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 If
you were to believe the Times of India, the only website in India
making any news is Indiatimes.com, and the only radio station doing
anything worth reporting is Radio Mirchi.
It's not alone. Outlook features ads and editorial
from Outlook Money and Outlook Traveller. Even the oh-so-conservative
Hindu shills for Sportstar.
The self-promotion is okay I suppose. Where
it gets dangerous is when press releases from pr agencies are served
up verbatim as news. Turn the pages of any pink paper and you'll
know what I mean. You might think it comes from an in-depth examination
of a company's finances. Not true. It's probably come off a press
release that was faxed or emailed to the desk of an overworked,
underpaid journalist.
It's not just the factual announcements. Some
time ago, this magazine had a cover story and interview with Bill
Gates. Don't think Microsoft's pr agency wasn't involved. The company
was waging a battle to push back the Open Source movement in India-and
rather than do it expensively through ads, it did so through carefully
cultivated meetings with journalists, opinion leaders and politicians.
After all, you can get on to the same newspapers and magazines that
the ads are in. Why end up paying Rs 2,000 per column-centimetre
for ad space, when you can get into the credible editorial part,
by offering a magazine an exclusive in return for the commitment
of a prominent story? At far less cost?
A huge amount of the news printed and aired
today is the result not so much of a journalist working independently,
but of a pr person working hard behind the scenes to get their clients'
views across believably. India's largest newspaper has a "sacred
cow" list-a list of politicians, advertisers and others that
their journalists cannot be critical about, without specific approval.
Newscorp itself created a pro-government news channel in China to
further its business interests there.
This comes as a shock for the layperson. But
it's old hat for marketing people. The more cynical among those
quote rates for getting on to Page 3 of your local paper. A front
page, they will say, will cost a bit more.
Amidst all of this propaganda trying to look
like news, where are the real stories? If you're an investor, how
do you track a company without being infected by the well-spun story
out in the press? If you're a fan of a movie star, how can you find
out more about him or her that has not been carefully projected
by their publicity agents? One way is personal research-go over,
meet the people and make up your mind. This, of course, is not always
practical. A far more useful way, I find, is to ask other people.
Online. And to do it through bulletin boards.
A bulletin board is a newspaper gone truly
democratic, where the readers can immediately write back and rip
apart something they disagree with, often with evidence. You don't
have to agree with everything said on a bulletin board-and you can't.
But it often gives you the best possible 'feel' for what a community
really believes about any given topic.
Bulletin boards have been around for decades-they
were a precursor to the web. Have you skimmed through Usenet groups
and seen what people think about Brand A motorcycles, Brand B software
and Artist C's latest album? At the least, it's enlightening. Yes,
it won't be polished and edited like a journalist can make it, but
there's a charming honesty in that rawness.
Already, the world over, perhaps the most trusted
source of information on all matters technological is a community
at Slashdot.org. A year ago it would have told you of the impending
backlash against Indian body-shopped programmers. Kuro5hin.org-also
called k5-is a broader palette of opinions. For more commercial
purposes, ePinions tells you what people think of various products
and services. Memepool and the hundreds of thousands of blogs available
at Blogger and other places are a further mark of the decreasing
power of big media to dictate what our opinions should be.
Companies have already woken up to it. Many
now employ "community experts" who lurk online, monitor
opinions expressed across all these websites, and try to keep a
shiny profile facing the consumer.
Will it be possible to subvert a bulletin board?
Possible, yes, but much more difficult than buying off a newspaper.
Which, in these days of an advertising recession, is cheaper than
ever before.
Mahesh Murthy, an angel investor, heads
Passionfund. He earlier ran Channel V and, before that, helped launch
Yahoo! and Amazon at a Valley-based interactive marketing firm.
Reach him at Mahesh@passionfund.com.
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