MEDIA WATCH: Times of India's new "Private Treaties" - guest post by Salil Tripathi

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I thought it was a joke when I first heard about it. A newspaper publisher offering to take an equity stake in companies that wanted to advertise in the paper. But that's exactly what the Times of India (with a circulation of 2.4 million, the world's largest-selling English broadsheet daily; other publications in the group include the Economic Times, India's largest-selling business daily) is doing with something it calls Private Treaties. And it's not some secret backroom deal, either. It's all spelled out clearly on TimesPrivateTreaties.com (complete with a section labeled "Investment Philosopy" - that's not a typo on my part, as you can see above). Among the highlights of the "Why PT" section:

Private Treaties eases the cash flow constraints on a company to devote resources to its brand building initiatives. With the capital support provided through Treaty, a company can afford to take a long term strategic view of its market positioning. As a treaty partner, your company can also avail of a bouquet of professional expertise within the Private Treaties Department. Our three pronged solution encompasses:
- Advertising Support
- Branding Support
- Corporate image development
Some of our Private Treaty Partners for whom we have facilitated brand growth include Celebrity Fashions (Indian Terrain), Pantaloons, Shobha Developers, Deccan Aviation, Avesthagen, India Infoline, MCX, Videocon, Thyrocare, Sahara One, Paramount Airways, General Motors, Vishal Retail, Kuoni Travels being the notable ones!
<snip>
Private Treaties provides the bandwidth to ad agencies and their client to work on media solutions that will create the right impact. We help remove budget constraints by sharing the risk of media spend of brand owners. Our own brand and media advisory team works closely with the media agency of our treaty partners. With our exposure to over 100 brands through Treaties, media agencies are welcome to leverage our experience to provide the best value to their clients.

Sucheta Dalal, a leading Indian business journalist, was among the first to write about Private Treaties (also see coverage of Private Treaties in Business Standard, a financial daily, and in Mint, the business daily edited by WSJ alum Raju Narisetti).

Given the economic success of the Times group, everything it does is watched closely by its competitors. But instead of being slammed far and wide for this Private Treaties business, some other media companies, it seems, are considering launching similar schemes.

To get a handle on this, I turned to one of the best observers of the international media scene, Salil Tripathi. He's a veteran journalist who's worked in India, East Asia, Europe and the U.S. and also one of the most prolific freelancers I know (turning out what seems like a dozen pieces a week). At the risk of annoying editors he has worked with at TOI, he provided his take on what he calls an "audacious, innovative and breathtaking" (he uses another adjective, too) business concept. Read his piece and reactions to it below (add your own, too - or e-mail them to saja[at]columbia.edu).
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A Look at TOI's Private Treaties
By Salil Tripathi

Most serious and professional newspapers recognize the need to separate editorial and advertising. The Wall Street Journal goes further, separating fact and opinion. (So do other major US newspapers, but WSJ's distinctness stems from separate management structures for both. At the SAJA convention, New York Times editor, Bill Keller, said that the management structure of the edit page and news pages at the NYT too, were separate. Which is how it should be, but all newspapers don't have the luxury of such a roster of writers and management structures.

When editorial and advertising blend, the first casualty is credibility. A reader simply cannot know if a particular company, product, or an idea being promoted is because there's a mass base of support for it, or because some experts like it, or is it because of financial considerations.

The Times of India's new business concept, Private Treaties, is audacious, innovative, and breathtaking. And incredibly underwhelming. It trades advertising for equity in companies.

As described in its poorly-designed, shoddily-edited, and jargon-filled website, it creates intangible value for companies in which the TOI group has a stake, by highlighting its intangible qualities, through the medium of TOI's publications. If  all that it means is a promotion restricted to discounted rates for advertising in the TOI, that would be simple enough, and acceptable to most purists in journalism. But with the Times you are never sure. in the past, it has encouraged its reporters to go on junkets to tourist resorts, and not always revealed the nature of the hospitality received.

