binu karunakaran

On the viability of Media Business in India and its political economy: I study the business operations of media orgs for a while as a side entertainment. It's instructive. There is a churn in the industry and there is a business model challenge because tech advancement has altered the capital required to start a tiny operation. A million new 'media and content' businesses have proliferated and moth-eaten into the growth of big media revenues. But, The story of large Indian media businesses can never be visible from reading topline profits and revenues from the balance sheets of the mothership entities. The way money is milked-out by promoters, owners and top editors, directly and through other adjacent cost booking hide the actual financial health of the main media production company. The owners and editors are not yet willing in most organisations to end their gravy trains and influence peddling. Neither are they keen to do more or better journalism. Having reconciled that they cannot do any more journalism than they do at the moment, they have instead decided to move into the volume 'content' generation market. When they complain about journalism not working out as a business, it's usually the case that they are in the business of 'minimal journalism' and maxing content generation to cover for that. And, that model is competing with a million new nimble-footed, miniscule or near-zero capital infused, content generators. The traditional ad-revenue streams of these minimal journalism media businesses (from private companies and political parties in power) are flattening. Corporates and political parties (in and out of power) are incrementally putting money behind 'content generator influencers'. The media orgs aren't getting share of this growing pie that they think they deserve by right. The only way these minimal-journalism max-media business orgs would do better for their journalist employees was if they did more journalism. But, they know, that they cannot afford to do that and live the kind of 'media mogul' lives they have lived for long. So, they keep doing more 'content' and milking their motherships while claiming journalism doesn't pay in India. It would, if they invested in journalism.