PIB cud.Let intelligent folks (read: people willing to pay the way people are willing to pay for more comfy seats on airlines) watch the video version of the newspaper, where lean, mean, stylised informative machine-curated news is delivered to the discerning, leaving the usual clutter-howl to the mob. Remember, the bottled water market is still growing even as potable water becomes ubiquitous.The fact that quietude, both in physical ‘surroundings’ as well as consumption habits, is becoming the new aristocracy among the young is a fact, regardless of the loudness that we seem to continue celebrating. There is a reason why ‘WhatsApp University’ is a derisive term. The rabble loves the din, the racket, the crash, the shouting. Do you?
As we get more mid-21st century, and separate the wheat from the hyperbolic chaff, there may be a case for dispersing news that is quieter, ringfenced from hysterics, less disco and more kathak. As more and more young people abandon news, there may be a surprise market in quiet, intelligent, non-fish market news demand that one could supply.
To know something is easy enough these days. To know something with clarity, moderate surety, is a luxury. As are the ways to consume news with JFE – Just Facts & Explanation – instead of making information a relentless baraat.
We know what Fox unleashed many moons ago – howling as an attention-seeking strategy. And honestly, it has served its purpose all these decades well. But as we enter the generation of the children of Bigg Boss viewers – its first season was aired in 2006, the year Facebook was made public and four years before Instagram was launched – perhaps, there is a business model that will provide engaging, enticing, linearly presented comprehensible news with accompanying visuals depicting the many happenings that happen around us all at once, a.k.a. news. A ‘soft segment’ at the end would be lovely.