When the Times group has launched its own businesses - such as music, entertainment, and so on - using prominent Indian performers, the newspaper's page 1 has to give way to stories about that event, as though it is the most talked about event in town, if not the only event in town. I recall in the mid-1990s, there were days of reporting on a modern ballet called Yes!, being staged under the choreography of my classmate from college in Bombay, the gifted dancer Shiamak Davar. The editor-in-chief would call senior Times editors to get hold of writers who'd say nice things about Yes! A tax raid on TOI's owners in the 1980s got barely a mention in the newspaper.

When things got tough, the Jain family's tax battles with the Indian government were cast as a human rights issue. A writer on the TOI edit page went on a junket with a European pharmaceutical company, and wrote an edit page piece extolling the medicine. Nothing wrong with a story about health on the TOI's edit page, but something was rotten in the state of Bori Bunder, if such a story appeared out of the blue, and no rival brand got similar coverage, or even comparison in that piece.

Then, the Times went the whole hog, with features like Impact and Spotlght, when news articles appeared on news pages, which were essentially advertisements.

When a plucky blog, Mediaah! ridiculed some of the practices at the Old Lady of Bori Bunder, the Times's legal eagles threatened to sue the website. Pradyuman Maheshwari, the spirited journalist who kept it
going, decided to close shop. . (It is, therefore, refreshing to see Times's Gautam Adhikari writing that his paper believes in publish-and-be-damned liberalism.

It is against this background that the Private Treaties are highly suspect. However much the Times might claim that it keeps editorial and advertising separate - when we know that's not really the case -
there will be an impact. A reporter chasing a story against a company in which the Times group has an equity stake will feel obliged to go softly. A reporter chasing a scandal involving a film star whose music
is marketed by the Times group, will view the release of the CD differently. It is so obvious, that it does not even need stating. A property scandal, or a scam, involving a company that advertises in
the newspaper may be problematic for some editors; how much more complicated it can get when the Times group has an equity stake in that company? And wouldn't the negative story drive down the value of
the investment?

There are sound reasons why across the world, editors try to keep editorial and advertising separate, to enhance the credibility of the editorial matter. When I worked with a US-owned magazine (Far Eastern
Economic Review) and wrote an extensive piece on conflict of interest within some leading US investment banks, even though those banks were prominent advertisers in my magazine, at no stage did any editor tell me to go easy on that story. At the Dow Jones group, reporters cannot own stocks in companies they write about. Other major US papers have similar codes.

In my reporting days in Bombay in the 1980s, I've seen, with great dismay, financial reporters of several leading Indian dailies rushing out of a press conference where a company has declared its results, to make phone calls to their brokers to buy or sell shares (there were no cell phones then). Mint, the new business daily launched by the Hindustan Times group, has transparently placed its
code of conduct on the web. It also recently declared to its readers how it would publish advertorials, and how they would be distinct from edit pages, and how edit staff would not be involved in preparing them. (The International Herald Tribune and other American publications do likewise).

Unless the Times institutes similar safeguards, it would seem that Private Treaties marks another step in the journey the Times - "the leader that guards the reader" - has taken, transforming the nature of
journalism.

In the late 1980s, the Times group had begun distributing promotional products in a plastic bag, together with the magazine, Illustrated Weekly of India, which the Times used to publish. We used
to throw those products away, preferring to read the magazine. Now the magazine is gone; the toothpaste remains.

Hopefully, the Times, in its drive to enhance the value of companies it invests in through this innovative mechanism, will also attach some value to its readers.

(Disclosure: I write frequently for Mint, and the Wall Street Journal's international editions; often for the International Herald Tribune, and on rare occasions for the Times of India. But this is not a case of sour grapes).

- Salil Tripathi, London

POST YOUR COMMENTS BELOW or e-mail them to saja[at]columbia.edu.

Comments

[rajiv malhotra]

I have said for many years that TOI is a tabloid, not a reliable source of objective news reporting. Beyond just infotainment (i.e. making the information entertaining), it is creating news that fits the economic model, if not blatantly, then by biasing what gets distributed and what is ignored.

