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Advent of Free sheeters in Goa
Perhaps the first free-sheeter to hit Goa was Vasco Watch, edited by Cmdr (Retd) A. Narayanan who is associated with the group Citizen's Watch. His attempt at Margao News was not half as successful, basically because there was no significant local involvement and input in Margao. Local involvement is the essence of a free-sheeter. Perhaps, the Salcete News spread the 'local' context too wide and did not do too well, either.
Coming to North Goa, the pioneer was Panjim Pulse. In my opinion it did not place its finger properly on the pulse of the citizens in this thriving town and its municipal council (now corporation). Its readership should have crossed the ten thousand copies mark by now, but the Panjim Pulse is nowhere to be seen. It does not have a 'presence' that is so important for survival. More than a year later came Panjim Plus, which is doing reasonably well as a monthly newsmagazine. Obviously, it could do better. Panaji is such a 'happening' place that a weekly free-sheeter could grow comfortably covering the cultural events, exhibitions, sales, educational scene, etc. Perhaps, the would-be journalists from the non-formal courses in journalism at the Mushtifund Institute and elsewhere will 'jam-up' to fill this void sooner rather than later.
The Plus series began with the Mapusa Plus on July 04, 2001, first as a fortnightly and later, after crossing the quarter-century mark, as a monthly newsmagazine. The trigger for this paper was a college student, Rohini Swamy, who made a foray into journalism like a meteor. She did so, before moving off as quickly, after moving through a couple of local newsrooms. (Rohini is back reporting for an outstation TV network, posted in Goa.) It was Sapna Sardesai who sustained Mapusa Plus production, while her co-directors in Wordsworth Communications Ltd. led by Lester Fernandes generated the revenues by 'marketing' advertisement space. This writer have been associated with this free-sheeter as its consultant editor and mid-wife from the very first issue. Two years and a little re-structuring later, the labour pains are visible in Mapusa Plus, but, after 35 odd issues, I do not know whether the issue will be delivered or aborted. There is little that a midwife can do if there is a congenital complication.
The Plus group also entered the Margao area simultaneously with Panjim in December 2001. The Margao Plus is as robust as its publisher, Roque Fernandes. From August 2003, he has fathered the Ponda Plus through a new partner, Diamond Publications. The Ponda Plus is the first free-sheeter to start off with glossy art paper and colour printing, not the humble black printing on grey newsprint paper of all its forerunners. It has got no competitors in its class in Goa. The Ponda Plus has raised the ante. It has got class, it has got good readership and it is still free. Hard work pays, hard sell pays better. Roque is doing both: hard work and hard sell. The results are visible in black and white – and in colour! The challenge now is to do better than that and still be free.
What makes a free-sheeter tick: Ask any good physician and he (or, as per the recent trend in MBBS graduation, she) will tell you that one's circulation must be good. Whether it is blood, air or free-sheeter, your health depends on its 'circulation'. There is no other way. A well produced free-sheeter is easier to circulate because it is free. Once it has attracted the attention and reached the hands of a potential reader, it will be glanced through even if it is not read in detail.
That is a wonderful way to deliver a well-designed advertisement to a potential buyer of any goods or services. It makes more sense for a local shopkeeper or institution to advertise in a 'local' free-sheeter than a state-wide newspaper with ten times bigger circulation (and, subsequently, far higher advertising rates). Most free-sheeters have a circulation of 3,000 to 5,000 copies, a figure which ranks better than some mainstream newspapers in Goa. A free-sheeter is a better vehicle, less expensive and less bothersome to handle than a 'flier' inserted in a newspaper for local distribution. A flier is often discarded unread. Not so with a free-sheeter. It pays to advertise in a free-sheeter. The advertisements pay to keep the free-sheeter alive and free.
Miguel Braganza Consultant Editor & Horticulturist, Mapusa Goa.
Chapter 15: Journalism in Goa: An outsider looks in
Shiv Kumar
Shiv Kumar is a Mumbai-based journalist who occasionally para-drops into Goa for some sun, sea and opportunities to tilt at a few windmills there. A journalist, a freelance and subsequently as a full-timer since 1992, Shiv Kumar was the Goa correspondent of The Indian Express from 1998 to 2000. After moving back to Mumbai, he is with the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS).
