“The news reporter shouldn’t become the news”, an adage that an editor of a prominent media outlet in the US pointed out, but I think, is no longer remembered by journalists. Let me tell you, the life of a reviewer is not as hunky dory as you think it is, nor is the life of a news reporter. Yes, sometimes we get to eat at five-star venues, (some of) our rooms are decorated with gifts that we get from events, and yes, sometimes the most senior among us are invited to foreign shooting schedules and are on first name terms with actors, veteran and upcoming alike.
But all of this comes at a heavy price. My readers by now, know that I am an outsider in the industry. I have been a reviewer for the past 10 years, 4 of them unpaid. Those years were good. I just used to go to a morning show, watch the film, come home and whip up a review on a site I ran. Once I joined the system, I have got numerous phrases thrown at me about reviewing films, “Be fair”, “Don’t be too harsh”. “You are reviewing this film?” “Tell me what has the actor/director done before this?”.
But that’s not the problem, the problem is that each reviewer, bar none, has to justify their review. Every sentence, every paragraph. This can be attributed, I feel, to the fact that I have yet to come across a media house (in the current scenario) that believes it can make revenue out of its review.
Here’s how the entertainment journalism and movie reviewing world works. The website plugs the film, the people associated with the film give them interviews. The readership/TRPs of those interviews are the numbers that the salespeople drive to those who wish to advertise with the media organization. Very few reviewers actually sell copies on the basis of their reviews. Mid- Day, in the 90s, understood the scope of entertainment journalism and it was one of the few newspapers to sell because of Mayank Shekhar’s interviews.
Today, online media establishments don’t understand the power of reviewers or are simply not interested in tapping it. I remember, a few years ago, a person started a movie review aggregator website – something like Rotten Tomatoes. I was one of the few ‘star’ reviewers. Everything was in place, and one just needed a man on top for the final push. In that week, the man spent three very valuable days trying to get a tie-up with a producer who was about to launch the third film in a highly successful action-heist franchise. The website never recovered from those three days of ‘The boss is at an important meeting’.
Coming to Kangana Ranaut and the recent hullabaloo. She has always had a tumultuous relationship with the media and hasn’t been one to shy away from voicing her dissatisfaction. Every field reporter I have met has had something colourful to say about Kangana. There has been a slew of actors who have faced a boycott by the media. Amitabh Bachchan was reported to have banned the press from entering his sets till 1989, in response to the media’s then boycott of the actor following allegations of attempting to shut down magazines during the Emergency.
Now, that the Kangana tiff has reached a point where the media guild has threatened to ‘officially’ boycott Kangana Ranaut, here’s what can happen. One, Ekta Kapoor will lose out on event coverage. If Kangana doesn’t arrive, journalists won’t. This is a PR nightmare and I genuinely sympathise with the PR company that’s handling this film. They didn’t know this was coming, and some of them might also have booked their vacation tickets to enjoy post the film release. There’s another side to this. If the ‘boycott’ does happen, journalists will still, I feel, make a beeline to cover events related to the film and to cover what Kangana has said, to make sure that if she does say anything more about journalists, it should make headlines. Yes, it is ironic, and yes, it will happen.
Two, Ekta Kapoor, being the smart businesswoman that she is, will tap into the ‘Influencers’ market. Most influencers are young(er) kids, some who feel that their careers will shoot up if they get a selfie with a celebrity. Some influencers prepare detailed PowerPoint presentations to demonstrate how their tweet creates a tweetstorm or at least pulls traction towards something else.
Balaji recently held some music launches and series launches at some of the most happening venues in Mumbai and it really seemed like I was at a music festival. When Balaji spends, it spends. This is why I would say Balaji deciding to turn to influencers for movie promotions will sound the death knell for the older journalists, the ones who still record their interviews and transcribe them at home, the ones who write down phone numbers on little diaries, and the ones who hold a drink in one hand and a chicken kebab in another, and with both hands raised, yell at the waiters asking if ‘there’s any fish in the menu‘.
Over to Ekta.