But google does something similar by selling search words to the highest bidder, thereby allowing market economics anmd buying ower to shape what is ready more often about a given topic.

This fits into the postmnodernized ideologies in vogue today: There is no such thing as objective truth, its proponents say. In this relativism environment, why not let the freemarket decide the truth, rather than some power structure of intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals?

[Shoba Narayan]

I am glad Salil Tripathi wrote this piece. I am appalled by the Times of India policy. I don't think they deserve to be called a news organization.

[Anita S]

Strangely I am not shocked by this outrageous TOI initiative. In fact it was their overt focus on boosting commercial interests combined with publication of mindless articles that drove me away from the newspaper. Though I grew up reading the TOI,about a year ago I decided to finally get rid of a newspaper which provide more entertainment than information. The only value the paper seemed to add to my life was when I got money selling old issues to the newspaperwalla. I am confident that the newspaper's reportage will be further hampered by this initiative.

[Pinaki Bhattacharya]

Times of India's is a story of going from 'rags to riches.' the more it has become a rag the more it has gained in riches. Though it might be reflective of the intellect of newspaper's reader's - besides being that of those who run it - it has some unique attributes to its credit in terms of the history of journalism. For example, this is one widely sold newspaper of the world, which is bought not for the incisive journalism of its news pages or the depth of its advocacy in the editorial pages, but it is procured for its six page pull-out that does an incredibly unimaginative take on tabloids. Even in that, it is no match for vibrancy of the British tabloids or their poorer American cousins.

I am glad that SAJA has recognised a rag for what it is, considering that not long ago, it was also used as a platform for espousing the metier of the chattering classes - the Indo-US civilian nuclear deal.

DISCLAIMER: As a journalist, I used to once harbour dreams of working for the newspaper. Now I consider them nightmares, best forgotten.

[Rajan Mehta]

The major impact of the private treaties is as follows
1. Journalists from the Times group will no longer be seen as independent opinion makers. Times group has always worked to undermine the power of its journalists internally, the private treaties helps to further shatter this image with the public.
2. Financial information or opinion on which a lot of investors make decision cannot be relied on if it comes from the Times group, particularly from Economic Times, as it will always be biased in favour of its PT companies.
3. Any opinion on policy affecting an industry will also be biased in favour of the PT clients. ET is the driving force for the PT clients, they are more interested in investors looking at their companies fairly.
4. As journalists are being asked to function as cheer leaders for these PT companies and their appraisals are based on how happy these companies are. They have become sales executives or PR executives for these companies inside Times. Some of them even have new designation internally to reflect their new roles.
5. As the whole editorial system has been made subservient to the demands of the PTs group, there is no need for senior editors in the group, as the PT group decides which article will go where, what will be the lenght of the article and pictures. The desk editors just have to execute it and the better they execute the more they are rewarded at appraisal time.
6. Decision on major stories on the front page, Corporate Dossier and even Brand Equity are made by the PT group.
7. As TV_18 and other media groups are also following this strategy in different variants it would finally end up destroying the industry as the credibility of the information or opinion can no longer be believed.
As readers reject these kind of media, Times group will sell out its media brands by that time the promoters will become a private equity company.
The most interesting thing is that there is absolutely no opposition to this from journalists anymore at the Times group, as most of them are too scared to talk back and have given up trying to change it.

[BIJAY SINGH, journalist,INDIA]

i think its gr8 idea and i was thinking in the same line.
you see as a journalist we have to cover many press conferences and this only gives wide publicity to the institution/organisation/individual for whom coverage was done.
but what about journalists?
why we cover press conferences free of cost?
why journalists should not be paid for press conferences by the party.
i know its our duty to publishb various topics for the benefit of our readers but why should we give free of cost publicity to the party.
i'm sure whole journalist bodies and organisations should think over it.

[Sendhil]

If we consider the etymology, "philosopy" would mean a love of sops, no? So perhaps it is quite accurately named.