Today, happily there is a vast talent pool of journalists among the Goan Diaspora that is making its mark in news media across the world. The movement of journalists from Goa to newsrooms across the globe is perennial. The Middle East and the West are popular destinations but then so is Mumbai: a popular stepping stone to this peripatetic breed. Reporters, deskies, the butterflies flitting through the features pages… one can count first generation migrant Goans everywhere.
As a rookie reporter in Mumbai in the 1990s, lesson one was about Goan journos fresh off the boat (the Bombay-Goa steamer was a recent memory then) gladly beginning at the bottom despite having done duty in one of Goa's three English-language newspapers. Editors marveled at the `material' coming out of Goa with well-rounded exposure in a city where people are quickly slotted into different 'beats'.
At first, one wondered why someone with several years' experience in the profession was willing to take the bullshit dished out by preppies all for a measly six grand gross monthly. And just when we got used to seeing their bylines, off to the Gulf the Goenkars went.
The penny dropped much later when one moved to Goa on assignment. Poor pay and lousy working environments surely could not make up for Goa's fabled joys of life. But then Mumbai's charms too quickly faded in the face of the daily grind one had to endure. So it was only a matter of time before the Goans pulled up their posts and set sail Westwards, to the Middle East and to other uncharted territories.
One doesn't have to go too far – only till the Goajourno Mailing List (http://indialists.org/mailman/listinfo/goajourno) – to figure out how far the hack pack from Goa go. They are out there in Bangkok bringing out a jumbo newspaper for a community that can barely read English. In Fiji, from where the Indian population flees after every coup d'etat, journos of Goan origin move in the reverse direction. In Stockholm, it was a Goan journalist who found himself on the headlines while trailing the killers of a Swedish Prime Minister.
So why do journalists from Goa bloom only on alien terrain?
A conversation I had with the venerable Lambert Mascarenhas comes to mind. Just settling in for a long chat at someone's house at Dona Paula, Mascarenhas asked me why I was not trying my luck outside. I told him about the variety of experience I enjoyed as a journalist, the wide range of stories I could do and the opportunities to travel though the profession paid only slightly more than my earlier employer, the government.
Free Goa's first English-language editor sighed, nodded his head wisely and told me no newspaper in Goa would ever send out a reporter even to cover a major event. "And the money is so much better… the Gulf newspapers pay so much more," Mascarenhas told me. Perhaps Mascarenhas would have thought differently had newspaper owners in Goa exhibited more commitment to professionalism. Just browsing through the back issues of Goa Today edited by Manohar Shetty proved to be an eye-opener on what could have been.
With Devika Sequiera and others, the old Goa Today turned out to be a delightful surprise. Well researched and crisply written stories like the ones on the protests against charter tourism in the early 1990s were a joy to read long after the magazine became a pale shadow of itself.
One saw similar flashes of the classic fire in the belly kind of journalism during the agitation against Meta Strips metal recycling plant four years ago. But matters have since slipped back into the safe routine of old. While mediapersons elsewhere in the country are agitated over the loss of substance to the infusion of style and gloss in the age of colour, it's prolonged siesta time in Goa.
The English-language newspaper market ensures that the readership is carved equally among both the players. Just 2000 copies separate the number one daily oHeraldo and the runner-up Navhind Times as per the latest Audit Bureau of Circulation survey. But with neither of them aiming to break out for total dominance there is little investment either in editorial or in printing technologies.
Though tourism is major contributor to Goa's revenues, the newspapers offer little to a visitor. The colour and vitality of the tiny state simply does not reflect in its English-language newspapers. Though it is the beach belt that draws all the tourists, there is very little coverage from these areas in the local newspapers. As one senior journalist remarked to me, Goa moves simultaneously on two parallel lines. And the beach belt is a whole world away from the hinterland that provides all of Goa's journalists. So the hotels and the party scene appear rarely on their radar, and that too only when disgruntled politicians in the area rake up environmental or other issues.
