 Newsnext 2016 is a conference that is always in tandem with the news broadcasting awards, which is ENBA. It precedes the awards, of course, it's going to be an exciting evening ahead. But Newsnext specifically talks about, as the name suggests, the future of news broadcast media. And we've got an exciting panel lined up for you discussing one very pertinent point talking about India generating a global news network and why it hasn't happened up until now. But before we get on with the panel and the panelists and the discussions as a scourcery for most of the events that either I curate or anchor, I'd like to start by invoking the higher power, whatever the higher power it is that you believe in or you don't believe in. It's a Saraswati Vandana. It's an old Sanskrit verse. It talks about the dispelling of darkness through the light of ignorance, through the light of knowledge, dispelling the darkness of ignorance through the light of knowledge. And it was also yesterday the moment to wear yellow. And that's why I've continued the festivities of wearing yellow today. The Basant Panchmi festivities continue. And of course through Basant Panchmi, we also invoke Goddess Saraswati and hence also the Saraswati Vandana. Ya kundeyindu tu sharahar dhavala, ya shubhravasthravrita, ya vinavar dandamanditakara, ya shwetapadamasana, ya brahmachutta shankar prabhutibi, devai sadavandita, samampatu sarasvati, bhagvati nishesh, jadyapah. Essence, like I shared, it's to dispel the darkness of ignorance through the light of knowledge and we hope to do that through the medium of news broadcast as well. I also see Anurag having joined us and of course all our panelists are here. Without much further ado, I'd like to invite on stage to formally welcome you all, Mr. Anurag Bhattra, who's the editor in chief of the Exchange for Media Group and the publisher as well of a business world magazine. With a loud round of applause, I request you all to please welcome Anurag. We can do better than this because there's a great night ahead and if you're not going to be clapping, Anurag, are you happy with the applause that you get? I stay happy. I'm married. Okay, great. I told Surana, Surana that I stay happy because I'm married, married men don't look for applause. They look for a lifetime achievement award, not a lifetime, but anyway. On a serious note, it's my honor and privilege to welcome you to the seventh edition of the Exchange for Media News Broadcast Awards. Mr. Alok Mehta is there and he's a stalwart of our industry. Most of you know him. He's a Padma awardee winner. So it's my honor and privilege to welcome you to the seventh edition of the Inba the Exchange for Media News Broadcast Awards. We are meeting at a time when the news broadcast industry is going through a flux. It's a time when the investments in content in news broadcasting are at the lowest ebb. Just to give you a number, CNN invested about $700 million last year in its content, which is about 35% of its total budget. In India, we invest between 8% to 10% of our total budget spent on news channels in spite of the fact digitization has taken place on our content. So we're meeting in the backdrop of when content investments are the lowest and the digital mediums in some way are expanding on the audiences, but are also hitting into the audiences. We're also meeting when the attacks on news professionals in the internal end of the country are the most, whether you take the state that we are in, which is normally a progressive state, but we've seen attacks on, you know, cameraman, on news persons, on journalists. We've seen journalists being eliminated, maybe sounding like Russia, feel like we're Russia. Right? No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. So you know, we're meeting in the backdrop of that. And this is an evening that I dread coming to and I look forward to it and I'm also afraid because every year I end up upsetting many journalists, media, leaders of my industry who are my friends because we do these awards through a jury process, which is, I can see a lot of our jury members sitting in the audience, we are custodians of the process. We have no role to play in who wins. We don't even know, I don't even know who's winning except one or two winners called me to see if I was going to be here and that's how I got to know their process. Otherwise, I have no clue who's winning. We have a very competent jury who understands this domain, who have been practitioners, who understand the nuances who've taken today's decision. So really, I hope today's panel discussion in some way finds solutions to the issues that the news broadcasting industry is facing. To some extent, where we are is because of what we've done collectively as news professionals, we can't blame the owners or the subjects that we write on or feature in our news channels. I think in some way we are responsible in letting it happen and if we have to get it out of where it is and hopefully get the investments in content to 20 percent. The reason I talk about the investment in content, at the end of the day we are in the content business and it is unfortunate that if you see any news channel, there's no reporting on the ground. Everyone takes A&I bytes and repackages them and plays them. When I was growing up, I'm a news junkie. I think today it's a very vibrant domain but it was equally vibrant in terms of depth and width. I think we can do better in this industry and it is our duty to build a case to our stakeholders about the role we play and safeguard the integrity that we have. The last point I wanted to say is that when you see the winners tonight, you'll see that they really are doing great work. I know everybody is a winner. All the nominees, participants have done great work and INBA in the seventh year has become in some way a benchmark for excellence in the news broadcasting domain and I remember when we started it, one of my friends from the media industry, I won't take his name, said to me, you know, why? Why are we doing awards for news guys? What good have they done? I can tell you these are the people who make sure that the public consciousness is brought to the fore in building a public opinion to change the course of things. Whether we like what has happened in JNU yesterday or whatever side we are on but the fact that these are the news channels that bring us a point of view on that. So I think the news channels and the news professionals play a very important role in the discourse of, you know, where the nation should be headed. And I believe today's endeavor in some way will recognize these people, professionals, owners and people even behind the camera who are making sure that the citizens of this country are well informed and have a point of view. With this, I welcome you to the seventh edition of News Next and the Exchange for Media News Broadcasting Awards and I look forward to meeting you after the awards. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Anurag, for rolling the gauntlet. Just one factual error, it's the eighth edition of, yeah, the news broadcasting awards and the news conference. Of course, like I discussed with you, we're talking about a very pertinent point. We're talking about broadcasts across borders as part of the News Next conference this year. We're talking about why India is still far behind in creating a global network that can put across an Indian perspective. We have a very luminary panel. I'll just share the flow of the evening with you. My name is Suparna Chadda. I'm the curator of these awards and conference and editorial consultant with the Exchange for Media Group. We will start off with the panel discussion. Within the panel discussion, we have Anna who's flown in specifically for this particular conference and thank you so much for doing that. Anna will start off with her opening address in the panel and of course, the panel will continue for about 45 minutes if we have time and we are well within our limits. We can open the panel for Q&A and I would definitely request the moderator for this panel to save time for that because we've got quite a few people from the broadcast industry who would love to ask some questions and who would like to get some clarity. After the panel discussion, we will take a small exit of about 10 minutes and we shall reassemble for the glittering night to felicitate the best in the news broadcast scenario in the country. And without much further ado, ladies and gentlemen, may I invite on stage Ms. Anna Belkina with a loud round of applause. She's the head of communications and deputy director marketing and strategic development, Russia Today. The RT network consists of three global news channels broadcasting in English, Arabic and Spanish. And incidentally, it's not broadcast within Russia. Is that correct? There is broadcasting within Russia, but not news broadcasting. Not news documentaries. And we do broadcast in Russia in English. OK. So you can watch if you're in Russia, you can watch news in English. All right. Thank you so much for taking the time for being here, Anna. You joined RT in February 2012 when I was overhearing Eve's dropping your conversation for 20 years. You'd been in the United States and it's just past four years that you've come back to Russia and straight away joined Russia TV. Exactly a week from today, I'm going to be celebrating my four-year anniversary at RT. Excellent. Yes, but it's been quite a ride. Yes, very exciting. All yours, Anna. We would like to learn whatever lessons that Russia Today has learned over the past 10 years. You recently also celebrated your 10th anniversary. Yep, I'm going to talk about that later. So whatever the challenges have been, whatever the triumphs and what India can learn from what, where Russia Today made its mistakes and what it's doing well, all yours. No mistakes. OK, well, first of all, everyone, good evening. First of all, I'd like to thank you for the great honor of allowing me to address such a distinguished assembly. I'm a little bit nervous. I'm also very proud to be here to represent RT or, as most of you probably know it, Russia Today, the Moscow-based global television network. Thank you very much for this wonderful introduction that I just received. And yes, just a couple of years ago, I'm sorry, a couple of months ago, tell you I was nervous. In December 2015, RT celebrated the 10th year anniversary of its very first broadcast. This, for us, was the perfect occasion to take stock of everything that the network has accomplished since our very first channel went on the air on December 10, 2015. Now, I have to talk a little bit about RT at this point, but I promise I'll be quick with this part. Now, RT provides round-the-clock news coverage of international events in English, Arabic, and Spanish. We have dedicated channels that are delivering locally-focused news and commentary programs to the audiences in the US and the Great Britain. On top of this, we have online content in German, French, and Russian. That's available all around the world. What started out as a project designed to tell the world about Russia has since grown into rather a global news force. And RT has successfully established itself as the, I'd like to think, the preeminent alternative to the Western mainstream media. The place to get the stories overlooked by other news outlets and the go-to source for the Russian perspective on issues that matter the most to our country. RT channels are available today to more than 700 million people across 100 countries on five continents, 70 million people watch RT every week, and 35 million tune in daily in just 38 countries. When yet another digital revolution changed how the news was going to be consumed for years to come, we listened to our viewers. We do that quite a lot. We listened to our audience and we followed them to the new platforms, which took us to new heights in turn. In 2013, we made history when RT became the first TV news channel on YouTube to cross the one billion views mark. Today with 1.5 billion views on our flagship YouTube channel and more than three billion views in total, RT stands as the number one TV news network on the world's largest video sharing platform. RT is also the global leader among the non-anglish acts and international TV news channels online. Our network is ahead of Al Jazeera, Deutsche Well, Euronews, Franz Wanker, NHK in terms of online PC audience, and our overall online audience exceeds 50 million unique users monthly. For the last 10 years, we have been bringing our audiences the kind of high quality insightful programming that has made our channel a three-time finalist of the