This seems somewhat similar to a number of schemes I was familiar with in the financial technology industry during the 2000 bubble, and also to the "trade credit" schemes by the high-flying tech companies of the day. Perhaps it is less kosher because it's in the news biz, or it's inherently less politic or well-considered, but the pressures are there across the capitalist system.

How does the hue and cry over this (or journalists' opinions of this) compare to the concern over News Corp's takeover of the WSJ? (The rest of DJ's outlets don't seem to merit a peep on such concerns.)

[exsqueeze me]

the truth of a collossus...TOI... reduced to a degrading fact. The purist revolts.

caught in the cross currents of disparate intellect another indian institution bites the dust. The purists, like innocent infants, cry foul because the monolith has taken a giant step in a predictable direction. all the unembarrassed cliches such as infotainment and advertorial adorn the critiques that fight creation of wealth like it were a sin. as always, the citations in these holy critiques are gospels of paul luke and matthew, named NYT, WSJ and IHT.

But just like Old Testament moved to St. James version the Vatican had to get new prescription glasses for a better vision to accommodate Talmudic view of Jesus' 'first coming,' instead of a 'second coming' that christians await.

For 15 whole years before WWII NYT didn't talk about the jewish persecution in europe. it wasn't profitable to talk about it. MEWSpapers are businesses, news is a product and opinion is an old lady who has no use as a woman.

moral: TOI maybe unreadable, but it's not unread.
PS: journalist has this view of himself as a watchdog of public trust and a carte blache to opine as he pleases. when did the public give him this honor. King Canute might order the tide to turn back while sitting at the beach but it ain't happenin'.

[A TOI Henchman]

I salute the Times Group for this latest initiative. The reasons are as follows:

1. Lets shed the myths related to what a newspaper is. There is a calvin klien underwear, a moods condom and then there is the Times of India. A day in the life of another FMCG product. Its glossy, colorful and attractive, any problems? But now, it even owns other FMCG products! So cool going guys, your FMCG product is taking the F really seriously. No pun intended.

2. The Times of India group used to put two gentle elephants on the front page in the 80's. Design changes and some 20 years of evolution later, there was colour, glamor, even half naked women with whips (budget issues)- but the two elepahnts and the tag line "Truth shall prevail" became extinct. And now the two Ambani elepahnts are the only visible cut outs on page one. Common, its a globalised world. Grow up, and whats all this talk about truth? We sold all that long ago! In fact ToI must "position" and "ultra leverage" it current "brand" and come up with a new tagline: "TRUTH SHALL PREVAIL only after money, adveritsing revenue, equity, half naked women, advertorials, honest ads, dishonest ads, tabloid news etc"

3. Private treatise. Hmm, the Times is after all in dire starits. It makes only a few hundred crores in profits and then it has to pay its employees all that money and print all those press releases. Whats more, creative copy editors who can give catchy headlines to advertisements aint coming cheap!

4. Hey, dare anybody say anything against those poor editors. So what if no one has the balls to speak up about selling their souls. Editors are not revolutionary thinkers or opnion formers, they also have families to feed and don't unneccessarily thrust all this moral baggage down their throats which forgot the language of courage a long time ago.

5. And those pesky reporters? Suppose I am a baby food brand and one of those lame nogooder reporters finds out that i mix lead in baby food. Does he really think he can write about it and let my "brand" suffer? So well, what do i do? Well, I let the paper buy a "stake" in my nice and innocent baby food company. Huh! Thank god, now the people won't even know and a few babies may die, but thats okay...Private Treatise will help me on "corporate image development".

6. OOps, other papers may find out about the lead and then what do i do? Ha, simple! I let the Hindustan Times, Indian Express, DNA and XYZ times all buy stakes in my companies. And what about television news channels and blogs? Well, do you actually think television reporers are vaguely concerned with baby food? As for blogs, no one reads them! Plus, if they start becoming popular, we shut them down! haah, the corporate strategy for "image management" is in place!