There is a thriving party scene on the beach belt that could have been happening on some other planet going strictly by the newspapers in Goa. Purely as a marketing play, newspapers here should be allocating resources to ensure adequate coverage of the tourism sector. There are any number of marketers eager to tap the floating tourist population and the newspapers here missing out on big opportunities.
But then even the coverage of day to day issues in Goa's English-language newspapers leaves much to be desired. During the two years I spent in Goa, I can remember barely three or four memorable stories from the state's three English-language newspapers. The regional language newspapers, on the other hand, have stolen a march over their English-language counterparts as publications of record. A comprehensive coverage of Goa, aided by a network of stringers spread all over the state, ensured that the Marathi Tarun Bharat was a newspaper of choice for anyone looking for a bird's eye-view of Goa every morning.
Tarun Bharat's strategy to topple existing market leader Gomantak by investing in people and technology makes an interesting case study in the newspaper business. With very little marketing muscle on the lines of the Times group or Dainik Bhaskar to speak of, the newspaper simply worked at reporting from the grassroots to capture a leadership position in the market. That Tarun Bharat has still not found favour among Goa's Marathi-speaking intelligentsia is another story.
On the other hand, Goa's English-language newspapers have sold out to petty politicians and the mining lobbies as weightier examples from other contributors to this e-book indicate. Lethargy runs so deep that there is little coverage of even the staples like society, courts, crime and health that form the backbone of newspapers all over the world. Owners of English-language newspapers here are so indifferent that the photographers on the rolls have to bring their own cameras to work – something unheard off in the mainstream media.
So the big stories in Goa are buried in two-para dispatches from the mofussils. I still cannot figure out why the dispute between a section of gaunkars in Cuncolim and the Catholic Church received poor display in Goan newspapers. Here was a big story of unresolved caste conflicts that transcended religious conversion and economic prosperity spread over half a millenium. Let alone dwell on the academic angles in the edit pages, Goa's English-language newspapers, barring the Herald, downplayed the story. Even Herald's reportage consisted of allegations and counter allegations from interested parties with out any indepth coverage. I am happy to say that my then newspaper, The Indian Express played up my stories on the episode prominently as the anchor on the front page nationally. Unfortunately even after the national and international media picked it up, there was little improvement in the coverage by the local press.
Another story played out as a farce in Goa's English-language newspapers: when former chief minister Shashikala Kakodkar's estranged husband passed away, the news received prominent display in all the major English-language newspapers. Only the lady's relationship with the deceased was suppressed in the obit!
With complete censorship, voluntary or otherwise, Goan journalists seem to exist in a blissful state of non-competitiveness. Trained to break stories and score one on the competition, I was amazed at the unofficial news pool system that operates at the Press Room at the Panjim Secretariat. The twice-daily 'edit meets' at the Adil Shahi palace ensures that only the very junior reporters intimidated by the Press Room circle break stories of any importance. One could depend on the juniors at The Herald and Gomantak Times (under Ashwin Tombat ) to put out at least one readable story a day.
Understandably, Goa's newspapers survive on a staple of political verbiage all generated from the safe confines of the Press Room. Unverified allegations that would not pass muster with even a trainee in a national newspaper find play on the front pages. With no facility to train journalists in the state, trainees here look towards the Press Room as some kind of a finishing school!
Over the years, the Press Room crowd have attached themselves to the camps of different politicians. It's a temptation common to journalists in every small town and Goan journalists have fallen neck deep in it. With nothing exciting enough, politics becomes the all-consuming passion for 'senior journalists'. So the current storm over journalists accused of obtaining favours from the current BJP-run dispensation comes as no surprise.
It has always been easy for journalists to be sucked into different political camps considering the proliferation of politicians in the state. There are 40 MLAs, three MPs – including one in the Rajya Sabha – and scores of municipal/panchayat level 'leaders' for a population of less than 1.4 million which includes the Gulfies and shippies).
Even junior reporters easily manage to invite a minister or two for family functions. Journalists are also not above seeking the help of politicians to solve problems even in their workplaces. Many of them even grow to depend on the ruling politicians for basics like accommodation in the capital because of inadequate remuneration from their employers.
