News in the time of coronavirus, and beyond

Acute Angle

Last year, when this column started, I made a reference to a Chinese saying: “May you live in interesting times.” This exhortation, as then noted, was not so much a blessing as a curse, i.e., may your life be torn apart by events beyond your control.

Well, those interesting times -- that started, appropriately enough, in China -- have been upon the world for four months now: Covid-19 has changed everything around us, including, crucially for the news industry, every aspect of the news cycle.

For a start, public discourse in India has changed dramatically post-corona, and for the better. So much so that our cartoonists have no politicians to lampoon, and we have given our SpeakOut crew a break from taking a swing at the powerful.

For a change, there’s very little of the usual Right-wing hatred and secular contempt on view. Getting onto social media is less draining than usual. The bhakts, whose days were spent happily wishing smallpox or rape on anyone who stepped out of line, are unusually quiet, as are those professional purveyors of fake news that inform a feeding frenzy on television prime time.

The good thing is that there is unity in fear: At least, we are together in this fight against a deadly enemy. There may be audio-visual extravaganzas like banging on pots and pans and lighting candles, but there are also substantive tales of heroism on the part of medical staff and administrators.

It used to be said in the old Congress-yukt days that only two things unified India: cricket and war. The nation would huddle before TV sets at 5 am as its cricketing heroes fought with their backs to the wall in Australia. War, with its attendant jingoism, half-truths and lies, always brought our country together. Otherwise, we were a motley bunch, a nation of various nationalities that appeared to have no common purpose, but which was strangely happy in its skin, looking the other way when corruption scandals hit, and vote banks were lovingly cradled.

All this has changed over the past six years, with polarisation seeping into national consciousness, drop by irreversible drop. It has ‘unified’ a big chunk of India. That earlier animal -- tolerant to a fault, assimilative of everything around it and resolutely live-and-let-live -- has given way to an efficient but perennially angry one. In the ultimate irony, the first was the cow, that most Hindu of beasts; its replacement, a big cat that thrills the senses of some but has a limited inner life. For a newsperson with a bullshit detector, it is tiresome.

Now, fear is the new unifier. Watch TV or read the papers, and the only thing you can see is how the country is coping with a vicious virus. This has crowded out CAA, NRC, mandir, uniform civil code, and even the antics of a BJP perennially in election mode. State governments have vied with each other to keep the unwelcome intruder out, the Centre has done its bit, and hopes for a weaker mutation or a hot summer to scotch transmission have gained ground.

What has all this meant for the news industry? First, newspapers had to deal with the canard that the virus hitched a ride on the surface of their pages. All it took was WhatsApp University (plus some ‘advisories’ on a Kannada television channel) for some residential areas and some hawkers to swallow this. Luckily, the papers have been able to hit back, with telling visuals of their plants being fumigated, and quotes from the better-informed, confirming that they are safe. A second problem was a lack of public events to cover: everything was Covid-ed. And third, and most worrying, a drying up of advertising as companies went into retrenchment mode.

So, many of you have had e-papers WhatsApped to you by journalists keen to stay engaged with their readers, the physical newspaper has thinned considerably, and supplements have been suspended. Unprecedentedly, we have been producing DH at our homes for the past week, and firing pages to our printing presses from sitting rooms. Our daily 6 pm Page One meeting is on Google Hangout; some colleagues position phone cameras to show only their top halves and spare us a glimpse of their bermudas.

There’s no doubt the financial year that just began is going to be challenging for media companies, but then, it is going to be so for a lot of other sectors. Media will duck and weave, forced to innovate and streamline and find new ways of doing things. A natural process -- of change, not necessarily deterioration -- has just been mercilessly accelerated by a microscopic virus. Many companies -- not just in India, but across the world, and not just in media but across industries -- are entering uncharted territory. Publishers who nobly took down digital paywalls during the virus’ reign will be forced to bring them up again, and everyone will be looking at new ways to make money.

Readers will have to decide how much their favourite newspaper or website means to them. Are they willing to pay more? Are they willing to accept thinner but more thoughtful products? Will they shell out the cost of a vada-sambar for a month’s subscription of a website or e-paper?

When the virus is hopefully beaten and life returns to normal, public discourse will go back to its egregious lows, our cartoonist and SpeakOut team will be back in business, and edit meetings will be more real and less virtual. But for politicians, administrators, company executives and journalists alike, life will be irrevocably different.