 The news broadcast ecosystem is one of the most interesting places to be in because the business of news is in constant evolution. After comprehensive feedback from the industry, we bring to you our annual conference news next 2018. Our theme this year is future of news television in a multi-lingual, multi-screen environment. With that, I'd like to invite Mr. Anurag Batra, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief, Business World and the Exchange for Media Group to please come and present the welcome address. Good morning. It's my honour and privilege to be at an event that is possibly for me the biggest and the most important event in the Exchange for Media calendar and possibly in the news industry in India. We also have Mr. Suman Seraf and Mr. Kamini Seraf from Hyderabad. Mr. Seraf is the promoter of Radha TMT. It's a large steel company or TMT company. Mr. Kamini Seraf is the chairperson of the Fikis Ladies' Organization and is very active in the media. I have lots of friends in the audience. I would also like to tell you that Jyotsana and Rohail are not, you know, hosts. They are editorial colleagues that work in Exchange for Media. Jyotsana edits pitch our marketing magazine. Rohail is a senior editorial colleague at Exchange for Media and he covers advertising marketing media for us. Now, let me ask you, my friend Praveen Negum who is a market entry and a service text expert. He wrote a book on service text 12 years back and many more friends from the industry some I can see and because of the bright lights it blinds me sometimes. Let me ask you this question. How many of you believe that the Indian news media is doing a good job? News broadcasting, how many of you think we are doing a good job? Please raise your hands about 20 hands. How many of you think we are not doing a good job? Clearly at least twice the hands. Maybe two and a half times, right? Now, let me understand from a person who raised the hand why we are doing a good job. Somebody who believed that and somebody who is not in the news industry, who is not an anchor or a journalist, you know, yes sir. Why we are doing a good job? No, that's true but on a very critical, why do you think we are doing a good job? Okay, now let me go to the people who believe we are not doing a good job. Ranjit, we are doing a good job or a bad job? You have too many friends in the media, that's why I keep quiet. Yes, sir, there is no truth. There is no truth in our news. It's fiction. So we should get more advertising like GECs. That's a very strong statement on a serious note. What do you do, sir? I don't know you. Fantastic. Clearly somebody of your eminence and your background feels that that's the cause for worry. Now, let me tell you what I think knowing news in the news industry from both my own understanding, reporting on it, having friends and being in the civil society. First, let me say that right now there is a fight for the soul of this country happening. It doesn't matter what side you are on. There are no sides. There is only one side. That is the country and its progress. And the notions of truth, facts and the benefit of the country. Let me also ask, how many of you have seen the post? Priya has seen it. Five people have seen it. Now, of course, movies can move you. And I would recommend, I don't get any royalty or any fees for promoting posts. It's a fantastic movie on the business of news, on the domain of news and how publishers and editors need to conduct themselves or should conduct themselves. I think there is increasingly this notion that news needs to be more objective. And again, recently in the Supreme Court, four of the judges came out and said, you know, we believe everything in the Supreme Court is not good. Now that, in journalism also, we've had those moments where people from the journalism fraternity have spoken up and said, you know, not everything is okay in the journalism fraternity. In fact, when I hire people today in the editorial domain, I don't talk to editorial guys. I don't take reference checks. Because most editorial people are not kind to other editorial people, if not all. So there is immense amount of jealousy in this people-driven business. Having said that, the editorial people are looking at each other for doing news. So sometimes I feel that the news is being done for each other to impress each other, not for the masses. The second point I'm trying to make is that when an episode like the Supreme Court episode happens, the people who are in power, it doesn't matter whichever government, they would like to say, oh, we told you that everything is wrong with the Supreme Court or there's something wrong with the Supreme Court. Similarly, in the news domain, the people who are in power would like to see a weak media. You know, for many, many years, for the last 15 years, the news industry has faced this issue of distribution fees. Unlike the US or UK, where 50% of the budgets of news television goes into content, 45% of our budgets go into distribution fees. Now the distribution and the carriage fees will come down, have to come down, but the new DTH operators have become, you know, the new operators who charge carriage fees. So in a country where the economics of news gets disturbed because we spend disproportionate amount of money on distribution and very little money, relatively very little money on content, that's one problem. The second problem is of being more detailed, of being more objective. And these two things of being more detailed and being more objective go hand in hand. For that, again, it goes back to the same issue of putting more resources. The journalism of debates in a studio is also cost effective. When you get eight guests in a room and you talk to them, it costs much lesser money than doing an investigative story. So I'm trying to tell you that the Indian news broadcasters, the editors, journalists are working in an environment where over the last 15 years the ecosystem is such that it is not geared up to provide a business environment to news in which news flourishes. So I want to kind of flag that off, that the news people are doing a job in a very tough environment where the business ecosystem is stacked in a manner that you cannot spend that much money in content. Second, whether it's the government, whether