At the Indian Magazine Congress 2024, held in Mumbai's Taj Santa Cruz Hotel, Raj Chengappa, Group Editorial Director (Publishing), India Today Group, spoke on "Magazine Journalism as an idea and its relevance in the digital world."
Noting that he was not an owner-editor, unlike many other speakers at the Congress, Chengappa said "I'm a worker-bee editor. And when Anant (Nath) talked of the theme, new revenue strategies, he talked of reaching across the wall. Maybe I'm on this side of the wall, in some sense, and trying to now understand the other side of the wall that's there. But of course, I've been around for 40 years in magazine journalism."
Adding that the day of the conference was the same day that the latest edition of India Today magazine came out, “And strangely enough, the headline of that is what you're seeing here, 'the big battle for survival.' And of course, it deals with the state that we are currently in, in Maharashtra as well as other swing states."
"But it was very appropriate for this occasion because I think we are fighting a major battle for survival ourselves. We have this existentialist question that bothers us every day and bothers me as an editor every day: Who am I? What am I? Why do I exist? What purpose do I serve? It's just not an individual question. It's also the magazine's question. Every day we ask this of ourselves. What are we doing in India Today magazine?"
"And I thought of us as really the Maharajas of storytellers. And people forget that value. When you get into the digital world, you think the moving picture, the audio, everything else is so important. And therefore, it's overtaking us. But you cannot beat magazines. And why would that be? Take a photograph. Try and look at it on your mobile and try and look at it in a magazine spread and the impact difference that you get. That's what I'm talking about. You just cannot replicate all that you do in a magazine,” he said.
Chengappa noted that apart from the pictorials, graphs and other content, what really stood out in a magazine was its writing, and set it apart from other media. "You bring a reader in. Sometimes what happens is that if you look at TV, you're not getting the feel. But when you write, that is the power we have to bring. It's not that we should disinvest and do digital and other forms. We need to reinvest in great journalism.”
Chengappa said it was quality work that would help connect magazines and audiences, something that previous speakers had also said, and were vital to the
survival of the industry. He added that previously it was a numbers game, about producing and pushing quantity so as to show off high numbers and attract advertisers.
"I think value is the key now. How do you curate and how do you bring what is really good for the reader and you understand that reader or the listener or the viewer, whichever way you want to communicate in terms of that? And the other thing that I found was, we are in the age of what I call a retention deficit disorder. And the reason is that when you see a moving screen, when you read off this mobile or whatever it is, you don't tend to retain as much as when you hold a magazine, you flip it, and you take a photograph in your mind.”
Indeed, according to Chengappa, it was this tactile, real feel of the magazine, of handling it, perusing it, even smelling the fresh pages that made people still have a yen for magazines and an appreciation for the content they create, a feeling that cold digital can in no way replace.