It's the same story everywhere in the country, but the sheer number of journalists in a big city like Mumbai or Delhi helps mask the dilution of ethics among a select few. Like everywhere else in the world a few journalists in Goa too happily combine their jobs and elective roles as fixers for politicians. The icing on the cake is however to inveigle into a chief minister's coterie thereby ensuring government contracts for self or family members.
Under the chief ministership of Manohar Parrikar, the issue has hit the headlines especially after Rajan Narayan announced his resignation from the Herald (in September 2003). But during his days in the opposition, Parrikar slogged at wooing the media. As leader of the Opposition, Parrikar could be depended upon to come up with all sorts of files to put the then Congress government on the mat. Journalists looking for a juicy story never returned disappointed. To be fair to Parrikar he did not even hint about the need for a quid pro quo from the journalists tapping him for information on the then Congress government.
Journalists who are now accused of obtaining favours from the incumbent chief minister were even then known to be part of Parrikar's coterie, though a large number of journalists sought out the former leader of the opposition. However with the media eating out of his hands, Parrikar had the mantle of Mr Clean wrapped on his shoulders – either by design or by default. One now gets the feeling that a small group of journalists probably played a part in building Parrikar's reputation with the expectations of being paid back at an appropriate time. Agreed, there is genuine admiration for the man – IIT Bombay alumni, quick acting, with a vision for the middle class, etc. But the cause of good journalism is compromised.
Today, there is very little criticism coming up against the ruling BJP government in Goan newspapers. For instance, there has been very muted coverage of some elements in Parrikar's cabinet – like a minister who is rumoured to be pushing illegals into Europe. Another worthy has a reputation of being a ruthless moneylender whose rumored 'sex scandals' could even put Jalgaon to shame, as the BJP leadership is itself known to have once argued.
The kid-glove treatment meted out to the BJP government has also been extended to the extend Sangh parivar, despite the ideological opposition to it in many sections of the Goan society. Parrikar's handing over government schools to unregistered groups of alleged RSS-linked activists barely registers a presence in local discourse even among members of the minority Christian community traditionally opposed to right-wing Hindu politics.
While the reluctance of local newspapers to rattle the ruling politicians is understandable, there is really no reason for correspondents of outstation newspapers to follow suit. But for a couple of honorable exceptions, correspondents with outstation publications too have decided to toe the government line. Unfortunately for Goa, the market is too small to attract the attention of any national or international investor in the media scene.
Most of the quarter-million or so households in Goa who can afford to do so, already buy a newspaper and a new investor can only hope to net a marginal increase in circulation. The failure of The Times of India to penetrate the Goan market is a case in point. With its financial muscle, the Times was best placed to shake up the Goan market. Even while skirting controversial issues, the newspaper could have made an impact with a comprehensive coverage of Goa. But the newspaper clearly did not see it worthwhile to continue and pulled out after a four-year long presence, and 'Goa edition' plans, in the state.
Even the Sakal group, the other outside group to enter Goa, has not been able to figure out the English-language newspaper market here. Having bought over the Gomantak from the Chowgules, the Sakal group does not seem to be interested in making big-ticket investments in the English-language Gomantak Times. As Goa's third English-language daily continues to bleed, there is a very strong possibility that there would be one less player in the English language market in the near future.
One can only hope that increased competition following the entry of foreign publications in India provides enough incentives for future players to dig their heels deeper into the Goan market. Hopefully, national players in the media business and expatriate Goans will see a market in selling quality journalism in Goa.
Chapter 16: An accidental Bhailo
Rahul Goswami
Rahul Goswami, one of Goa's most hardworking and innovative outstation correspondent, covered this state for the Business Standard, in the mid-nineties. He is today based in Singapore. On a lighter note, RG says he was offered, several times during his stint in Goa, bribes by various colleagues envious of his posting as inducement to trade places with them. Instead, he went to Bombay to quarrel with newspaper vendors, went to the Gulf to start up a dot-bomb, went to Singapore to learn Mandarin, and is now wondering if those bribes are still on offer.
