Journalists at the Bharatiya Janata Party's silver jubilee convention in Mumbai, besides reporting on the tidbits that emerge from the meet, are debating a wholly different issue: whether or not will Rajdeep Sardesai's new channel CNN-IBN be able to give the well-established, Prannoy Roy-managed NDTV 24x7 a run for its money.
Columnist Kalyani Shankar believes that NDTV has an advantage over CNN-IBN as it (NDTV) has many known faces and its core team is more or less intact, while Rajdeep Sardesai has to sell his channel entirely on his own brand equity.
"It is a new concept in India that a channel is trying to sustain itself on a single brand name. However, it is too early to say if it will click or not. Rajdeep's team might be able to give tough competition to NDTV. It is clear that the competition is between these two channels," she said, speaking to rediff.com.
But those who saw the coverage of the terrorist attack at the prestigious Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore (in which one professor -- Dr M C Puri -- was killed and four others were injured) on television give Sardesai's channel an edge over NDTV.
"Rajdeep was simply brilliant. His team was way ahead of not just his immediate rival, but other television channels as well," claimed a senior journalist, known for his proximity to Rajdeep.
When contacted on phone, Sardesai himself said that he is doing what he had promised. "Work is still in progress. I had promised a journalist-driven channel to the people and that is what I am doing. The taste of the pudding lies in its eating," he said.
His supporters claim that on the first day of the launch itself, CNN-IBN had beaten NDTV in viewership as also market share. "But this could also have happened more out of curiosity for a new channel," said an NDTV reporter who had flown down from Delhi to cover the BJP convention.
Coverage of the Bangalore incident provided an insight into how keen is the competition between the two rival channels. Realising the importance of the event Rajdeep raised the profile of the coverage by anchoring it himself and directing his reporters from the CNN-IBN studio in Noida near Delhi.
NDTV countered it by putting their best crime reporters on the job. It also inducted its managing editor Barkha Dutt to provide intelligence inputs on the story and give it a different angle. Yet, most journalists believe that Rajdeep managed to score over NDTV by beaming pictures of Dr Puri's family while other channels were still looking for them.
"In the Bilkis Bano case too, we were way ahead of our rival group," claimed a CNN-IBN reporter in Mumbai.
But sustenance is the name of the game in the electronic media and it remains to be seen who gets better of the other: NDTV or CNN-IBN.