it's bureaucracy, whether it's business people who advertise on news channels, they honestly don't want an honest media. They can keep talking about it, but they really don't want an honest media. And the principal job of the news is to report on the government of the day. It's to report on the people who rule the country. And if they will not encourage, I mean, they can't allow, we don't need anybody's permission. But if they don't encourage or let us be, and you know, there are, you know, there is a lack of courage. I think I wouldn't say there is a lack of courage for some reason. Most of the news broadcasters are subdued. And I may say that I'm entitled to my own view. And the last point I want to make is that people of the country are looking at news providers with hope. There's a lot of people who still believe in the credibility of media. Mr. Avinadar Kumar, while you believe that the news media should do a better job, and I agree with that, I think the people in the news industry, in spite of the odds stacked against them, are doing a fairly good job. Can they do a better job? Clearly, yes. Right? But I just want to tell you that when we started this nine years back, a lot of my friends from outside the media said, when awards to celebrate news broadcasters and anchors and journalists, what do they do good? I think that's a very cynical view. Media has an important role to play. And let me tell you that in the fashion domain, in the food domain, you know, trends come back. The old good things come back. I promise you at some stage in this country, if you believe it, it isn't there. If you believe that, at some stage in the future, the good old principle of journalism will come back. We talked about news in a multilingual digital age. Today, most of the people consume news on their hand phones. We all are screenagers. We may not be teenagers, but the old saying was that a family that prays together stays together. The new saying is that a family that's on WhatsApp together stays together. In an era where WhatsApp has become the primary source of receiving news, it may not be the primary source of generating news. I may say that WhatsApp is misleading. Most of the information that comes on WhatsApp is half-baked, is propaganda. So I would request all my friends in this room not to forward WhatsApp information without verifying it. The danger of fake news and propaganda is bigger than malaria, it's bigger than terrorism. Because at the end of the day, if news media does not take up issues in an honest manner, in my view, a lot of news media does. Yes, there are biases because the people who run news channels are also people. They're human beings, they have biases, they believe in a certain ideology. But unlike the US or UK, the news channels don't state their ideologies upfront. It's okay to have an ideology. You know, Fox openly supports the Republican thought process or a certain kind of thought. In India, there are channels that support a certain kind of thought, but they do not kind of profess it upfront. So my request would be if we have biases, we must state those upfront. And in a multilingual digital world, news is getting disseminated more often, more people are accessing news, and the lines between who is a broadcaster and who is a digital-only site, you know, are blurring. Is Bloomberg a broadcaster or is it a website? To me, it's a broadcaster. I think it's a blessing and disguise that you haven't got a license yet because you'll be able to build a digital business and hopefully your digital business will be more valuable and impactful than a broadcaster. You know, the new CEO of NDTV is here, and I happen to know some people who are part of NDTV at the ownership level without taking name. And I know how excited they are about digital and the fact that you've become the head of CEO, I'm sure I don't know you, but you ran the digital business, that's possibly one of the reasons and NDTV on digital is huge for me among the best businesses. Rajeev Ji is here from ZNews, he leads ZNews. I can tell you that with his background in digital, one of the reasons he leads ZNews apart from all his leadership qualities is because he came from a digital domain and he's trying to make ZNews very digitally engaging and profitable. Again, the issue with digital is that you've got to over invest just now. Right now, there are not commensurate returns for digital for the kind of traffic NDTV has on its side, you still do 70, 80 crores. I don't know, 100 crores, maybe more. Okay, that's a lot of money, but for the kind of traffic, it's just under-leveraged. So, in digital, you've got to over invest, and at some stage, the amount of money in digital will be more than the amount of money in broadcasting. Salil, welcome. Now you run a digital company. Salil runs Hook, which is the Netflix of him from Singapore. He won't agree like that, but that's my simpler way of putting. So again, the issue about digital is that you've got to over invest. The impact is happening through digital, but the advertising revenues may or may not follow. So I just want to say that people in this room are people who can change the destiny of the nation by making sure that the editorial products they lead, the businesses they lead, they're more fearless. I only have one word, because I don't think news people can be bought. Most of the news people I know are fairly honest. They worry about the destiny of the country. They worry about their responsibility to honest journalism, and they try and do their job. And let me say that for a great editor, you also need a great promoter. For a great editor, you need a great publisher. If you do not have an honest and fearless publisher or an owner, whatever you want to call, a great editorial product won't happen. So I think that fearless quality is needed. And I can say that my friends in the news media are very, very conscious of that. They're also conscious of reinventing themselves, and they're also conscious of the fact that they need to get trust of both the readers and the sponsors, the advertisers. Last but not the least, you cannot talk of news without talking of the regulatory environment. I've already talked about the fact that the money that we spend in carriage fees is still substantial. It was supposed to end four years