“Can you give me a confirmation and a quote?”
Thru the second half of yesterday, when the news spread that I was coming to the end of my tenure with Yahoo India, I kept getting that question, with mild variants, from journalists.
WTF is up with that? Since when did you guys get reduced to quote hangers? And, corollary – don’t they teach you any better in the J-school you hopefully passed out of, and in the newsroom you are part of?
This is not an attempt at being holier than thou – honestly, it’s not. It’s just that of late, I’ve been thinking about content a lot. I also got lucky in some long conversations with bright young journalists who pinged to discuss story possibilities and project ideas.
So what the actual f… what’s up with this “confirmation and quote” stuff?
There were exceptions – like the journalist who asked me a lot of questions that I answered in depth and detail. And then I saw the finished output, and – put it this way, yesterday was a big day for going what the eff.
Not much I can do about that, but I would like to keep the record clean and straight. So I decided to interview myself. Here’s the transcript (Most of the questions are what I was actually asked -- and answers I actually gave, in more or less the same words and to the same depth. I’ve avoided the more bizarre queries):
Can you confirm that you’ve quit Yahoo India?
I can confirm that my last working day will be December 12, 2014.
You are quoted as saying that you want to get back to a content focus and away from management. Does that mean there is no content focus where you are now?
No, it merely means that I want to spend more time on content – by that I mean writing what I want to. Equally, on editing – which means working with storytellers from the idea stage up, through the field work and then at the writing/editing table, on forms and shapes and structures and the actual words themselves.
It means that if there are 12 working hours in a day, I want to spend 11 hours 30 minutes working with ideas and words. The other half hour is for smoking and email.
My saying I want to move away from management is not pejorative in intent. Someone has to manage things so the rest of us can function in the areas we like. I merely mean that the minutiae of management functions do not excite me. I’ve learnt how to do that stuff with a fair degree of competence, but there is a difference between being able to do something and wanting to do it for the rest of your life.
What has your stint in Yahoo been like?
Great fun, and incredibly educative in a way I did not even expect.
Could you elaborate, particularly on the ‘educative’ part?
I’d never worked in a global organization before. Being here taught me – among many other things – that there is a world beyond the tip of my little nose.
For instance, the things we do mean the world to us – we invest in them, we think and rethink them, we overdose on euphoria when they work and think Armageddon is around the corner when they fail, as ideas will fail sometimes.
But when you step back and look at the larger world you are part of, you realize there are other ways of looking at things; that what you are doing is part of a much larger whole – and that therefore, ‘success’ at something you do is not absolute but relative to that larger whole. That in turn teaches you to think of how to expand the definition and scope of what you call success; it teaches you to ask questions like, how do you do things at scale.
Or looked at another way – immediately before joining Yahoo I worked at Rediff, a media organization I was part of from inception. The CEO, the head of product, the head of sales, the head of edit, they all sat, literally, within 50 yards of my desk. And since we all grew together from zero, there was an interpersonal relationship that impacted how we worked together. For instance, if I had a thought, I could stroll up to my editor, Mr Nikhil Lakshman, and go hey, need to talk. I could do the same with my CEO, Mr Ajit Balakrishnan. And I could walk away from those conversations with decisions.
In a large corporate, you don’t just waltz into your boss’s cabin for a coffee and a chat. If you have an idea, you make presentations. You cost it. You think of ROI – return on investment. You make traffic projections. You estimate possible revenue based on those projections. And then you walk someone through it and if that someone green-lights it you then talk to someone else and…
There is a greater rigor to the process – it’s not just ‘got idea, will execute’. You could say it slows things down; you could equally say it challenges your assumptions more, forces you to think not merely ideas but also implications.
I could go on but seriously, each ecosystem you are part of teaches you much – for instance, smaller ones teach you to be nimble; giant ones teach you to be diligent.
I’ve honestly not considered the question in any depth. And it is not “where” anyway – it is “what”. Content. Wherever I go next, and whatever I do, it will be in the field of pure content.
Will you stick with conventional media?
What is “conventional media”? I’ve been in journalism 25 years and counting. When I started, “conventional media” was newspapers; when cable television came in it was considered “new media”. Then the Internet came in – and suddenly TV was conventional media, newspapers were almost relegated to borderline “old media”. Now, 19 years after the internet was first opened up for commercial use, it is “conventional media” and all sorts of things are “new, innovative media” – from Twitter and Facebook to Instagram and Vine and oh I don’t know, whatever the latest toy on the horizon is, until we get bored and throw it out of the pram and grab the next one. For me, media is just that – a means of telling stories. “Conventional”, “traditional” etc are labels we stick on them, often for our own purposes and prejudices.
Have you considered starting something on your own?
Yes, for quite a while. There are many indicators out there that the audience is not as invested in who – which media house – is telling the story as it is in the story itself.
For instance, my friend Sonia Faleiro was a founding member of Deca Stories – a group of top of the line journalists/writers who formed a collective so they could tell the stories they wanted to tell, in the way they wanted to tell them, with no dependence on “conventional media houses” and “ROI”.
They went on Kickstarter, announced their intent and asked for $15000 so they could tell stories at the rate of about 10 a year, each the size of a novella, each researched in depth, and written and edited with care and passion. Well within the one-month time frame, potential readers donated over $30k. Who knew?
That should tell you there is an audience out there for good stories well told. It may not number in millions, but numbers are not the only – or even always the best – measure of what we can do.
So there is an audience. And there are writers, journalists, who care enough to tell stories the way they should be told. And people are increasingly noticing, and investing, in this “alternate media model” that is emerging. Take two examples that speak to the same thing: Medium, and Creativist.
Both are content management systems – back-end platforms that let you tell stories the way you want to, with the elements that suit the story (text, video, images, data, audio, timelines, you name it). And they are not the only ones – more such systems are being built, and launched, every other month.
Why would someone invest in creating such platforms? For the casual blogger, there is Wordpress and Tumblr and a host of other readymade platforms, each with users numbering in the millions of millions – so who is this for, and what is the idea behind this? Simply, that blogs as we know it have limitations when it comes to immersive, in-depth story-telling; that providing such platforms, at affordable rates (I spend more on cigarettes in a month than I do on my Creativist subscription) opens up a whole new opportunity to those who want to go beyond the here-and-now immediacy of blogging to larger, more rounded storytelling. And equally, the realization that the storyteller doesn't have to be employed by a media house to tell the story, just as the reader does not need the imprimatur of a media house to judge whether to read the story.
Extend that thought one degree more: If I am no longer dependent on a media organization to give me a CMS and engineering/development back-up and all the rest of it, just how hard is it to do your own thing – assuming you know what it is, you are sure of the idea, and you are confident you can pull it off?
So will you start something like Deca?
Why start something like something else? Deca exists, and there are other such initiatives. It’s much more fun to think of what else is possible than what you can clone.
What do you see in the future for yourself?
After I’m done with the handover and other exit formalities? Sleep a lot. Read a little. Think things through without a ticking clock. Decide what I really want to do – independently, or as part of a media house, or as part of a group, whatever. Question the assumptions behind my ‘decision’. Get to where I am comfortable I know what I am setting out to do and why. Then do it.