7. And last but not the least, who is this Tripathi guy anyway and why is he getting caught up in mundane chores like telling the truth? Does he not have to develop his brand? Or worse still, I hope he still doesn't think that journalism is about making a difference and all? Pooh pooh, the poor man. Lets do him a favor. At the ToI, journalism is about "MAKING A DIFFERENCE....to the corporate bank account...in swizerland"

[A ToI Hencwoman]

Osama bin Laden is seriously contemplating on this thing.."why should we play the bad guys?" So Al Qaeda will be offering its "equity" to the ToI so that it publihses an "exclusive" with Osama where his corporate communication department types an interview and mails it to those spineless chaps called editors to print. Its about how Osama is actually the hero. Private Treatise, anyone?

[Ian]

Remarkable.

Check out www.ihtreaders.blogspot.com

[panditjugalkishoreshastri]

Yo HENCHMAN.

you are the best. The method to your madness is so much better than randomness of my sanity. i like your tongue in cheek. Today's news: another editor bites the dust. LA Times editor makes the front page of NYT as the ousted editor. All these guys are so out of touch.

moral: we were able to keep fine journalism in place because public did not read it, and consequently they did not influence it. not anymore, thanks to the WEB.

[Rohini]

This is TOI's way to fighting corruption in the newsroom--IF YOU CAN'T FIGHT A FEW CORRUPT REPORTERS--WELL JOIN THEM.

[Amused Indian]

Finally the TOI has come out of the closet! It was never a NEWS PAPER - it was an ADVERTORIAL pretending to be serious pubication and now it has decided to get rid of the imaginery little fig leaf called OBJECTIVITY.

You have to give TOI for having the guts to come out of the closet unlike the others who still continue to pretend that they are serious publications.

[Sumant]

In response to Rajiv Mehrotra's comment:

Google does not 'sell search words to the highest bidder'. In fact, the AdWords program which drives sponsored links that appear on the right (and sometimes, at the top) of search results pages is completely distinct from the system that delivers natural search results on the left-hand side. Further, ad serving amongst the sponsored links is based on a weighted blind auction that heavily favours performance over bids. This means that there will often be bidders who will be placed lower on the list than those they have outbid.

A little more research and knowledge before posting, please.

[Amit Doshi]

So is the issue with Private Treaties? Or is the issue a lack of trust in the Times? Everyone here is bitching about the times, but does anyone(including the author) have any thoughts about PRIVATE TREATIES?

[Salil Tripathi]

Responding to Amit Doshi's question - is this just a rant against TOI, or if I have something about the idea of private treaty.

I read your blog, Amit, at doshiamit.net, so I now understand where you come from. (http://doshiamit.net/2008/01/17/private-treaties/)

I agree with you that for an advertiser it is a win-win deal. You get free mileage, you also get investment. You are also correct in observing that the folks upset by this are those who didn't like their earlier initiatives of hawking edit space.

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but for reasons you point out in your own post, there is virtue in keeping advertising and editorial components of a newspaper separate. A newspaper's main selling point, in the end, is its credibility. If its word is not believed, people will move to some other publication. Two consequences of PT deals - denigrating rivals or better producers of the product that your own PT partner offers, or talking up the PT partner at the expense of others - do a disservice to the reader. When it is camouflaged as a regular news story, it makes it worse. This is because it makes the reader feel he's getting an objective story, when it is clearly not so.

You raise the point of bulk discount rates in advertising - should they be disclosed. The point of disclosure is not to immerse the reader in a mass of data, but so that s/he gets material and relevant information. Does that advertising influence editorial opinion? The PT model is designed to shape a reader's opinion, not to provide information. That's why it is wrong.

What was it that someone said? News is what someone somewhere is suppressing. The rest is advertising.

And the Times seems to like that - for the TOI, news is the stuff between the ads. And I write this with a lot of respect for the many good journalists who still work there.

