News Broadcasting
Mirror Now & govt working together on public issues without yelling, says Faye D’souza
MUMBAI: Mirror Now, one of the newest English channels, has not done any marketing since its launch around six months ago. Covering all Indian cities, Mirror Now claims to have got a good response especially from Bangalore and Chennai.
The channel and the government are working together on public issues. “The central, Maharashtra and Karnataka government are working closely with us on public issues,” says Mirror Now executive editor Faye D’Souza.
“Our strongest markets are — Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore. And, we have beaten our internal target a lot faster — the target set for a year has already been completed.” “We don’t yell, but ask tough questions politely,” she asserted.
Speaking to Indiantelevision.com, she said, “We are introducing shows and working on new concepts. We are working on morning primetime from 7-10am, early evening prime time 5:30pm onwards. Our disruptive shows will be on our late prime time shows — from 11pm -1am.”
Talking about content, D’Souza added, “Stories are coming from across India. We get 25-30 calls/hour during our prime time shows.” To a question she said, “Despite being a small team of 25, our content speaks louder than marketing, the ratio being 95:5.”
About measuring success, the executive editor says, “I look at two yardsticks, first one is numbers from the BARC India point of view, and secondly what type of response you are getting from the social media.”
On the marketing front, she said: “We didn’t launch it on a large platform, having marketing campaign across the country even as, being a Times group channel, everything was available to us.”
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News Broadcasting
News TV viewership jumps 33 per cent as West Asia war draws audiences
BARC Week 8 data shows news share rising to 8 per cent despite T20 World Cup
NEW DELHI:Â Even as individual television news channel ratings remain under a temporary pause, the genre itself is seeing a clear surge in audience attention.
According to the latest data from Broadcast Audience Research Council India, television news recorded a 33 per cent jump in genre share in Week 8 of 2026, covering February 28 to March 6.
The news genre accounted for 8 per cent of total television viewership during the week, up from 6 per cent the previous week. The spike in attention coincided with escalating geopolitical tensions involving the United States, Israel and Iran, which have kept global headlines firmly fixed on West Asia.
The rise is notable because it came at a time when cricket was dominating television screens. The high-stakes stages of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, including the Super 8 fixtures and semi-finals, were being broadcast during the same period.
Despite the cricket frenzy, viewers appeared to be toggling between sport and global affairs, boosting the overall share of news programming.
The surge in genre share comes even as the government has enforced a one-month pause on publishing ratings for individual news channels. The move followed regulatory scrutiny of the television ratings ecosystem.
While channel-level rankings remain temporarily out of sight, the genre-level data suggests that when global tensions escalate, audiences continue to turn to television news for real-time updates.