Arriving to live and work in 'aparanta' – a place beyond the end, as the Sanskrit texts would have us believe, where time stands still – was always going to be a challenge for the conscientious newspaper correspondent. Even when one does not do so blind, as I comforted myself in 1993.
It was Goa Dourada, Golden Goa, Perola do Oriente, Pearl of the East, Roma do Oriente, and other such colourfulness that I was being assigned to. The imagery was breath-taking – corsairs, corruption and conversions. There were heart-warming tales of gruff compassion – whether from the dashing Marathas or their debonair Portuguese rivals. There were edgy accounts of the rivalries of contentious nationalisms, delicious stories of grand thievery, fabulous stories of immoral profligacy, of debauched viceroys who equalled in pomp and splendour the Asian potentates they dealt with.
This was, I thought to myself, the stuff of a hundred feature stories, the mother-lode of post-colonial memorabilia, the gateway to phantasmagorical explorations. Indeed they were, but in no way that I had imagined at the outset, overcome then by the cultural fecundity of 'aparanta'. Imaging Goa, as a curious ingenue, as a journalist, as an informed participant, has never been an easy task and indeed is one that has grown more onerous over the years.
Indeed the provenance of such a view is a curious one, and yet one that is well-known. The widespread tendency in Western writing of India – and, by extension, of Goa – has been to condense the description of the scenic beauty and natural resourcefulness, the cosmopolitan life and the imagined mercantile prosperity of the early colonial period, into pastel-coloured, palatable images. So it is too with Goa Dourada, or Golden Goa.
The Goa that has been perpetuated in the newsrooms of the media conglomerates of urban India – an English construction, I would like to emphasise – has even now more in common with the hazy feel-good miasma that occulted the communal perceptions of the dharma bum generation that made its way from the West, in a slow and tortuous ganja-laden, booze-sodden crawl, through the tolerant places of the 'Third World'. The difference was, and is, that the dharma bums smoked and drank and blissfully fornicated under the moonlight that bathed the silvery beaches of 'aparanta' and dreamt of equality and human emancipation (to be fair to many of them).
The news editors and feature editors and editors-in-chief and numberless marketing imbeciles who chose to imagine Goa, within the narrow and noisome worlds that defined their own existences in the megapolis of their choosing, had on the other hand no such overarching humaneness, despite generous applications of all that is narcotic and alcoholic. 'Aparanta', I found, may welcome all comers, but it also encourages those processes that sift out the unbelievers.
How, I asked myself, is one to distinguish? What is the Goan-ness that one is seeking to understand and, if possible, to give substance to in a 1,200-word report (under the illiterate regimes that run newsrooms these days, that is a torrent of words)? Can one encapsulate all that seeks to be distilled by this multitude of experiences, of personal encounters, by listening to the narratives of the histories of Goa? And when one does become an ideological sympathiser of the dharma that is 'aparanta', how can one convey it to the hard-eyed stewards who rule over the column centimetres in Bombay or Delhi?
It was a question that had no simple answer. My own method was to attempt to blend in with the rhythms of the village in which I lived, Betim, which lies across the river Mandovi, opposite Panaji. The river is like a slow-moving artery that expresses Goa – the rusting, elderly ferries of the River Navigation Department chug across the gap with a ponderous regularity, and in doing so determine the schedules of legions of Goans who live within a short bus ride of the water – 'aparanta' tends not to respect time-pieces worn on one's wrist.
In this I was marginally successful. Mahadeo was one of my neighbours – a generously-bellied Betim elder who with surprising agility climbed into his canoe and laid his meagre nets along the river shallows. Mahadeo was also adept at catching river crabs, and when one morning I found a pair – neatly trussed and no more than two hours old – squirming outside my front door I realised with a thrill that I was accepted by the Betim-kars.
Mahadeo – despite his belly a very handsome man with a tanned visage crowned by a mop of white curls, with a commanding presence and possessing an enviable facility with a little skiff barely a foot across – was only one of a series of revelations. There were the nearby family Bhosale, whom I had been warned "were trouble", the "rowdy boys" of the village who tended to be destructive, the crooked 'possorkars' from whom I would be forced to purchase my groceries. The roll-call of potential villains was long indeed.
