You will ask me "What type of title is this?" but you will soon come to know why. The common belief that there is nothing like a good disaster to get viewers back. Natural calamities, terrorist attacks or wars push up viewership of news channels. That happened in 2008 when the growth of viewership was primarily spurred by the coverage of the Mumbai terror attacks and the political crisis in India over the Indo-US nuclear deal. In 2009 and 2010, for instance, there wasn't any major event that could shake the entire nation for days or weeks except for the IPL.
In the last few years, news channels have moved from a feature-led format to solely a breaking news format, which has minimized the stickiness on the channels (evident from the drop in time spent). A senior media observer says, "Viewers come in when news breaks and move out equally fast." The fierce competition amongst the news channels to get that extra share of revenue and get ahead in the race for GRPs has led to an increase of sensationalism. The line between news and entertainment channels is increasingly getting blurred.
I want to tell a real incidence where these 3rd grade channels have spread the miss information. It was last year when there was an incident where Fearing end of world by CERN experiment, girl commits suicide in, September 2008. That girl wasn't the only person who got terrified by these news, even my parent got terrified. They informed me that all the people in my home town are just shocked to watch the same news again and again. They were doing everything to increase there viewership and spread the mis-information. They will tell you something, even create a complete show on something but will never substantiate. The normal people who don't know much about language like Hindi, will not fully understand what is going on.
Same thing happened in where there was pandemic in India especially in Pune where I used to stay. There were continuous counts of casualty of the people because of Swine Flu infection, rather than providing the right information. This went on for many days, as this was first real pan India pandemic in recent time but to cash in on it was shameless act.
Smaller, non-network channels that have their own set of audiences and advertisers tend to get into 'masala news' in search of more eyeballs. But such sensationalism also puts off viewers. News today is available all through the day and because all channels exhibits sameness, audiences are not worried of missing out on any news occurrence. This has affected appointment viewing drastically.
They seem to be lacking in innovative news programmes, which could be of interest to a larger set of TV viewing people, rather than just their core TG. Then, how are regional channels doing better?
First, the viewers who usually watched Hindi news moved to the regional news channels because of an affinity for their mother tongue. One reason could be the biased nature of Hindi news channel, as they look after getting the TRP in the Hindi Heartland and do not focus on the real issue. Second could as there are many states in India where the primary language preference is not Hindi or English.
As the number of regional channels continues to grow, the shift from Hindi and English to regional is a natural phenomenon. Also, localisation of news is the biggest strength of regional news channels.
Local news channels has been the strength of southern media as they exploit the current condition but at least they are not doing propaganda work which Hindi media seems to be doing. As per the little research I have done in this regard, it is the south-based channels that have led the growth in the regional space. Currently, there are 16 Telugu news channels (24-hour) in Andhra Pradesh and more are expected to be launched soon.
The reason of the Hindi news channels can be traced back to the literacy rate in that reason as many people are uneducated, these silly news sells there. In fact sometimes I don’t call them the news channel as they tend to show comedy shows more than the actual news. As they
I think the issue plaguing all of our media and entertainment today is nothing else but a lack of content. News channels today do precious little other than bringing irrelevant news, highlighting trivial information, Bollywood gossip and poorly moderated debates into our living rooms. Its high time somebody pulled the plug on this charade and brought real, researched, thought-provoking and useful news, discussion’s and investigative stories to us- something which we left behind when DD used to be the only channel and news were restricted to only 20 minutes capsules in Hindi and English each. The 24x7 mode which news channels have adopted, as pointed aptly in the story above, does nothing other than allowing unnecessary information to be beamed right through to every household. It might bring you short term revenues through advertising, but penny wise is surely bound to be pound foolish.
In a such a vast country with wide variety of issues there is a real need of new news channels, where we will see the real India and there problem. Not those English news channels who are centered around cities, Hindi News channels showing Comedy shows and Local news channels owned by politicians. I will never advocate for any regulations on the News Content of the channels but if you see some of these Hindi news channels showing rubbish news, then I would surely like to change my mind. I am really a critic of Hindi news channel, not because they are from north but they are showing something which is watched in whole of India.
