Footage

So after a fifteen year gap, I was in the Times of India yesterday, writing about the joys of working from home (I’d shared the clipping yesterday, sharing it again). The interesting thing is that this piece got me the kind of attention that I very rarely got with my six  years with the HT Media family (Mint and Hindustan Times).

The main reason, I guess, that this got far more footage, was that it came in a newspaper with a really high circulation. ToI is by far the number one English newspaper in India. While HT may be number two, we don’t even know how much of a number two it is, since it seemingly didn’t participate in the last Indian Readership Survey.

Moreover, ToI is read widely by people in my network. While the same might be true of Mint (at least until its distribution in Bangalore went kaput), it was surely not the case with HT. I didn’t know anyone who read the paper, and since my articles mostly never appeared online, they seemed to go into a black hole.

Another reason why my article got noticed so widely was the positioning in the paper – it was part of ToI’s massively extended “page one” (it came on the back of the front page, which was full of advertisements). So anyone who picked up the paper would have seen this in the first “real page of news” (though this page was filled with analysis of working from home).

On top of all this, I think my mugshot accompanying the article made a lot of difference. While the title of the article itself might have been missed by a few, my photo popping out of there (it helps I have the same photo on my Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and WhatsApp – thanks Anuroop) ensured that anyone who paid remote attention to my face would end up reading the article, and that helped me get further reach among my existing network.

ToI is going to pay me a nominal amount for this article, far less than what Mint or HT used to pay me per piece (then again, this one is completely non-technical), but I don’t seem to mind it at all. That it’s given me much more reach among my network means that I’m satisfied with ToI’s nominal payment.

Thinking about it, if we think of newspapers as three-sided markets connecting writers, readers and advertisers, it is possible that others who write for ToI do so for below market prices as well, for it has an incredibly large reach among “people like us”. And that sets the size-related network effects (“flywheel” as silicon valley types like to call it) in action among the writer side as well -you don’t write for money along, and if it can be sort of guaranteed that a larger number of people will read what you write, you will be willing to take lower payment.

In any case, this ToI thingy was a one-off (the last time I’d written for them was way back in 2005, when I was a student – it’s incredible I’ve given this post the same title as that one. I guess I haven’t grown up). But I may not mind doing more of such stuff for them. The more obscure the paper, though, the higher I’ll be inclined to charge! Oh, and henceforth, I’ll insist my mugshot goes with everything I write, even if that lowers my monetary fees.