International Emmy Awards for News. This is a record for a Russian TV station. RT is also the winner of the Monte Carlo TV Festival for the best 24-hour newscast and of many more New York Festival awards for our news and documentary features. Now, I could easily spend another hour or so talking about the in great detail about all of our accomplishments, but I'm pretty sure that's not why I was invited here today. So I will now skip a little bit to the next part and I'd like to go back to last December. To mark the event of our anniversary, RT hosted an international conference on information, messages, politics, the shape-shifting powers of today's world. It was the perfect opportunity to look at the big picture far beyond RT and reflect on the rather epic changes undergone by the news broadcasting landscape in recent times. And we're actually very fortunate to welcome in Moscow Arnab Goswami, the president of Time's Network and editor-in-chief of Time's Now, to lend his expertise on the role of international news media on the geopolitical chess board. But I'm very disappointed that I'm not getting to see him today, but it was a great honor that he's flown in to Moscow to be with us for such an event. So, what did we learn in the discussion and the reflection? Never before in the history of the world have we had access to such an abundance and diversity of information as we do today. The international news broadcasting arena that was once the domain of just a handful of players, such as the BBC and the CNN, has, over a relatively short period of time, welcomed many new voices. Among them are Al Jazeera, Germany's Deutsche Well, Bloomberg TV, Frans Van Kader, Al Arabi, China CCTV, Japan's NHK, Israel's very recent I-24, Euro news, Latin America's Telessort, and, of course, RT. And now, India's own Time's Now has gone international and came to the United Kingdom. Such drastic changes in the industry inevitably lead to many more questions. What's behind such a surge of international news? Do news consumers even want or need this many sources of information? And what purpose do all of these broadcasters, including RT, serve? I'd like to think that we might have the answers for at least these three questions tonight. First of all, each outlet, each outlet be it TV, newspaper, or a blog, is a platform for communicating some kind of perspective. There's been a lot of debate, I think at pretty much every single conference dedicated to news, at least all the ones that I've attended, about whether news reporting can be impartial, essentially devoid of perspective, whether there is such a thing as objective news. Now, I think that while objectivity is an absolutely good, reasonable ideal, it's difficult to argue that it is a tenable one, because at the end of the day, journalism is done by people. And each person, a reporter, an editor, a producer, leaves their own stamp on the process, something that is informed by their own experience, again, be it cultural, socioeconomic, geographic, political, and so forth, and there's really no way to get away from that. Even if we assume for a moment that you could produce news reports that are absolutely impartial and give equal airtime or appropriately allocated airtime, however that is decided, to different sides of each news story that is reported, who decides which stories make the cut? Once again, it is simply not possible for any given outlet to cover absolutely every single story that takes place in the world, even in the round-the-clock format. Choices are constantly being made about which stories are covered, how they're covered, which experts will be providing commentary, and so forth, and all of this inescapably forms a particular perspective. Now, what does this mean on a larger scale? Specifically, what does this mean for countries and nation-driven or publicly-driven international news broadcasting? Any country that aspires to preserve its independence and relevance in the global community needs to have a voice on the international stage, a voice that reflects the perspectives, concerns, and interests of the nation. Russia, as you can see, did not invent this concept. The alternative, of course, to this is that countries that don't have the opportunity to make themselves heard on the global stage risk being defined in the eyes of the world exclusively by foreign media. Russia is, again, all too familiar with that course of events. For a very long time, somebody else was telling our stories, which is why, 10 years ago, RT came into this world. Of course, when you have something news like RT with a very distinct voice, it's bound to ruffle some feathers. We have a stronger tutorial perspective. We never deny or shied away from it. In fact, we quite embrace it. But that has led to criticism from some corners about lack of due objectivity, for example. But once again, who has the right to decide what is objective or which perspectives are more valid than others? At RT, we believe that the audience should decide that. And what we see is that the audiences are very open to diversity in news. Right before our anniversary, Pricewaterhouse Cooper has carried out an independent study commissioned by RT about changes in cross-border news consumption, exactly what we are talking about here today. PWC surveyed 5,000 news consumers in 10 different countries, India's one of them, and found that everywhere people aren't just receiving news from more sources than ever. They are increasingly turning to news providers from foreign countries. They're going to TV channels and magazines and websites from across their borders to get a more complete picture of what's going on in the world. But also, and this is quite interesting, to get a fresh take on what's going on inside their own country. Remarkably in our survey, India actually topped the list of countries whose news media consumers are most likely to use resources from abroad. We also looked, I see these are kind of small-ship here, but we can discuss afterwards in greater detail. But we looked at the bottom two slides here at what drives cross-border news consumption. And we identified three main factors, mobility, availability, and curiosity. People are more likely to use foreign sources if they travel or live abroad, which is pretty logical. But the second and third factors on this list are