The Way We Work

Of late,journalism has taken a hit,reputation-wise,everywhere in the world. An illegal hacking scandal in the UK brought down a 100-year-old newspaper institution like News of the World,another example of the crazy pressure journalists everywhere live with to come up with that rare,breaking story. Wikileaks has broken more stories than the rest of the media put together,igniting a debate about the rights and responsibilities attached to freeing information. Any citizen,armed with a camera phone is a journalist as well,an alarming fact that is probably diminishing the value of journalists further. In the West,nobody’s reading physical newspapers any more,but until newspapers figure out how to make money off the internet,things are not going to get easier.

On an optimistic note,there will always be room for good content and incisive writing. Like in every other career right now,it’s a far less secure work world. In journalism,nobody is going to pay anyone to just show up and file a story; a good solid journalist will need to add to skills besides writing,like camera work and editing. What’s worrying in India is there doesn’t seem to be any room for great reporting,especially in TV news. Primetime has completely been taken over by studio discussions,with the same jaded pool of journalists and editors we’ve been watching for decades now,holding forth. Even the guests who appear on the shows are the same dreary lot,moving with alacrity between channels in the same one hour. There are no opportunities for growth for young dynamic reporters since their stories are relegated to non primetime rundowns that nobody sees. One TV journalist told me in all seriousness that he has to wait for his boss to die before he has a shot at a promotion. It’s no wonder that young TV journalists are a grumpy bunch,what with prospects so dismal and a future so uncertain. So many journalists I know have switched to public relations firms or to corporate communications for big companies to survive.

But chasing stories across cities — and the world — is not a trivial pursuit. It requires grit,incredible hard work and dogged perseverance,so to dismiss the entire career as slightly better than that of a lumberjack is grossly unfair. A majority of journalists work under very trying circumstances and even if their stories are not changing the world,the valiant attempt to keep the record straight is commendable in itself.

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