News Broadcasting
Network18 Media shuffles senior management
MUMBAI: Reliance Industries group company Network18 has made some senior management changes, which it made public through a regulatory filing on the Bombay stock exchange on 12 October 2024.
Shweta Gupta has been appointed as company secretary and compliance officer, replacing Nitten Gupta as the compliance officer who moved out of Network18 on 12 October 2024.
Sanchayan Paul has also been roped in as chief human resource officer who will join Network18 from 1 November 2024. He replaces P. Sakthivel who will be moving into another role within the company from 31 October 2024. The company had made the announcement of Sachayan’s joining as CHRO designate in June 2024.
Gupta is a qualified company secretary & law graduate with more than 20 years’ experience in the areas of secretarial, corporate governance, legal and compliance functions. Her last posting was as company secretary & compliance officer & legal head of Gulf Oil Lubricants India, a Hinduja group company. Before Gulf, she was associated with Hindalco Industries and JSW Steel.
A graduate from Delhi university and a postgraduate from XLRI Jamshedpur, Sanchayan is a a veteran HR professional with more than 25 years’ experience. He was previously associated with Modenik Lifestyle, a PE-backed enterprise that he landed into after journeying through companies as varied as Reliance Industries, Thomson Reuters, Eicher Consulting Services, Hutchison Essar Telecom and Vodafone. He also took a stab at entrepreneurship, founding KaryaMitr, a tech-enabled platform for skill building and training aimed at the vernacular workspace. Sanchayan has also completed his digital business leadership pogramme from Cornell University.
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.
