"I am not driven by social media": Arnab Goswami

Most Indian households know him as 'Arnab'. Guests are known to return on Newshour, his primetime show, even after being yelled at incessantly. Aggressive on air, he is known to be calm and affable off it, especially to journalists interviewing him. His 'brand of journalism' may have been questioned time and again, yet Newshour remains the most watched news show in the country.

On the question of the channel being dependent on one man, he says his show is a consequence of what they do the entire day, and that it's about an overall editorial philosophy guiding the channel, more than the person.

It's been 10 years of Times Now, and we have Arnab Goswami, President-News & Editor-in-Chief, Times Now and ET Now, sharing his insights, learning and views on news. Edited Excerpts:

Edited Excerpts

I was very raw when I started this channel. I hadn't got the programming mix right and was more involved in the logistics of setting up. But I was constantly searching for stories that would have an impact, and 'Prince' was one such.

Those were the pre-Twitter days and impact was felt in terms of how many people were calling you. In a newsroom, which felt it had low ratings, and a channel, which had collapsed when it was launched, this was validation for us. The viewer responds to impactful stories and there is no complicated science to it. My peers in television and print criticised me then and called that story 'sensationalist'. The big lesson for me was that it was all about conviction. You will see the same spirit in our stories today. There's a common thread between Prince and Rohith, the Andhra student who recently committed suicide. We are putting the person, the citizen, on top. Just recently on the occasion of the 26th anniversary of the exodus of the Kashmiri pandits, we put out a video of Anupam Kher talking about what happened then - some people termed it extreme, but it was about speaking the truth.

It doesn't. You can't deliberately make fewer people watch you. We need to balance it out. Also, are any of the other channels stronger? They have single digit viewership between 9 and 11 pm. We have over 70 per cent of the viewership. Will our channel become stronger if we have only 10 or 20 per cent viewership? Indian viewership cycles show that there is a predominance of walk-ins at prime time, heading into super prime time. It is also true of GECs where there is a spike post 7 pm. Indian viewers generally are tuned in more towards evening, while American viewers are tuned in, in the morning. Newshour has done well for 8 years in that slot - there's no plan or strategy here.

Right now as we are speaking there's a siege in a Pakistan University. That's breaking news. What happened in Pathankot, Rohith's suicide and the political debate that followed it was breaking news. We do serious news as breaking news. I am not driven by social media. It's a useful tool sometimes, but you can't take opinions passed on it with a sense of finality. In our business if you ask a tough question to a Congress person, you are on the rolls of the BJP and vice versa. We've questioned every political party. So, trivialisation is also a stereotype.

I think there has been a return of news on all channels including Hindi. We haven't got viewership by trivialising news, and others have also realised that you don't need to spend 50 per cent of your time on crime and Bollywood to get ratings. Today, I can confidently tell you that news is 10 times more relevant now than it was seven years back. People were beginning to lose faith in the sansani format of news then. What have we (Times Now) done since? We broke big scams, our election coverage competes with international channels, and we have a prime time show watched by millions.We are bringing back confidence in the news industry as a whole. Times Now trends nationally almost every night and globally, many times more than the BBC.

Yes, and those who say it isn't, are cynics. In my business there are a lot of them. Why should we waste

time on them? Do they have the ability to break a 'Lalitgate' today? One thing is to be cynical, the other is to be rationalabout what news has done. In fact, print has followed television in terms of what high impact news has done.

The viewership we have is because of trust and credibility. The day it goes away, you can do a show about it, rationalise about what you did wrong, but the viewer out there knows. Yes, there are channels that have lost that trust because of certain events, or because of what happened to individuals within them. Channels whose credibility has been affected once, never get it back. Journalists whose ethics are questioned, never get their credibility back. I'm positive about this industry. People believe in the news they watch, they like the formats in which it is presented, and this is a great time to be doing television news.

