The MahaKumbh of media , exchange4media conclave Mumbai edition 25th Nov Monday
Metromirror Correspondent, November 19, 2013

Dear Metromirror,

Greetings from exchange4media. It is our pleasure to introduce to you the 13th edition of the exchange4media conclave scheduled on November 25, 2013 at Four Seasons Hotel, Mumbai.

With a speaker line-up that comprises some of the best minds in the business, both globally and in India, the Mumbai Leg of the Conclave this year delves into the theme "Shifting media mindset and the growth path ahead".
Arnab Goswami, Editor-in-Chief and News anchor of Times Now is the Keynote Speaker.

Our other distinguished speakers and panelists include

Gerry Boyle -Chairman Asia Pacific, ZenithOptimedia ,
Neil Stewart - CEO Asia Pacific,Maxus,
David Mayo - CEO, Bates Asia,
CVL Srinivas - CEO, GroupM South Asia,
Shashi Sinha - CEO, IPG Mediabrands India,
Matt Blackborn - President, Emerging Markets Starcom MediaVest Group,
Vikram Sakhuja - Global CEO, Maxus,
Anupriya Acharya - Group CEO, ZenithOptimedia,
Sam Balsara – Chairman and Managing Director, Madison World,
KV Sridhar - Chief Creative Officer India Subcontinent, Leo Burnett,
Tjaco Walvis - Managing Partner, THEY,
Sanjoy Chakrabarty - Managing Partner, ZenithOptimedia,
Ravi Deshpande-Founder and CEO Whyness Worldwide,
Anil Jayaraj - Chief Marketing Officer at Pidilite Industries,
Santosh Padhi Chief Creative Officer and Founder Taproot India,
Sunil Lulla MD & CEO of Times Television Network ,
Neeraj Roy MD & CEO of Hungama Digital,

Gautam Kiyawat Group CEO Madison Media and Ashish Bhasin - Chairman India and CEO South East Asia, Aegis Group.

Leaders from across domains will get together to discuss and debate how the ecosystem favors growth, but some decision and actions are not in that direction. They will throw light on what is going wrong and the right way forward.

It would be great to have some participation from your organization at this event. Participation fees are Rs.7000 per delegate. The proceedings start at 3:00 pm and conclude with Drinks and Dinner.

We would like to request you to mark your calendar, confirm and make it convenient to attend.

Social Media and Mainstream Media : A love Hate Tale

Andreas Kaplan, Professor of Marketing and Social Media and Michael Haenlein, Editor of the European Management Journal (EMJ), have defined social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content Social media technologies take on many different forms including Magazines, Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, microblogging, wikis, podcasts, photographs or pictures, video, rating and social bookmarking.
In their highly acclaimed article ‘Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media’, Published in the Jan-Feb 2010 issue of ‘Business Horizons’, the bimonthly journal of the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University Kaplan and Haenlein classified six different types of social media.
These are collaborative projects (e.g., Wikipedia), blogs and microblogs (e.g., Twitter), content communities (e.g., YouTube), social networking sites (e.g., Facebook), virtual game worlds (e.g., World of Warcraft), and virtual social worlds (e.g., Second Life).

Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms. Social media network websites include sites like Facebook, Twitter, Bebo and MySpace.
With a burgeoning number of users joining the online community world wide, the importance of social media is significant – not only for the purpose of connecting with the people we know but also for the purpose of disseminating information thereby informing, influencing, moulding and building mass opinions.
The Anna Movement against corruption in India exemplified the power of social media. While critics claim that the anti-graft crusade was a television generated movement, the fact remains that a large number of youth who joined the campaign across the country were deeply influenced by the social media, although aided and abetted by the visual media. We have witnessed the use of social media technology during the widespread unrest in the Middle East – Libya, Syria, Egypt and Bahrain.
In fact, the experiences in Egypt and Tunisia have prompted the Syrian Government to maintain a strong surveillance on the use of new media technologies. China and Pakistan have often restricted access to social media on political and cultural grounds. In India too, the Central Government has made futile attempts to censor social media but have backtracked following huge hue and cry.
In neighbouring Nepal, the importance of these informal channels was recognised after the February 2005 takeover by the then King Gyanendra, when almost all the formal channels of information were blocked and only a few online media and blogs remained to share information with the public.
It is not only during unrest and rebellions that the social media has come handy. They have proved to be immensely invaluable during natural catastrophes and even emergency situations like the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai and the fires at Mantralaya and at Kolkata recently.