back. It hasn't ended. Right, Rajivji? We still spend a fair amount of money in distribution. So I hope that the regulatory system in some way will become more friendly to news. But if it doesn't happen, being digital is an advantage. So all the news broadcasters that are in some way thinking of their broadcasting setups as purely digital and the broadcasting setup where they have some revenue is something that they can phase out over the next three, five years are the broadcasters or I may call roundcasters that will survive. Talking about the size of the news business, the size of the news business is 3,000 crores. It is almost less than 5% of the overall advertising pie. Now that's very little. I hope through today's deliberations and the showcasing of the great work that the news broadcasting ecosystem is doing we are able to grow this 5% to about 10% because out of the 70,000 crores we are less than 5% of that industry. So news is a very small piece but news is not about the size of advertising revenue. News is about the kind of impact it makes, the kind of discussion it engages. So news again when the exchange for media news broadcasting awards that are in the evening at 7 p.m. Shri Mahesh Sharma Honorable Minister is the chief guest. I can tell you that I was there for about one and a half hours. I was not part of the jury but I was there for one and a half hours and I did participate in the deliberations as in I was watching them and I can tell you that there were very intense discussions and the jury members were very diverse. The people who know the industry, they just didn't look at performance. They didn't look at numbers. They looked at editorial credibility. They looked at the long-term impact that those news organizations are having and whether you agree or not, perception is bigger than reality. In reality is of course there. So the perception about certain individuals, certain news products was a very diverse jury. So you can't, you know, it was a very balanced, diverse and very knowledgeable jury. So they had point of view on everything. So not necessarily the channels that had the highest ratings or programs that had the highest ratings won. Because if we had to do that then there's no need for an award. There's no need for a jury. I want to tell you that the people that who won, it is not just about financial performance. That's one of the parameters. That's one of the parameters, especially when it comes to the business awards. But it's a lot about credibility. It's a lot about the promise of future. It's a lot about the kind of reporting was done. So the news broadcast awards and news next are a lot about editorial integrity. And I can tell you that this is a time when I try and not meet my friends from the news industry because all of them are my friends. You know, I don't like, I would like all of them to win. So I can tell you that, you know, lots of people from the media industry wanted to know who won. I couldn't even give them a list because I didn't have it till the morning, right? So I just want to tell you that the most honest awards, whether you agree with them, don't agree with them, we'll be happy to engage with you on that. We can show you jury tapes, jury bites. And when you see the jury deliberations, the glimpse of jury deliberations, you know that there was intense discussion about some categories and winners. So I wish that next year when we meet, we have grown from this 5% to at least 10% and digital is what leads the growth. There are elections in many states in the next few months. Whenever there are elections, news channels come up. I'm sure there will be at least 5 to 10 news channels that will come up. It may be through existing licenses or maybe the government will finally issue new licenses. So I hope that the news industry becomes more and more dynamic. It grows financially because I believe wherever there is Saraswati, which is the goddess of excellence, the goddess of wealth, that is Lakshmi always follows. Also, the last point I want to say is that today in the digital domain because the growth will also come from digital. The digital advertising in domain is about 15,000 crores at best in India if you add everything, right? Out of that, 11,000 crores is Google and Facebook. Everybody else including the news broadcasters is 4,000 crores. So the digital publishers or the publishers news broadcasters have to think about whether we want to give our content to Google and Facebook or not. We have to think about it because the only ones benefiting from giving content is them. We are not benefiting from it. So that's something that we need to discuss and choose whether we want to make sure our content is part of their ecosystem because it sometimes reflects nervousness on our part to believe that our brands are any less than theirs. They may be more technology driven. They may have larger distributions because they are in the lives of people in a different way. But I think people who consume news by going to branded news sources, that's my belief. So I hope that the news people, the editorial people realize that they have a power which they are not utilizing fully and the news leaders, the business side people realize that they need to be more on their own if I can say because they are as big. Because Google and Facebook have been built by us in some way, providing content to them. So we must be. I know Rohit is here from Jio. Jio is going to take over the world, not just India at some stage. But we have to see how we are able to benefit in a two way manner. I wish all the winners tonight, we will start the award sharp at 7. Hopefully the minister will be here on time. I wish all the winners who win tonight all the best and I'm sure they will inspire us to do good work. I wish that the news organizations become more editorially fearless and profitable. Thank you. God bless you. The family which WhatsApp's together stays together. Lovely words. Thank you, Mr. Bhattra. You can follow us on Twitter. The handle is E4M3 events for all the live updates and also cast the buzz with hashtag and the awards. Also, don't forget to tweet as we will keep an eye on your tweets and person with maximum tweets will win an award. Now I would like to request Mr. Acharya Tiwari to come to the stage and start this event.