Digital will be dependent on television. Why? One, digital ventures that are based on news aggregation alone cannot succeed. Two, the amount of original content on digital news is negligible. Three, high impact coverage on digital news platforms has not happened. Four, people want to 'watch' on digital, not just read. The quality of audio-visual content on many new platforms here is amateurish, to say the least. Also, in India, people are not consuming as much news on digital as they should. In the future, digital in India will be driven by audio-video. Right now, these enterprises pick news from everywhere, add a catchy headline and put it up on 10 different platforms. If Arnab does a show that gets talked about they do an article on it, thus cannibalising news. There is too much focus on the vehicle, and too little on the message. But I'm hopeful that in the next 5-6 years, the errors will be washed away, and a new vision will come in for digital, that will encompass and be built upon the power of television.

If you like watching something, you'll find your way to watch it - cable or Netflix. The challenge is to create formats that will pull people towards it. 4G, 5G, 6G doesn't matter. I have to create a programme that you want to watch. I'm watching OTT platforms with a lot of interest - it's working for non-news channels, and it could work on news too, provided you have compelling content. For sometime though, the revenue will be tilted towards television.

Nothing at all. Am I doing anything on my channel for ratings? Even if there were no ratings I would not make our channel boring. I would not stop questioning politicians. I would not please interviewees by asking them silly questions. I would not have a much older team sitting in Lutyens Delhi delivering news in a 1990s format - right? (smiles) So, I wouldn't change anything. Ratings are not about excel sheets, they follow conviction.

The Indian channels which you receive there are the Doordarshans of private news channels. We have a more argumentative style of questioning different from UK or American formats, and our language sensibilities and nuances are also different. I want to take our kind of television outside of India. Also, we are sometimes far quicker than international channels. During the Paris attacks, my guy at Brussels was there before CNN. My dream is to make the world watch global news through a neutral Indian lens. And we should be able to do this by 2020.

The first year was a tough time, but second year onwards we've been bullish about news, and people have been bullish about us. We are No 1. The gap earlier was 5-10 per cent, now it's 25 per cent and there is no clear No 2. We have a clear leadership - hard won, hard fought and hard defended. The challenge is to keep defending that. Another challenge for me is to marry the success of television with digital. I've also become obsessive about smaller changes that I can keep making. For the next decade, television will continue to climb, and digital will continue to grow. I would put my bets on digital-led television and television-led digital, but digital without TV will not work. Those who are trying to do the latter, good luck to them.

My focus is not on innovations and logistics. People think they can spend their way into news. Seven years ago, a channel launched saying they were the first HDTV-ready channel in India, thinking they could impress viewers. It made no difference and never got ratings. Those who understand news can, and without spending money, make it look like a million bucks. Almost all of the technology that we used for our election coverage- which broke records in 2014 - was either borrowed or hired. There were other channels with large rooms and offices, scalability, buses with transparent roofs and drones for coverage. I have a great team and I'm abreast with technology, but money can't make you win the TV news game.

Investors or advertisers look at viewership. We have 12 advertisers on Newshour, and the number is only growing. We have rates over'35,000 and these are only the mast head sponsors I'm talking about. So we are grateful.

The night before the BARC ratings came, I was very nervous, and I had a sleepless night. I thought we were going to be gobsmacked. If you have 60-70 per cent share in urban and no share in rural - or some other channel has more share in rural - that would be worrisome. However, we were delighted that our share in rural was more than the urban share. It's crazy that more people are watching you in outer Ghaziabad than in Delhi. So we'd keep doing the same, but yes, we do use a bit of Hindi and regional languages in our news. None of us expected rural to be a lift-off point.

I'm going to do something in the next one year, which will change the game in a much bigger way. 2016 will be the year of big change. I'm not here to participate in the game, I'm here to help my team become game changers.

Mostly international, as I've interviewed all the Indian guys. Vladimir Putin comes to top of mind. He's the terror of the West right now. I think he's an emerging force and it would be interesting to read his mind.

Viewers always come back and watch. Our most heated debates were during 'Lalitgate'. Do you expect four different political leaders to come together and say nice things - that would be fake! Look at it this from a top-down approach. Netas today are scared to take the citizen for granted, that's enough for me. There's a sense of accountability that somewhere on a television show you will be made answerable. If you were to lose this platform, would we be better off?

To download the PDF version of the article, click here.