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B. S. Raghavan

THE era of globalisation and competitive market economy is wholly upon us . Economics, rather than politics, will be, if it is not already, putting its imprimatur on a nation's profile. Decisions in the economic domain bid fair to constitute the mainspring of a country's progress and prosperity. Inevitably, the business and financial media will come to dominate the stage as the appetite of economic players for new and diversified pointers enabling them to conquer new frontiers by sharpening their competitive edge becomes insatiable, and as advertisers and subscribers make exacting demands on creativity, objectivity and professionalism. How is the financial media to gear itself up to face the future?

Facilitating stakeholders' informed participation

It may not be out of place here to take note of the philosophy driving journalism, in general, and governing the media's role and influence in society, in particular. Its essence could be encapsulated in the following maxims: Content should match the context, style without substance is like an airplane without wings, perception should not become the surrogate of truth, reality has its own solid attributes and does not, like beauty, merely lie in the beholder, and ambivalence and ambiguity should not take the place of clarity and credibility.

Without the media, there will be no effective and continuing participation of all the stakeholders in a polity, with the citizens at the centre. The participation should be informed as well. Anything that exists or happens does not exist or has not happened so long as nobody knows that it exists or has happened. What these postulates mean is that media play a vital role in making things known, and the manner, method, timing, choice, depth, range and reach of information that they purvey largely determine the average person's understanding of events and issues.

The media does not stop with dissemination of information. They leaven it with interpretation and analysis which, by their very nature, involve value judgments. At least in the case of the print media, if one has the inclination, one can find the time to ruminate, refer to alternative sources, bring one's own correctives to bear, come to one's own conclusion. Whereas the impact of whatever comes out of the electronic media is instant and electric, all the more powerful for being visual. The viewer has either to take it or lump it, since what is said and shown acquire an aura of finality. The viewer suffers from a further handicap of being unable to recall or retain the images that displace one another in quick succession, or piece them together to form a meaningful pattern.

World in a whirl

Yet another factor causing bewilderment to both the media and the lay public is a direct fallout of the knowledge explosion and information technology revolution. The media has to function in a world which is in a whirl. They have to be on top of transactions characterised by the four Vs of volume, velocity, variety and versatility. They have to do all that circus artistes do: Perform a balancing act, walk the tight rope, do the flying trapeze, and shove the head into the mouth of the lion of customer-preference. All this without losing proportion or perspective.

No wonder, attempts to evaluate and measure the contribution of media to a society's and a country's development and achievements bump into the problem of too many variables and the difficulty of prioritising and weighting them. Also, they perforce have to take account of the degree of the media's responsibility not simply to inform and interpret but to act as an agent of change. These goals are no doubt broad and diffuse, but narrowing the scope also does not make for an easy assessment. For example, how to put a value on the leverage media exercises on governance, corporate and national?

Volatility of moods and sentiments

In this background, the challenges confronting the business and financial media are even more daunting. The extent to which this section of the media can be customised to steer markets, banking, financial and insurance sectors, or the course and pace of economic reforms is a moot question. Can it take on the task of monitoring institutions and holding economic players to account? Do disclosures and exposes help implant the culture of truth-telling? The financial media has to contend with not only the complexities of the data in terms of timeliness, topicality, accuracy and relevance but also with the volatility of moods and sentiments.

Also, there is no way the business and financial media can manipulate or manufacture data to suit their taste. The media have to accept them as given. In the context of the identical nature and universality of data, the media entities in competition with one another in the fields of finance and business can survive and succeed only by carving out distinctive, if not unique, niches for themselves with which they will be associated by their audiences. They can no longer coast along either on the strength of the laurels achieved or by peddling wares reminiscent of the generality of the main-stream media. Nor will simplistic nostrums such as using newsprint of various colours do.

Niches waiting to be exploited

The discerning will see three such special, hitherto uncatered for, slots emerging on the horizon. The first is the young global manager-cum-leader segment. He is a fully wired persona and has no problem at all accessing all the data and information he needs by surfing the web. He is also highly ambitious with no compunction about switching as often as will serve his purpose of bettering his lot as fast as possible. He reads while he runs, and has no time for prolixity or pretentiousness. He digs into the financial media not for information but for knowledge and insights presented in short, crisp, compact, concise squirts.

The second segment waiting to be wooed is the entrepreneurial class. Large numbers of talented persons, men as well as women, are turning away from the thraldom of salaried employment to be on their own. They have an unquenched thirst for the basics relating to, for example, building and running an organisation, mobilising and managing finances, including human capital, instilling the right work culture, dealing with regulators, conducting successful cross-cultural negotiations and deciding on the right investments.

Rural hinterland

The rural hinterland has cottoned on to the magic of micro-credit, and self-help groups, especially of women, are becoming a force to reckon with. The panchayat raj institutions are yet another promising avenue so far ignored by the financial media. These constituencies are casting about for guidance on drawing up locality-specific micro-plans, promoting small businesses, establishing networks of alliances, inducting appropriate, rural-oriented technologies and operating information centres to share the fruits of their experiences and exploiting the synergies of collaboration. There are also many untold success stories among them. Here is a rich pasture for the financial media to justify itself.

The third special, but neglected, area pertains to women. Gender bias floats thickly on the surface of the financial media. Women cannot be taken for granted anymore. As shareholders, investors, executives, managers, CEOs, entrepreneurs, business persons and leaders in their own right, they are shaping events in all walks of life as never before. Of absorbing interest to them are ways of freeing the work environment from sexploitation and sexual harassment, harmonisation of domestic and workplace obligations, and effecting a turnaround from a man's to a woman's world. There is plenty that can be built into the financial media to be of use to this niche.

In short, it is high time the business and financial media radically reinvented themselves, instead of being content with dishing out more of the same.

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