Lets hope there will be positive change in the content of these channels or there will a bill from the government soon. Not sure they will be able to pass, as we know how incompetent they are but there is real need of the right content to liberate people....
In the last few years, news channels have moved from a feature-led format to solely a breaking news format, which has minimized the stickiness on the channels (evident from the drop in time spent). A senior media observer says, "Viewers come in when news breaks and move out equally fast." The fierce competition amongst the news channels to get that extra share of revenue and get ahead in the race for GRPs has led to an increase of sensationalism. The line between news and entertainment channels is increasingly getting blurred.
I want to tell a real incidence where these 3rd grade channels have spread the miss information. It was last year when there was an incident where Fearing end of world by CERN experiment, girl commits suicide in, September 2008. That girl wasn't the only person who got terrified by these news, even my parent got terrified. They informed me that all the people in my home town are just shocked to watch the same news again and again. They were doing everything to increase there viewership and spread the mis-information. They will tell you something, even create a complete show on something but will never substantiate. The normal people who don't know much about language like Hindi, will not fully understand what is going on.
Same thing happened in where there was pandemic in India especially in Pune where I used to stay. There were continuous counts of casualty of the people because of Swine Flu infection, rather than providing the right information. This went on for many days, as this was first real pan India pandemic in recent time but to cash in on it was shameless act.
Smaller, non-network channels that have their own set of audiences and advertisers tend to get into 'masala news' in search of more eyeballs. But such sensationalism also puts off viewers. News today is available all through the day and because all channels exhibits sameness, audiences are not worried of missing out on any news occurrence. This has affected appointment viewing drastically.
They seem to be lacking in innovative news programmes, which could be of interest to a larger set of TV viewing people, rather than just their core TG. Then, how are regional channels doing better?
First, the viewers who usually watched Hindi news moved to the regional news channels because of an affinity for their mother tongue. One reason could be the biased nature of Hindi news channel, as they look after getting the TRP in the Hindi Heartland and do not focus on the real issue. Second could as there are many states in India where the primary language preference is not Hindi or English.
As the number of regional channels continues to grow, the shift from Hindi and English to regional is a natural phenomenon. Also, localisation of news is the biggest strength of regional news channels.
Local news channels has been the strength of southern media as they exploit the current condition but at least they are not doing propaganda work which Hindi media seems to be doing. As per the little research I have done in this regard, it is the south-based channels that have led the growth in the regional space. Currently, there are 16 Telugu news channels (24-hour) in Andhra Pradesh and more are expected to be launched soon.
I think the issue plaguing all of our media and entertainment today is nothing else but a lack of content. News channels today do precious little other than bringing irrelevant news, highlighting trivial information, Bollywood gossip and poorly moderated debates into our living rooms. Its high time somebody pulled the plug on this charade and brought real, researched, thought-provoking and useful news, discussion’s and investigative stories to us- something which we left behind when DD used to be the only channel and news were restricted to only 20 minutes capsules in Hindi and English each. The 24x7 mode which news channels have adopted, as pointed aptly in the story above, does nothing other than allowing unnecessary information to be beamed right through to every household. It might bring you short term revenues through advertising, but penny wise is surely bound to be pound foolish.
In a such a vast country with wide variety of issues there is a real need of new news channels, where we will see the real India and there problem. Not those English news channels who are centered around cities, Hindi News channels showing Comedy shows and Local news channels owned by politicians. I will never advocate for any regulations on the News Content of the channels but if you see some of these Hindi news channels showing rubbish news, then I would surely like to change my mind. I am really a critic of Hindi news channel, not because they are from north but they are showing something which is watched in whole of India.
Lets hope there will be positive change in the content of these channels or there will a bill from the government soon. Not sure they will be able to pass, as we know how incompetent they are but there is real need of the right content to liberate people....
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