The ratings game is pretty easy to 'game'. I have done it in the past, as the editorial head of NDTV India. Between Nov '08 to June '09, I used every trick in the book to attract viewers, to raise NDTV India's rank from No.9 to No.4. (1/n) https://twitter.com/Nidhi/status/1304027069907718145

It was easy for me, because I had no skin in the game. I came from the English news environment and believed that I have to handle the Hindi channel for just one year. But, those who were emotionally invested in NDTV India felt ashamed and embarrassed. (2/n)

Many reporters came to me and said that they are being ridiculed in the field. Senior editors, like @ahirwal tried to dissuade me, saying that this is not the good for journalism. I ignored them, because I didn't care for the channel's reputation. (3/n)

One day I was called by Radhika & Prannoy Roy, who otherwise never intervened in my editorial autonomy. They explained to me that the path I was taking might get ratings but it will kill journalism & affect the NDTV brand. (4/n)

After about six months of being part of NDTV India, I too developed an emotional connect with the channel. I, too, felt ashamed of the tabloidisation that i was pushing, not in content, but in the presentation style of the channel. (5/n)

In July 2009, I called a meeting of the entire channel and announced that NDTV India will go back to ways of old-school TV journalism. There was a great sense of relief in the entire team. Higher ratings made us feel good, but the path embarrassed all of us. (6/n)

Since, I was good at analysing ratings, I correctly projected a 1.6% market share drop, after I withdrew a couple of shows that I had introduced to boost numbers. We took exactly a 1.6% hit the next week and dropped to No.6 - that is how tight the race is in Hindi news (7/n)

We were No.1 in the Delhi market at our peak - in June 2009, which was the biggest market. I had organised our programming very precisely to tap that market. As soon as we went back to old-school newsgathering, we slipped to No.5 in Delhi. (8/n)

Of course, there is much to the ratings game than just fixing content - there are issues of gaming meters, appearing on two channels simultaneously, getting 30 seconds of captive viewership on a landing page, etc. (9/n)

This is the price of doing journalism. Entertainment & sensation works. Hard news doesn't. This is even more true for TV, where most of hte viewership comes at the end of the day, when people are tired after a hard day's work. Tabloid TV invariably gets more ratings (10/n)

The big question is how to find a TV idiom, where we can make Important Things Interesting, instead of making Interesting Things look Important. Our experiments with Ravish ki Report, long-form stories or even my own show Simple Samachar were part of that experiment (11/n)

If the system wasn't inimical to NDTV, & the channel wasn't being forced shut in various places across India, we might have been able to make a breakthrough. We'd still not have been No.1, because literature cannot compete with pulp fiction, art cannot compete with porn. (12/12)