Hot Off the Press

Deccan Herald editor Sitharaman Shankar recently penned down a longish full-page piece on the workings of a newspaper after shadowing his own daily right from the printing press to the reader’s doorstep.

It evoked mixed reactions with some marveling at the coordinated efforts and hard work that go behind the production of a newspaper, while a select few dismissed it as an ego trip or marketing gimmick.

For those who have worked in the newspaper offices, this will strike a special chord. For someone like me who spent a good part of my working life at the newspaper desk, reading this piece was a mix of nostalgia and spotting some discerning changes that have crept in over the years.

One of the things that Shankar missed out on was the physical parting of the printing press from the newspaper office.

When I started out, many newspapers had presses located on the same premises, and the relationship between the two departments used to be frictional. 

The press superintendent will often drop in for a chat with the news editor and politely recount how the previous day’s edition could not reach certain places because the desk released the paper late. We used to look at his entry into the newsroom with a degree of hostility.

When there was some inordinate delay in the release of pages he would either walk in or call the shift in charge on the phone to enquire.

Many times an alert sub-editor may spot a mistake in a page that got released earlier in the day. A frantic call to the press will be made as a last-ditch effort to rectify the error. If lucky, the error gets fixed, or they will say the 'plates' have been made and nothing can be done. So the error gets a safe passage to the next day’s edition in cold print. 

The dressing down that follows the next day remains etched for many weeks to come, and sometimes becomes the recurring motif of nightmares.

Our interaction with the press staff used to be minimal as they get active after the newspaper is 'put to bed', and for us it is time to leave for home. It was mainly confined to a nod or a smile while bumping into them in the canteen. 

There was also a class barrier – while the editorial and marketing staff were mostly university-educated, the press staff came from more humble backgrounds with ITI certifications and diplomas. They were, however, more active in workers’ unions and in organizing strikes. 

Sometime after 2000, due to real estate constraints and the advancement of technology, most newspapers began relocating their presses to the city outskirts. 

This also brought to an end the era of open confrontation between the two departments. 

Nowadays, I guess, the press superintendent might be using phone or video-conferencing to raise his concerns.

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Those were pre-internet days and newsrooms used to be overrun by papers, with every table having some pile or the other and lots of paper strewn on the floor. 

The ever-rattling teleprinter machines dish out paper despatches from various news wires throughout the day. It was the job of the attenders to neatly cut each dispatch and leave the pile at the desk in-charge’s table.

Once the desk in-charge arrives, he/she goes through the pile and sorts news according to their importance and what pages they are meant to be carried – Page 1, city, state, nation, world, business and sports. Around 90 per cent gets dumped in a bin.

Even though boxy first-generation computers with black and white display monitors had made their entry into the newsrooms, the shift in charge used to be more comfortable in handing out ‘hard copies’ to sub-editors. The subs had to spot the story on the computer based on the time or serial number in the wire feed.

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Those were pre-social media days and once the shift gets over, one could choose to remain cut off from the news cycle till the next evening.

There was no internet or mobile phone to intrude into your day-to-day activities.

With smartphones being our constant companions, no such luxury exists.

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A Newspaper's Cri de Coeur

I was a part of the daily routine of most households and people used to read me along with the morning tea. I had an air of solemnity as I was holding mirror to the society and highlighting some of its warts. I could make or break reputations or even bring down the governments. A late editor of a leading English daily had once bragged he was holding the second-most important job in the country.

At school, teachers would advise students to read newspapers to improve vocabulary and general knowledge. And diligent civil service aspirants used to pore over my editorials, with dictionary close at hand, to help them with unfamiliar words. In pre-television days I was the ultimate window to the world.

However, right now I am facing an existential crisis and pundits have been writing my obituaries for a while. The combined onslaught of television, internet and WhatsApp forwards have been taking a heavy toll on me.

In the pre-internet days when television was the only threat to newspapers, some enterprising publishers tried to remodel me as primarily an advertising and marketing platform and dumb down on social issues. A famous press baron once even said that news is mere space filler among the advertisements, or words to that effect.

So broadsheets became tabloidized and all pages reeked of a Page 3 feel as newspapers stooped to conquer the yuppy eyeballs by providing them a feel good experience. Those working in the newsrooms started getting reprimanded by their higher-ups - please don't carry such 'downmarket' photos, our newspaper has an upmarket readership.

The coming of the internet further eroded my advertisement catchment pool. Thanks to some online classified listing platforms such as Olx and Craigslist, our clientele for classified ads disappeared. For the customers it no longer made sense to go to a newspaper office to submit an ad, pay per word and then wait for days to see it published - when all this could now be done at the click of a mouse and often at free of cost.