actually the strongest ones in determining when a person is going to turn to a foreign news source. People are using these outlets because they can, because they have a greater variety of sources to pick from, and the technological means to access them. And they're also doing it because they are curious, eager to know what is going on in the world, and can get a range of opinions on stories that interest them. This is good news for us, but it is also not without its challenges. In an environment like this, with a dozen countries now boasting their own international news networks and new ones coming online seemingly every year, how do we successfully compete or even coexist? RT's advice on this would be, you have to find your voice. Now, I promise this isn't just some kind of inspirational philosophical platitude, but a very real, very practical thing. Finding our voice was actually one of RT's early challenges. RT was a very different entity, notoriously 10, nine, even eight years ago. All day long, we were telling the world about Russia bringing stories and news from Russia and reports and documentaries and special programs from the volcanoes of Kamchatka to the forests of Siberia and the steps of the Volga and what have you. This was all very lovely and beautiful and absolutely fascinating for about five people. Our editor-in-chief likes to joke that if you rounded up all the people who are interested in getting news from Russia or about Russia every single day, it would be cheaper to just buy them all mobile phones and have daily conference calls. So I think you're kind of getting the point here. But then, something big would happen, a globally resonant news event that might have involved Russia, like with the South Ossetian conflict in 2008, but not necessarily involving Russia, like with the Occupy Wall Street movement. And we sometimes found ourselves telling the story quite a bit differently than how it was covered, for example, on the CNN or the BBC. Our camera crews went to different areas and talked to different experts and brought in different perspectives. If we saw things differently, we reported it differently. The response from the audience was absolutely incredible. Any kind of different coverage by RT generated so many comments, emails and discussions. A lot of, we had no idea this was happening or why am I not seeing this footage on my local channel. The reporting might have been eye-opening for the viewers, but also for us. This was our aha moment. International news had been dominated to that point for so long by such strikingly similar homogenous voices from just a handful of countries that the viewers were really hungry for something completely different. It's like they knew that the world was more complicated than what they were being shown, but until that point, no other channel was showing them the other side or sides of the story. So this is what RT has been doing ever since, showing the other side. Over the past decade, RT has dedicated itself to elevating the public debate and completing the picture of the world. RT's tagline, which has become our guiding principle, is question more. What does that mean? It means that we are not afraid to shake up the global media landscape by embracing different perspectives, to give a platform to voices that don't always get a chance to be heard, to tell stories overlooked by other news media. From the Arab Spring to the immigrant crisis in Europe, from the issues of internet surveillance to today's battle against extremism, people from around the world, and I'm very happy and very proud to say this, they tune into RT to hear the other side of the story, to question more. And we're also proud to say that these people from ordinary citizens to political leaders have expressed gratitude and praise for our efforts because every day we receive calls and emails and comments and tweets, some of just a small portion of which is on your screens right now. These are folks from every corner of the planet asking RT to come to their country, to broadcast in their language, to share their perspective. We have some critics, of course, but then again, any kind of establishment, be it in politics or in media, does not like to be challenged. But if you believe in what you are doing, you have to not be afraid of your voice and you have to trust your audience. I think this is the biggest takeaway, the biggest lesson from our experience that, you know, if you ask me what was the number one, the number one thing to share with this wonderful room today, this would be it. We trust our viewers to take in our perspective along with the other ones and then to come to their own conclusions. We want our viewers to think critically about what is going on in the world. We don't mind voicing inconvenient facts or providing a perspective that goes against the mainstream narrative because the global community can only benefit from having access to a wide range of voices. Time and time again, we see that many of the voices that are initially ignored or dismissed by the so-called establishment go on to redefine the entire conversations. This was the case with Occupy, this was the case with the Arab Spring and I'm sure for ages to come, this will be the case with many, many new stories that none of us can even anticipate. We live in an increasingly intertwined world, one in which we face increasingly complex problems that can only be solved when all sides are duly considered. We have to have these conversations. We have to have these debates. We have to be parts of those conversations, Russia, India and many, many more countries. The responsibility is on all of us here collectively to foster a well-informed global society because a well-informed global society is the foundation of a safe, stable, multipolar world and of a truly open international community. I'd like to conclude with this. There is a natural appeal in new ideas, new angles and new opinions. The appeal is even greater when these ideas and perspectives represent millions of people who previously might not have had a way to make themselves heard. If you are eager to share, then there are absolutely those who are eager to listen. The world today demands diversity in news more than ever before and I believe we are all here to deliver just that. Thank you very much. Thank you.