However, what’s more interesting is the emergence of social media not only as a crucial source of information for the mainstream media but also as a key competitor in the race for breaking news.
It is said that Twitter users posted the message about the death of singer Whitney Houston twenty seven minutes before the mainstream media broke the news.
According to the Telegraph, tweets were posted at a rate of around 70 tweets every five seconds during the Mumbai terror attacks. Blogs and social networking sites were abuzz with news, photo, audio-visual and eyewitness accounts as the events unfolded. The increasing significance of social media to the mainstream media can be gauged from the fact that now Sky News has a Twitter correspondent researching the microblogging platform.
Back home, in India, we have had former UN Under Secretary General and Minister of State for External Affairs, Shashi Tharoor, who lost his job following a series of tweets revealing juicy information about the goings on in the highly lucrative Indian Premier League. The young, media savvy author and columnist was not the only loser in the episode. His friend and now wife Sunanda Pushkar lost her stakes (sweat equity) in the Kochi team, IPL wizard Lalit Modi lost his job and Kerala lost its only IPL team. The episode provided lot of masala to the mainstream media. So did the tweets of actor director Farah Khan on the SRK-Sirish Kunder spat. The tweets of film stars and starlets often grab media headlines.

Instead of calling the media to air their enlightened opinions, on subjects ranging from tooth aches to Timbuktu, the celebrities, including the Big B, have taken to the social media to reach out to their fans, hit out at their rivals and remain in news. The politicos have also joined the bandwagon, with the BJP leaders taking the lead. Leader of Opposition Sushma Swaraj’s tweets keep the party beat correspondents updated with the latest in the party and parliament while veteran leader LK Advani has shocked and surprised many within and outside the party with his blogs on issues ranging from media to Modi and films to foreign policy. Lauding the role of social media, particularly in cornering senior journalists Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi in the wake of the Nira Radia tapes, even as mainstream media remained a mutte spectator, columnist Sachin Kalbag wrote in the Mail Today, “Online media in India rarely, if ever, gats its due. But it is social media, with its ability to become, as a senior journalist put it, a lynch mob that is something that media professionals would do well to remember. It is debatable whether a “lynch mob” or a “mass movement” would describe the phenomenon. It does not matter, really, because social media has well and truly arrived in India. Apart from mainstream media, social media is also being put to good use in social sectors in a big way.
Associate Professor Jo Tacchi, a Principal Research Fellow in the Creative Industries Faculty, is working on a series of projects funded by the Australian Research Council, UNESCO, UNDP and other international non-government organizations to enlist new media to help poverty alleviation in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Indonesia.
Although each initiative is adapted to local circumstances, the common objective is to give local communities the skills to set up their own independent and community-based media resources to address issues that are important to these communities. Such issues might include health, education or politics, and the media used range from local radio stations to new media forms such as websites.

Finding a Voice: Making technological change socially effective and culturally empowering is one of the leading projects in the programme. Taking a participatory approach to research, aiming to empower people through finding their own voice, the project looks at using old and new media technologies to reduce poverty in poor communities in terms of people’s participation. This is achieved by assessing people’s capacity to participate in various activities such as self expression and freedom of social networking media. Census 2011 was logged on 24x7 on Facebook with live update, comments and responses from the department.

The office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India thought of the Facebook idea soon after it released the momentous Census 2011 findings. The result has been more than satisfying.
According to Census Commissioner Dr C Chandramouli, “This initiative has really helped to connect with the people. The responses of the people have been overwhelming. People have been very inquisitive and thoughtful throughout and have been actively participating and commenting on our regular updates.” He is not averse to criticism and looks forward to some constructive suggestions to engage the public better.
Several other Ministries and departments including the Ministry of External Affairs too have joined the bandwagon. With India emerging as the third biggest Facebook market with nearly 4 crore 98 lakh Facebook users, the anxiety of the Government to reach out to GenX is understandable. According to Socialbakers, the contry is expected to have maximum number of Facebook users by 2015 while Semiocast, a social media monitoring tool, has rated India as the sixth highest user of Twitter. The other popular social media platforms include You Tube and Orkut.
A recent ‘Tata Consultancy Gen Y Survey 2011-2012’ of nearly 12,300 high school students across 12 Indian cities found that 85 percent of the students use Facebook.

Interestingly, Socialogue, a survey on social media trends and behavior, revealed than 56 percent of Indians would prefer giving up television than giving up social networking sites. It revealed that nearly 37 per cent of people prefer a large network of friends as compared to close friends.
The negative impact of the growing influence of social media is also causing concern to sociologists and educationists. According to ‘Global Youth Online Behaviour Survey’ conducted by Microsoft, India ranked third in the list of 25 countries where 53 percent of the surveyed children aged between eight and 17 admitted that they were victims of cyber bullying.
Even as they are increasingly coming to terms with social media or citizen journalism as a major source of information, the mainstream media too is feeling the punch of this “cyber bullying”.
A major problem confronting media houses is that their own staffers are choosing to break news on their individual accounts as against the professional platform. The staffers are also often found to be re-tweeting news breaks from correspondents working in other organizations.

