Event

Media Tech 2008, Delhi

Media Tech witnessed IT Heads from media and publishing coming together to discuss technology in media and build a forum for future deliberations. By Malabika Sarkar and Neeraj Gandhi

Ajay Kaushika, General Manager (Engineering), PTI, participated in the session on Business Continuity

Satish Sharma, General Manager, South Asia, Associated Press made a point during the session on Disaster Management

CIOs exchanged ideas at Media Tech 2008 in Delhi

E Mahender, Chief Manager, Ushodaya Publications, discussed the IT challenges faced by regional newspapers

The second edition of the Media Tech was organized in New Delhi on April 25, 2008. All roads, at least for the IT Heads and CIOs of large media houses from across the country, led to the Oberoi Hotel in the capital.

This one of its kind IT event taking place in the capital for the first time (the first edition took place in Mumbai) focused entirely on the issues concerning CIOs and IT Heads of various media companies. Starting with an informal warm up session, the participants mingled and arrived at a common plane for the day long discussion.

The pre-event tea break enabled moderator, Niyam Bhushan, a veteran in the IT industry, spanning five disciplines, including publishing and new media, to break the ice. Welcoming everyone, Bhushan said, “It’s quite ironical that we, the people in the media who are in the business of communication seldom meet. So it’s great that we have gathered.” He said that the meeting would be an effort to build a platform for further meetings and build a forum for discussion. He then invited all the participants to light the lamp to formally begin the proceedings.

The topics for discussion were Challenges at work, Digital convergence, Business Continuity & Disaster management and Open Source.

Challenges at work

To set the ball rolling, Bhushan started the session by encouraging delegates to discuss and share their top-of-the-mind challenges that they had faced in their day-to-day routine. He, then, passed on the microphone to Nirwan Biswas, Head of Technology, MID DAY Multimedia Ltd to share his thoughts on the issue. Biswas said, “Our group has taken a lot of digital initiatives in the last six months. As a result, the content that is being digitized has increased manifold. Managing this digital content has become a big struggle for us. In addition, we also have to understand the changing needs of the consumer and how he wants news to be presented to him, which is another challenge.”

He continued, “There is systems support available in areas like Telecom. However, there are hardly any vendors who stress on changing needs of a consumer from the publishing side. There is also a dire need for a Tier II vendor to fill in the gap between the Tier I and Tier III vendor.”

Adding to the comments, H R Mohan, Associate VP, Systems, The Hindu, said, “The Hindu has always been ahead in adopting technology, but there are causalities and concerns associated with this also. Whenever we adopt new technology, and by the time we implement it and are ready to use it, the technology changes. The biggest task for us; however, is content sharing and content generation. Another significant challenge is to archive content, classify and tag it. Digitizing content brings with it the problem of managing a huge number of HTML tags.”

Among the issues that Mohan talked about, the problem with archiving generated maximum response. As the discussion went ahead, it was clear that the problem with archiving was one critical aspect in technology for the media organizations that needed to be addressed. “Archiving is a huge task. Who is to decide what should be archived? Also, I want to ask what value archiving bring to an organization. With content lying all over the Web, is there a need to archive at all,” opined RD Bhatnagar, CTO, The Bhaskar Group.

Wing Cdr R S BORA (Retd), Director- Technical, Lokmat Newspaper responding to the question on what to archive or not, said, “Archiving is important when the news is not known. There was an incident in Nagpur when a group of women lynched a criminal to death. When the inquiry was ordered into the incident, a London-based paper wanted to carry a photograph of the same incident. They contacted us since they found that particular photograph on our Web site.”

“Archiving is must. People like to share archives and assets. Let us not look only at the monetary benefits of archiving. Instead, there is a need to create a common platform to pick up news and photographs from,” added Satish Sharma, General Manager, South Asia, Associated Press.

Another big problem, said E Mahender, Chief Manager, Ushodaya Publications, “From the perspective of a vernacular newspaper, the content in a particular language is huge, and it is difficult to retrieve this data. Besides, there is the issue of regional fonts also, since Unicode has not been made available on most of these fonts.” Bhushan added, “Web sites like wikinews, and archive.org contain all information emanating from the West in a digitized format. So is there a need for a centralized repository in India too.”