Remember those pages and pages of matrimonial ads on Sundays: Highly educated US-settled Iyengar Brahmin engineer looking for a 'fair' bride of the same caste, or a fair, well-educated, cultured Goud Saraswat Brahmin girl looking for an alliance; intespersed with words like 'decent' marriage (a sly hint that dowry will be offered) or 'simple' marriage (no dowry). To digress a little these columns gave a glimpse of myriad castes and other imponderables such as gotra and manglik that come into play while fixing marriages in India.

These ads too started porting off to those dime a dozen matrimonial sites such as Jeevan Saathi, Bharat Matrimony and some to more granular caste-specific sites like Nair Matrimony or even those catering to divorcees like SecondShaadi.com.

Amid all this disquiet on the advertisment front, subscriptions were also on a free fall despite dirt cheap rates. The predatory pricing by some leading players ensured that newspapers remained even cheaper than the daily chai-sutta expense of its readers.

Even in the households where I had entry, it was a coffee-table-to-attic existence, with every family member regarding me as part of the furniture. I was considered way too 'low-tech' and taxing to read because of the falling attention spans of people and the younger generation in particular. There is now even talk of a 'post-text society' dominated by videos and memes.

Those travelling by trains or buses used to carry me to kill time, but now they have their smartphones to stream them music videos and movies. Anyone without a headphone during travel is now considered a Philistine.

While this death in slow motion has been going on for years, Covid-19 pandemic has appeared like one of those masked movie villains who surreptitiously enter the ICUs in the dead of night to pull the ventilator plugs.

My entry suddenly got forbidden to apartments and households. The resident welfare association unclejis saw me as a disease carrier. For many I was a good riddance, as they were happy in their post-truth bubbles - with the daily fix of dubious WhatsApp forwards, plus 9 pm prime time debates aired by North Korean channels.

Newspaper circulations started getting reduced to a fraction of what they were in the pre-Covid era. The smaller ones started shutting down while the larger ones started cutting down on pages, print runs and ultimately jobs. Losing a job during lockouts is the unkindest cut, but for many journalists and other newspaper employees it is the new normal.

In the post-Covid world the newspaper industry will be reduced to its skeletal form and probably the worst hit will be ground reporting with journalistic checks and balances. This will only mean ceding the ground to fake and unverified news, which has already overrun most social media platforms.

The television channels gave up ground reporting long ago and settled for a less expensive model of prime time anchor and panelists engaged in a debate, which at best is a staged circus with very little journalism and loads of propaganda thrown in. Certainly not a good model to follow and not at all conducive to democracy.

Only a handful of publications, mostly online, may keep the flag of journalism, as we knew it, aloft. But for how long is a big question.


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B. G. Verghese: An Embodiment of a More Dignified Era

While TV talking heads were recently splitting hairs over the appropriateness of timing of Dhoni's retirement, a famous journalist of yesteryears quietly 'passed away' causing a minor blip in the media's radar - a mere mention in the ticker of some TV channels and 'briefly' column in the inside pages of newspapers. For many even in the media it was B.G. Verghese who?
 
It may be upsetting to some, but not very surprising as the type of journalism Verghese and his peers practised is now a lost genre. It was far more nuanced, sober and shorn of present day narcissism and shrillness of 24/7 media. News reports were free from editorialising (it was strictly the domain of edit pages), glib packaging and of course paid news.
 
While in the mid 1970s journalism was subjected to a litmus test under Emergency, Verghese was one of the few honourable exceptions who did not 'crawl when asked to bend'. As Hindustan Times editor he was given marching orders for criticising Emergency. In fact for the HT management it was the proverbial last straw – they were itching to do so after he had earlier criticised India’s annexation of Sikkim. 
 
In the early eighties when I started exploring newspapers beyond cricket scores and comic strips to its far more rarefied spaces like edit and op ed pages, Verghese happened to be the editor of Indian Express. For India 1984 was a nightmare year starting with Operation Bluestar, Indira Gandhi's assassination and Bhopal gas tragedy. During anti-Sikh riots it was Indian Express which brought to limelight the infamous Trilokpuri massacre, thanks to some intrepid reporting by Rahul Bedi and Joseph Maliakan,  with Verghese backing them to the hilt.
 
After Verghese retired from Indian Express in 1986 he continued to be very active with his columns appearing in various publications and he was associated with Centre for Policy Research. He also penned some books and figured as member of various committees constituted by the government - probably the last notable one being the one to review Kargil war.
 
Though he always championed the cause of downtrodden his support for big dams raised many eyebrows. He had opposed the Narmada dam agitation spearheaded by Medha Patkar and even got into a long drawn but dignified debate with Arundhati Roy. He felt that despite displacement of population dams were beneficial in the long run.
 
With his demise and that of Kushwant Singh and M. V. Kamath recently, an era is drawing to a close. Kuldip Nayar and T J S George are probably the only notables of that generation who are still alive.

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