The gravity of the situation can be gauged from the fact that BBC has drawn up an editorial policy on the use of social media for its editorial staff. While the organisation’s guidelines for breaking news recognizes the increasing value of other social networks, as a platform for its content, a newsgathering tool and a new way of engaging with people, the BBC has developed a system that enables its own reporters to send their messages simultaneously to its newsroom systems as also other journalists’ Twitter accounts. Thus, the journalists can no longer break news in their personal account before it is officially published from the media house.
Sky News too has issued guidelines to prevent its journalists from tweeting news and ‘undermining’ its credibility. Richard Sambrook, the director of the BBC Global News Division, feels that the impact of social media has been overestimated in the short term and underestimated in long term. Asserting that mere information is not journalism, he says one gets a lot of things, when one opens up Twitter in the morning, but not journalism.
“Journalism needs discipline, analysis, explanation and context. It is still a profession”, he says. According to him, the value that gets added with journalism is judgment, analysis and explanation and that makes the difference. While maintaining that journalism will stay, Sambrook says journalists must, however, understand one rule: if you believe you are in competition with the internet, find your way out. Collaboration, openness and link culture are rules, you can’t deny at the moment.

John Kelly, a columnist for the Washington Post, who has published a report on the rise, challenges and value of citizen journalism for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism points out that today the Huffington Post competes with the Washington Post not in terms of journalism, but in terms of its readers.
Social media for him are not only important for citizen journalism, but for reaching out to the readers as well. Mainstream media are exploring the use of social media to drive traffic; already 8% of the Daily Telegraph web traffic comes from social media. Leading trans-national wire service Reuters too is exploring blogging to set up a community offering specific trade news and information as the financial community is increasingly relating to the social media.
Many Editors in India and other developing countries are looking at social media as a boon, particularly the electronic media. In their view, if people hear anything on social media, they immediately check out for the details on radio and TV and the audio visual media can use inputs from social media can use inputs from social media including you tube, to their advantage. Several newspapers have launched their online editions, which is also turning out to be a good revenue model.
Many are even suggesting that in the days to come, newspapers may consider giving up event based news and focus more on the implications of such events.
It the words of Prateek Pradhan, Editor of Nepal’s leading national business daily ‘Karobar’, “newspapers need to go much more in depth and 360 degree view of the events. So, the social media have provided boon (in a way) to some mainstream media, and challenged others to find their niche Journalism,”
In some cases social media and main stream news media would be rivals, but in other cases they could be complementary to each other. “When the social media draw in readers and viewers to mainstream media, they are of course complementary. But both of them should and can find ways to take benefit from each other. In the real world they live in, both cooperation and competition exists,” he says.

(Author is a Delhi-based senior journalist)

COVRTESY : Media Critique

Prasar Bharati Plans to Raise Rs. 4,000 crore Via Land Sale
Metromirror Correspondent, 25 June,2013
Public broadcaster Prasar Bharati has floated a proposal to raise Rs. 4,000 crore by monetising its land parcels across the country, a move aimed at technical upgradation of Doordarshan and All India Radio as part of a larger restrucuring.

"Two landd parcels of 400 acres and 200 acres in Delhi and 2-3 land parcels in Mumbai will be the first to go, "a person familiar with the matter said, adding that the Prasar Bharati board is evaluating means of raising money by asset sale.

The broadcaster, which has offices and technical set-ups at 2,000 .ocations across India, hopes to raise Rs. 4,000-5,000 crore over the next 2-3 years to retain its autonomous status, said the person, who did not wish to be named. "Given the change in the technology, massive installations are not required anymore," a senior official said, explaining that Prasar Bharati had a number of broadcast stations across the country with surplus land.

Facebook Reaches 1 m Active Advertisers
Metromirror Correspondent, 25 June,2013
NEW YORK : Facebook Inc said it now has 1 million active advertisers globally who used the platform in the last 28 days, a milestone for the company that is seeking to revive its revenue growth.
A vast majority of those advertisers are small business owners who have flocked to the world's No.1 social network. Facebook executives are hoping to net even more small advertisers since 16 million local businesses, ranging from jewellery sellers to clothing stores, set up free pages on the network.
While pinpointing how much money small advertisers spend only online is difficult, in total they spent approximately $32 billion during 2012 in the United States, according to market research firm eMarketer

Makhanlal Chaturvedi University Launches Research Journal :

Indian Media Centre - MP chapter inaugurated :

" Media -Naya daur, Nai Chunautiya ".