With the first session on the verge of ending, the participants passed a resolution, which read - Creation of a Special Interest Group in news archives, and hosting of Mediatech.in.

Biswas of MID DAY volunteered for this task.

Digital convergence

The discussion in this session revolved around the need for newspapers to diversify on the Web. The fact that the Internet has brought everybody, TV or newspaper or magazines on to the same platform, it has also created the need for each to diversify and offer more to consumers. A case in reference was news channel Web sites having the story in the written format besides the broadcast? Therefore, even newspapers need to diversify and utilize the opportunity that new media represents. This would help them generate revenue.

Bhatnagar pitched in with the example of his own organization where news is being made and used on different media. “Our group has a multimedia desk. We have created a parallel organization, which looks into this aspect. So when a journalist files a story, it is posted on the intranet within the organization. This story then goes to print and the multimedia desk. This multimedia desk then SMS’ this news to mobile subscribers, and then restructures the story for the online version. This news then also goes to the radio jockeys.”

Snehasis Chanda Roy, Group Head, Technical, Dainik Bhaskar, opined otherwise. He said, “Convincing the management about setting up a multimedia desk is easy. The problem is how do we show revenue to the management! Firstly, the investment at present in the multimedia concept is low. Secondly, the technological interface for doing stories on different platforms is not available yet.”

In the end, Bhushan said that the concurrent media is the driving force today and the newspaper industry has to find a way to tap this business opportunity, and incorporate the multimedia journalist concept into media organizations.

Business Continuity and Disaster management

This was perhaps the most interesting session and it generated a good response. In this session, CIOs discussed their disaster management strategies and also shared their experiences as to how they got business going as usual when disaster struck.

Again to start things off, Bhushan put forward the example of how MobileComm got its network running during the 9/11 attacks. He said that at a time when all landlines were jammed, the only communication that was possible was through the MobileComm network. That said, he asked the participants about what kind of disaster management policy should be adopted.

Tridib Bordoloi, IT Head, The Express Group, said, “Whatever transformation in technology has to happen will happen. In this changing environment we cannot afford downtime. Downtime for an organization like ours can be disastrous. One cannot depend on a standard for business continuity.”

Ajay Kaushika, General Manager (Engineering), PTI, shared his own experience to present the real picture. He said, “Being a news agency, we provide news feeds to our subscribers. During the sealing drive in Delhi, The Indian Express Office was sealed at Qutub Institutional Area. With the Internet infrastructure down at their end, we were unable to send them news feeds. Besides, we had to quickly come up with a contingency plan. So we asked them to get their VSAT equipment on line, and we were successful in sending the news feeds.”

“A disaster not only hurts the subscribers (newspapers) but also us. Within PTI we have set up infrastructure like power backup, UPS backup array and a small network within the office to get things going in the event of a disaster,” Kaushika added.

Sharma added, “Disaster management is all about planning. Even AP had to suffer during the sealing drive. It was a day after the Tsunami had struck, and we had to send pictures. We somehow managed to connect a secure channel Internet connection through PTI to our London office and were able to send the pictures. As a part of our policy we have SAT phones in our bureau at all times. In fact AP managed to get picture from Kargil only because we had SAT phones.”

Open Source

Open source was final topic of discussion. Before the discussion commenced, Bhushan took a poll as to how many CIOs had leveraged open source applications at their organizations and what had been their experience. To everybody’s surprise, only a handful said yes. Since The Express Group uses open source applications, Bordoloi was asked to share his experience.

“The Express Group had to face huge technical problems from 1991 to 2004. It was post 2004 that technological upgrading started. We went ahead with upgrading in a live environment. We proceeded with Linux. As of now we have applications on the server front running on open source. We are now going ahead with SAP and have tied up Red Hat,” said Bordoloi.

Then, Venkatesh Hariharan, Co- Founder, Open Source Foundation of India was asked to give an overview of open source applications to the participants. He discussed the benefits of open source, the whole philosophy of the Open Source Community, and how open source is a whole ecosystem. “There are three principles that underline open source- the power of collaboration, community of common interest and sharing of knowledge,” he concluded.

malabika.sarkar@expressindia.com
neeraj.gandhi@expressindia.com