All unfounded. The rhythms of 'aparanta', as they found this 'bhailo' in Betim, ensured harmony. My dilemma was, how might I convey this to urban-bred news editors who have little tolerance for a mofussil correspondent's rural romanticism, as they saw it? Sometimes, fortune intervenes. In my case, while reporting for Business Standard, it came in the form of C P Kuruvilla, to my mind the most super-aware news editor of the last two decades.
Kuru, as we called him, was (he has voluntarily withdrawn from the circus that is print media, hence 'was') a maverick before the term found fashion, and was so within the relatively severe environs of the Ananda Bazar Patrika. Kuru provided the intellectual get-up-and-go that impelled a legion of correspondents to hit the road in search of stories that were to become memorable ones, and even more remarkable, was able to do so in the context of a mainstream business newspaper.
Will you find a Kuru nowadays? No, is the likely answer. Editors, sad to say, tend to be almost uniformly useless. It is left to the greater community of journalists to provide the context, the space, the encouragement, and the means. The encouragement, context and professional support has perforce now to come from within. This working alternative has not only become desirable, it has become imperative for for the non-sarkari journalists.
The problem is a systemic one today; there should have been manuals passed on, but system administrators have deleted them. Where binaries perish, we must turn to mnemonics. There was a time when some of us in The Sunday Observer successfully ran a tactical media counter-insurgency within the framework.
An immediate provocation at the time was a faux editorial regime presided over by an imposter named Pritish Nandy. Every Friday (dak edition) and every Saturday (city edition) we would have to redefine and re-take our territory and remind the insurgents that they had no place in it. It was hard work – outright threats and go-slows, files full of protest notes and minutes of meetings, and the halting evolution of a code that cut across the barriers that traditionally define a functioning news organism. I think it worked well at the time – the guerrillas who did this are still here.
Our questions were basic – why can sanitation not be "sold"? Why can education not be? Labour not be? Health not be? The elderly not be? That this not only assumes but reflects the dreadful significance of "sold" indicates why we still need guerrillas in the newsroom. These guerrillas, if they still exist and can still be drafted, will come up against some formidable mantras. "All things are more or less of equal import: all are only daily" is one. If you ask one of the system administrators she will reply: "All data are equal, but some are more equal than others."
That is why, we are reminded by those who give the system administrators their wages, the media have produced their own heroines and myths, which can compete with the traditional ones and moreover happily embroider over them. I was once advised that "journalism asks us to invest in the stock-market of momentary sensation". After such sexualist reduction, what forgiveness?
The difficulty lies in the accepted impermanence of our art, our skill, and the relentless transformation of today's news feature into tomorrow's newsprint into the day after tomorrow's wrapping paper for pakodas. The media that we construct (from the point of view of the consumer, and the brokers who interpose themselves between writer and audience) offers titillating speculations on danger, scandal, death, nightmare, opportunity.
Like a television talk-show host tripping loquaciously on industrial-strength amphetamines, it rattles noisily on, uncaring of the quiet interjections about sanitation, infant mortality, unreported police atrocities, tribal communities flooded out of their homes. And that is so both in an India that has reclaimed 'aparanta' without caring to know the topography of Goa, as it is in the desolate urban scapes that seek to define the middle classes who – reliable sources say – are the new India that seeks to spend.
The rules of the game have changed and we do need a new set of guerrillas. Newsroom disobedience is not what it used to be (is it at all what it was?). Who is willing to explore the new paradigm? It is so easy to stay in the bunker of assurances. No conclusions, no certainty; only performance analyses, management matrices, and practical wagers. We really do need a bunch of newsroom narkasurs here.
Can one seek for and hope for such a dimension in Goa? Will 'aparanta' provide it? Not readily. Early in my apprenticeship as a correspondent in Goa I ran into the local brand of sarkari thought. It was one of those endless afternoons in the old press room, the one in the corner of the Idalcao. A minion from one of the chambers above clattered in through the swing doors and muttered something. He was half asleep and so were the occupants of the press room, those who were not wrestling with the typewriters.