Best regards,

Salil

[Salil Tripathi]

One final point, Amit:

Do PTs help elsewhere, in other businesses? The answer is probably yes. Sales are driven by incentives; transactions and trade are built on give and take, on win-win solutions. The win-win solution, in the context of the media, is that the reader pays for the publication, and gets info; the journos write something, and get paid; the advertiser pays for space to gain access to an audience. That's the win-win. If the two organized entities get together and form a partnership, you need a countervailing power. Disclosure is a starting point; I'm told TOI has stopped doing that, too. (Pleasantly surprised, though, by the chutzpah-filled website; at least the shoddy grammar and spelling shows that TOI subs/copy eds are not, as yet, drafted in becoming champions of that particular brand.

[bala murali krishna]

In India, there is no outrage over this practice either among publishers and editors, or among readers. It has been at least three years since the Times Group started these private treaties. All it has done is created copycats. So you now have a number of other publishers including HT Media, the publisher of Hindustan Times and Mint, eyeing similar deals. It's anybody's guess where this will lead to or how will the India media as a whole will evolve?

[ToI henchman]

YOu're not old fashioned. The truth never goes out of fashion sir! Also, the ToI is deigging its own grave and fast. Giants often have to dig big graves to fit in- first it was media net and now its private treatise. I have another idea. The ToI could pick up on this one. Why not come up with something called "Troubled Times Treaty".

It works something like this: I am a ciggarette manufacturer coolly lacing my weeds with a super addictive drug. Somehow, a rare Indian babu who doesn't take my bribes decides to blow the whistle. He goes to the press. My editors are in charge of this. They call the company and "trouble shoot". A meeting later its decided: "Fifty crore rupees" no trouble and no shooting. The Indian Babu is told to bugger off and in return ToI publishes a surrogate advertisement on the whole of page one of the cig brand's mineral water bottle! Good idea? Oh okay, perhaps a few years later.

PS: How did my byline change? The exsqueeze me comment and the one following it (osama's exclusive) has been written by me (evident in the stlye of writing please). I gave the byline of a ToI hencman because i work at the ToI myself (oops).

PPS: How about this tripathi guy entering into a "private treaty" with the ToI? Well, i just got these words for you fella: "Show me the money, honey"

[A ToI Henchman]

The Troubled Times Treaty
By ToI Henchman

Note: The article about osama, the one before that and the one about the cig company has been written by me, ToI Henchman. As you can see, I am very psentimental about my bylines but this blog seems to simply change the byline. Must have worked at the ToI desk for a few years- changing bylines, I tell you!

Dude, google is a SEARCH ENGINE. Even if it throws up cheesy porn sites when I type "Rape victim statistics India" its fine.

But, The ToI is a newspaper. Agreed, a newspaper ends up wrapping fish and chips, but it should smell fishy after that, not when its delivered to you in the morning.

Also, the Times of India has a long history of over 160 years. Its leveraging that trust and good journalism of those countless giant reporters and editors who lived and died before us morally sold out pygmies took control of the show.

And btw, there is outrage. Its just that we all have entered into "private treaties" with our laziness and selfishness.

Hey, and please don't say anything about those lovelies straight out of college subbing copies about governemnt policies etc (sub editors, they call themselves). In India we are like that only okay?

When i wanted to click on the link of Mr Doshis blog, it said page not found. Oops, your rant may have reached the ToI empire and they must have used their sleuths to shut down your website. They may send goons over next. Yeah, newspapers do all this these days.

And for amused Indian - remember, in this war either you're with us or against us. Don't think you can just start that search engine and zip away.

[Viji Sundaram]

Hey, Salil, I totally agree with you. Indeed, the credibility of a publication suffers when newspaper publishers pander to advertisers. Once a respected publication, the Times of India has for the last several years been masquerading as a newspaper. As a veteran journalist, I cringe when I hold a copy of the TOI in my hand every time I visit India. A number of my students from the Indian Institute of Journalism in Bangalore cut their teeth at the TOI, and that experience left a bad taste in their mouth. More than one of them has told me that what was expected of them at the TOI ran counter to what I had tried to instill in them in class -- ethics, fairness and objectivity.

