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Sir Harold Evans, 79, the legendary editor of The Sunday Times (from 1967 to 1981) was in New Delhi last week to deliver the KC Mammen Mapillai lecture for the Malayala Manorama Group. During his hectic two-week stay in India, Evans travelled across Kerala and Rajasthan with his wife, famous editor and author, Tina Brown. He spoke to Shuchi Bansal on how old-fashioned principles of journalism are still relevant.
In your lecture you said that foreign ownership of media in India is not desirable.
It's something I would take great caution about. I am making a general statement because I believe that any society, and Indian society in particular, is so complex, has so many dimensions to its history, so many different sensitivities and relationships, that they can't easily be learnt by a guidebook or a briefing. They have to be learnt by living. Sensitive editorship is more likely to come from somebody who knows the community, instead of having a situation whereby somebody shouts down the phone from overseas "Why the hell did you do that?" or "Why don't you run that bigger?"
Your principles of journalism seem old-fashioned as newspapers do business very differently today. Some newspapers in India publish "news" that is "paid for" and not necessarily identified with as such.
It is a prescription for bankruptcy. It will fail in the end. The views may be old-fashioned but they have survived two hundred years in journalism, not that I am 200 years old. They have survived because they are like anything else you are producing. If you tie it to the wrong thing, you will devalue the product. Let me give you an example of why they are not old-fashioned. In 1984, I was asked to start a travel magazine, and I started the Conde Nast Traveller on the condition that we pay our own way in travel.
Secondly, the slogan for this magazine should be Truth in Travel, which was registered. After two issues of the magazine, I got a letter from an advertising agency representing a lot of companies about an article where we said that if you go to Mexico city you should be careful about running and exercising because the levels of poisons in the atmosphere would damage your lungs. This person said, 'We are withdrawing all our advertising from you as this kind of information may be all right in a newspaper but not in a magazine dedicated to travel'. So I published the letter and I wrote an editorial which said we believe in truth in travel and we don't give a damn about the advertising you are withdrawing. The consequence was that the entire advertising industry in New York Madison Avenue was absolutely outraged that somebody could be so stupid to write a letter to me obviously pressurising me to change the truth in the news. Not only did the magazine's circulation jumped, it saw a huge increase in advertising too. It is the most successful travel magazine today.
Is the declining newspaper readership in the US a serious concern?
It is. The saddest case of all is the Knight Ridder Group, which owns the Philadelphia Inquirer and Miami Herald, two very, very distinguished papers. Five years ago, the young chairman got all the staff together and said, 'We have a tremendous goal for you. We have achieved 21 per cent profit and we are going to go for 25 per cent profit'. I said that is no goal which is going to inspire any journalist.
So I wrote an article in a magazine called Strategy and Business and said that instead of a financial target, you should set an editorial target. If you succeed the finances will follow. You cannot run a journalistic enterprise by putting the bottomline above the topline. The topline is good product and value. You can't run it either by ignoring costs and economies, saying it does not matter if we spend $5 million in investigating a ridiculous story. Of course it matters. Most editors I know are aware of it.
Is crusade journalism over?
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