Building a brand name for agri media!
Political climate critical for media freedoms to thrive.
News is not information! Only controversial news is news! In agri sector there is no scope for controversies, except farmer’s suicides! Even that doesn’t make new3s now! So, agri media must get between social and political recognition.
See even the agri universities don’t make news! No one reads what the agri scientists write! How to communicate with the common man? This is what makes Vadamalai Media unique in the otherwise commercial media space.
Vadamalai Media is now publishing four monthly magazines, mostly related to agri sector and the education field. We have evolved by now over half a century. We started off in a village where we established a rural high school and a school newsletter that has grown into a full-strength education journal. It is now an all India education journal.
The agri magazines, now three editions, one in English, Tamil and Kannada languages and they make a sizeable market, given the scope for educated farmers and all those who are committed to the vibrant agricultural sector.
The urban media and the urban elite readers are a different cup of tea.
The readers for even the quality English newspaper, experts say, are thriving in India while in the West here is a decline.
May be Indians are like the British newspapers, they read the English newspapers, though there is very little in the way of writing on agri issues and the readership is also tiny.
But our agri sector is ill-served and there is no media worth its name as far as agriculture issues are concerned. Agri media where it is, as in Tamil for instance, all write about agriculture as if it is an exotic sector. Anything exotic, readers read it.
Cultivation of exotic crops, cultivation techniques etc. is that all about agriculture. What about farmers lives? Their rural life style, changing rural economic and social scenario?
There is much emphasis on pro-government programmes. Not any critical remarks. Even farmers suicides are not fully analysed. There are not enough writers, journalists to write about 6 Indian issues.
Since we operate on small scale, we often concentrate neither on crops, cultivating techniques nor even about the current buzz on organic farming or biotechnology.
Big news organisations must do that but they don’t. We don’t want to name the big print media houses. Two of them, long and well-established, started publishing agriculture magazines, annual issues but they now stopped them. We, on the other hand arte going strong? This is our 25th year! So, something we have achieved?
There is no one to notice us, right?
No government advertisement support nor support from private corporate houses either! We, Indians have a peculiar character, we in Vadamalai believe! We Indians don’t love our country genuinely, we feel.
We imitate the West; we seem interested to read more about the British royalty. We like cricket, in a country where such a sports was an exoticism, once. Now, we wonder whether we really appreciate and enjoy cricket or for the sake of fashion?
We also have an inferiority complex, a subservient mentality and also a craze for changing jobs, a change in life style, from dress to food to imitating the Yankee life style products.
We don’t yet seem to have cultivated a sense of pride in our country, its history etc. A pride, a justified pride in India’s inherent strength in its culture and belief system are not there.
Our agri media is all about these issues not just about cultivating loss-making crops! We have built up a brand for forthright, no non-sense bold exposition of fundamental issues of great national and intentional importance. We invite our readers to respond to some of our thoughts.