[I Banerji]

The whole discussion seems to ignore the latest development--that it is not just the much-reviled Times but many others who have taken this route. Times started it in 2004--that is nothing new...only Rahul Joshi's mail is.
BS edit on the issue takes a realistic view of the scenario.

Publishing directions

Business Standard / New Delhi January 16, 2008



Like other business innovations thought up by India's largest publishing company — Bennett, Coleman — the "private treaties" route to building a new line of business is creative in conceptualisation (by swapping shares for advertising space), a winner in terms of pay-offs, multi-faceted in its character (there is an important tax angle because capital gains on shares, when they are taxed at all, get favoured treatment when compared to profits earned from selling advertising), and heedless of concerns about the integrity of the editorial process. Like other innovations before this one, the initial response of the rest of the newspaper industry has been massively negative but after a respectable amount of time has elapsed, others are willing to follow suit. So it is that, as reported in this newspaper on Monday, at least three other newspapers (in English and Hindi) and a couple of TV channels have started a slippery slalom ride to profits that seeks to skirt the hard questions of journalistic ethics.

Readers might recall the fuss that was made a few years ago, when Bennett, Coleman (which publishes The Times of India and The Economic Times, among other titles) began charging for editorial space, initially signalling such deals through an innocuous credit line to "Medianet" but subsequently dropping even that pretence. Once the fuss died down, others have followed suit though usually not as openly as the Times group — though there is talk of rate cards being distributed stating the price for (say) a three-column picture, a higher price if the caption is to mention the company or brand name, and so on. It would seem that the unthinkable ceases to be so after some time and eventually becomes industry practice. It is as though the Times group is challenging the rest of the media on its commitment to its own stated convictions and conventions.

The "private treaties" can be defended in theory — on the basis of the claim that journalists in the publications concerned are free to write what they want about any company, and are not duty-bound to sing the praises of the companies whose shares the publisher holds. The bitter truth is that this is hogwash —the Chinese walls that used to separate editorial and business departments in most newspapers have become porous, and in some cases have been demolished without ceremony. Evidence that has surfaced supports the view that journalists in the affected publications are being asked to play the piper's tune. So from a journalistic standpoint, there is nothing to be said in defence of space-for-shares barters. To the obvious question of what happens to readers' trust in a newspaper and the unbiased nature of its reports, the answer would appear to be that the big newspapers have entrenched positions in the market, which cannot easily be challenged; so they fear no risk of losing readers.

As for the business logic of such arrangements, the hard fact is that Indian newspapers have engaged in price wars over the years, to the point where most of the large newspapers are available virtually free or at nominal cost to readers. As a consequence, 90 per cent and more of a newspaper's revenue comes from advertising; from that, it is but a short step for a cynical publisher to conclude that if the advertiser is the one who is paying, then everything should be done to please the advertiser and thereby to bring in more revenue. If the reader complains, tough luck.

[Amit Doshi]

Salil,
I agree with you that editorial, and advertising(or in this case the private treaty area of the business) need to be absolutely seperate. But the way I see it is that there are huge problems with the Times of India, not necessarily with the concept of Private Treaties. I'm very uncomfortable with TOI, and I would not doubt that these treaties do slant their coverage, but thats a TOI problem. Ethically I see no distinction between this, and giving consistently favorable treatment to a big advertiser. To do either is wrong.

I tried starting an e-commerce website in India in 1999. Unfortunately we were coming live just around the same time the internet crash happened, so venture funding wasnt a real option than. If we had an avenue like this available at that time, I think it might have been possible to keep the site alive.

TOI Henchman: The link to the post that Salils put in the above comment has the parenthesis in the link. Correct link is:
http://doshiamit.net/2008/01/17/private-treaties/

Please dont shut my new blog down.:)

[HILLSOFINDIA]

THE ENTIRE JOURNEY OF THIS PUBLISHING HOUSE IS TO REDUCE THE FORTH ESTATE TO FOURTH GRADE ESTATE