Girish Agarwal, Director of the Dainik Bhaskar Group, talks of the ‘No bad news on Monday’ policy, putting systems in place and upholding the sanctity of content by involving 2,000 odd journalists across all the Group’s publications
ON BRINGING FOCUS BACK TO CONTENT
At the Dainik Bhaskar Group, content is revered as king. “Our newspapers, with an average age of 12, 13 or 15 years, have been able to bring the focus back on content,” says Girish Agarwal, Director of the Dainik Bhaskar (DB) Group. “While most publications are now marketing-driven and events do a good job by involving people socially, by bringing the focus on content, we want to change what you read. In a large organization such as ours, we are talking about some 2,000 odd journalists and reporters working with us. It’s not that we need to train the top 200 people only. It’s an ongoing process. We are a multi-state & multi-language publication, present in 14 States with about 60 printing locations and 68 editors. It is impossible for any one person to call up all the 68 editors every day and discuss the daily business with them. Therefore, we need systems in place. At the same time, you can’t be too regimented, saying that news related to the Prime Minister will go in three columns and news relating to a Chief Minister will go in two columns. So this is a very dynamic concept!”
DRIVING WORKPLACE DIVERSITY @DB Corp
ON PUTTING SYSTEMS IN PLACE
“I realized that thinking in terms of content has to become the fibre of the organization, and the culture of the organization. Initially, I expect these 2,000 journalists to start thinking this way and new people, who join the organization, will soon become a part of that culture in, say, six months to one year. “We have worked a lot on our editorial. It is a bit frustrating at the beginning, because there are no immediate results when you go about changing the culture of the organization or imbibing certain new things in the existing system. It takes time. It’s like changing the thinking and the mindset of the people. Sometimes you have to explain things again and again to people, but our team has done a fantastic job. Now it is building brand loyalty among journalists.”
According to Agarwal, whatever is presented to readers should keep the reader as the focus. “The first thing that comes to a journalist’s mind is how readers will perceive this thing? Will he understand this report from that perspective? Will he benefit by this report of mine? Will he see this in the right perspective? Will they comprehend the news the way I am doing it? That’s been our focus,” explains Agarwal, adding that editorial and marketing never infringe on each other at the Dainik Bhaskar group.
ON ‘NO BAD NEWS’ MONDAYS
No bad news to be published on Mondays. That was the decision taken by the leadership of the Dainik Bhaskar Group sometime back, to bring some optimism in the Group’s publications amidst the gloom and doom of everyday news. So while the papers still report a killing or natural disaster that would make headlines on a particular Monday, the treatment of that news would be different so as to portray the positive more than the negative aspect.
“We recently did an experiment ‘No Negative Mondays’, based on a reader’s perspective. When you wake up on a Monday morning, you are starting the new week on a new note. So we thought whether we could take a stand like ‘No negative news on Mondays’. There was a lot of debate on it and how we would implement it. Where would we get all positive news? News is news. It could be bad news also, but it doesn’t have to be negative. For example, if the Sensex falls by 300 points, then it is news, but not always bad news. There were a lot of deliberations among our editors and then they decided to implement it,” says Agarwal. “Even in extreme cases, we would publish the bad news, treating it slightly more intelligently and attentively. Plus we would carry a small headline on the top of it saying ‘Negative news which you had to know today’ and then place it as a small news item. Or, we can try to identify whether there is any positivity in that news. For example, the recent Naxal attack in Chhattisgarh happened on a Sunday and the news had to be published on Monday. So, we published it, but taking the angle that in spite of the gruesome attack, our soldiers fought very bravely and were able to save most of the Battalion from death. Five soldiers had died, but if the soldiers hadn’t fought bravely, then the casualties could have been higher. See it from that perspective. Fortunately, there has been a lot of appreciation from our readers for this.” Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi has lauded the effort.
On this positive note, the DB Group has discovered goodness in ordinary things and managed to convey them to its readers. “We got a photograph of monks and local kids playing cricket somewhere in Himachal in the month of January or February. It was a normal photo. What was special about it? Well, snow stops almost all outdoor activity for eight months every year in that area. But these people realized that they could play cricket if the bowler only bowled a full toss. If they bounced the ball on the ground, it would go flat due to snow. It was a very innovative thing,” Agarwal says.
(As told to Srabana Lahiri)
