Aamir Khan's "Peepli (Live)" deals with news channel journalism's focus on trivial issues and their constant obsession with outsmarting the rivals and pocketing higher TRPs. Its first journalism-linked scene shows a news channel beginning a news bulletin with a breaking news announcing Shilpa Shetty's marriage with Prince William. In the present milieu, such breaking news is no laughing matter. Just months back, every news channel and all newspapers devoted enormous space and time to the inter-border marriage of Sania Mirza and Shoaib Malik. The last journalism-linked scene in "Peepli (Live)" shows a senior news channel journalist telling a junior that he has no business to be in the field if he accords priority to some mundane, trivial issues which have absolutely no TRP value.

This statement is meant to be a sarcastic comment on the state of affairs in journalism. But does it not apply equally aptly to films and television serials as well? I wonder what is wrong with newspapers and news channels going out of their way to chase stories -- trivial or not -- that will appeal to the readers or viewers and increase their readership or TRPs. A newspaper or a news channel has to constantly struggle to win the attention of a large number of readers or viewers to survive in the competitive business. They have to be the most innovative and also the swiftest.

And this is no new trend at all. Decades ago, newspapers across the world carried every minor detail of the marriage of Prince Charles with Diana. The newspaper I then worked for in Goa had stationed a photographer right in front of the television set to click  photographs of the marriage. The next day, it was the only newspaper in the Union territory to have an extensive photo coverage of the marriage of the century. When Sharad Pawar's daughter, Supriya, got married, a Pune newspaper had specially dispatched its head of the electronics team to Baramati, equipped with a scanning  machine, to transmit the photographs of the late-evening wedding function quickly so as to meet the printing deadline of the same night.

There surely is absolutely nothing wrong in such strategies by newspapers or channels with an eye on increasing their appeal for the readerships or win higher TRPs. Newspapers keep changing their look and content every few years in keeping with the changing mindset of the readers. News channels too emulate the idea. Let's welcome the trend.