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.