Kartikeya Sharma took time out from meetings with NewsX staff to speak to MxMIndia’s Shruti Pushkarna on his plans for the channel and the changes he intends to initiate.
Excerpts from the interview:
What are your plans for NewsX?
We intend on getting NewsX back on track. We want to distribute the channel properly everywhere. And we think that the content of the channel is pretty good, it’s just that for whatever reason it’s not been visible everywhere and it’s not been distributed everywhere, so we are going to fix that.
Will there be any kind of content and resource sharing between the channels, NewsX and India News?
Yes, there will be because we already run seven regional channels at the moment and we are expanding that portfolio also to 14 in another six to eight months. So there’s a lot of synergy that comes out of it. There’s a lot of infrastructure asset that can be shared, lot of content which will be shared. It even becomes a more attractive offer for planners and other people to pick up a product which addresses different TGs and different age categories and different genres. So it completes our bouquet. We were expanding our regional footprint till now and this will add as a national product that w did not have.
But there’s already so much clutter in the television news space, how do you intend to make a mark with NewsX now?
The clutter in the English news market is far less than the Hindi news market. We have five news channels in the English space, whereas you have more than 25 in Hindi. It is a competitive environment but I won’t call it clutter because clutter would be perhaps the right word for the Hindi news market. Yes, it’s competitive, but I still feel there’s a need for a good English news channel which is distinctively different. NewsX has always done things differently and that’s one of the major reasons for us to acquire it, and we’d like to continue that kind of editorial approach which is not about creating too much noise or sensationalism, it’s about reporting things how they are and letting people form their own opinions.
What changes are we going to see in the leadership…any changes at the editorial level?
At the moment everything is the way it is, we’ve just taken over and it’s too early to make any comments. But yes, right now everything stays the way it is.
NewsX has seen a couple of management changes in the past as well but unfortunately the channel never picked up in that sense…what changes can we hope for this time?
At the moment we are not looking at any changes, it’s too soon for us. The channel has always been very good, I have always watched it and liked the content, it has a differentiating factor to it. The only problem is that it’s not been visible everywhere. No matter how good your content is, if it’s not visible everywhere then you will really miss out.
Let’s say you’ve got an exclusive story and you can’t take a lead on it because others will hijack it immediately and take the credit for the story even though they didn’t break it. So this acts as a real dampener for the team which has worked hard to get the story on air. We’ve got a good team over here, they do a good job in terms of content and we would like to accentuate it rather than make any changes. We will tweak it in the right places, we will give it what we think is missing but the backbone of the organization, the product and the content will remain the way it is.
Is there going to be a name change…NewsX had announced a change of name to IMN News in 2010…
We are still undecided on it. We will have a couple of consultants talk about it. At the moment there are no plans of changing the name. If there are, we will definitely put it out.
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