Jotting Plus : The Numero Uno Itch
One of the curses of contemporary news media, both television and print, is that craving for the Number One slot.
Visit any news website or watch any television channel or read any newspaper - and you will see that ubiquitous claim of being the numero uno in the domain.
The chase for more eyeballs is driving newsrooms into a phase in which journalistic values increasingly play second fiddle to the commercial zest to be at the top of the chart. Every day seems to mark a new low in professional ethics.
Take the example of a recent incident in which two rival English channels got into fist fighting mode to get the first and exclusive interview with a father whose son had been murdered in a top school.
The gory state of affairs is simply a fallout of that rush for the highest television ratings, which seems to be the only measure of good journalism at the present juncture.
Prime time viewership and screaming headlines are the need of the day. That being the ground reality, could the editors be blamed for striving for this measure of success?
Of course not! We are living in a world completely driven by the marketing game. Marketing is about attracting advertising revenue, which translates into profits – which in turn, is the end goal of most media houses.
The sad truth is that media houses end up chasing business at the cost of the craft that is journalism and the ethos that goes with it.
Profit making is not bad. Media houses are definitely not charitable organisations. They need profits to operate and grow and prosper. However, the yearning to earn a profit at any cost may be pushing journalistic ethics and decorum a little too far – which perhaps, is what we are witnessing at present.
Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, the breaking news advantage of television news channels is becoming vastly irrelevant.
The shallowness of this metric is its biggest casualty, especially when every single news channel claims exclusivity for the same news and ends up cloning one another.
Times are fast changing. The viewer or reader is more empowered than before. You cannot sell “breaking news” to the reader or viewer, who has already read it on Twitter.
You cannot lull him with news content that is more melodramatic than the soap operas! So, sensationalism alone cannot be the magic mantra for a higher viewership or higher sales in the case of print products.
As the news space undergoes transformation with the coming of digital platforms, the onus of success will be on the quality of information and not noise.
And it will most definitely not be on the race to be number one!
— Ruhail Amin
