Staying ahead of the times

In every paper that I have edited I have looked after the letters column myself. We get a huge number of letters. What I do is, collect the letters that I like. I am looking out for those letters which meaningfully disagree with the magazine, and those which take us on. The most prolific letter writers are these BJP and RSS people, they have a very organised network of letter writers. They take on our political assumptions, the way we cover various events. Letters which praise the magazine go straight into the wastepaper basket, they are very boring.

• When you sent Outlook into the market, 24-hour news channels were still not here. How have you coped with the challenges of rapidly updated television bulletins?

I keep thinking about this. Magazines have to reinvent themselves. Newspapers have to reinvent themselves. This message is constantly coming back from the reader that the same old way of covering events will not do. It is often said that people are turned off by politics. I say, no, people are turned off by the way we cover politics. And television is the big spoiler — this whole idea that you can have a table and two people with opposing points of view, with a compere goading them on to really slug it out. In the print media now we seem to copy this. That’s not the way to do it. I don’t have the answer to that but I am certainly very aware that if we don’t reinvent ourselves, we are in very serious trouble. Now we have to create newspapers and magazines not for a television age, but for an Internet age, that’s an even bigger challenge. By the time a piece of news reaches the newspaper — and worse, by the time it reaches the magazine — it’s like a dog’s dinner. This last week, for instance, the big question for us was, by the time the Outlook comes out, how do we inject an element of freshness in this earthquake?

See, the whole idea of the newsmagazine was built around the notion of intelligent packaging — that you wrapped up the whole week. At one point of time that was good enough. You stay with that formula, you’re going to run out of business.

• How was it to edit a magazine compared to a newspaper?

Although I have enjoyed working with my proprietor I find the newsmagazine formula very stifling. In a newspaper I could nibble at the margins, try to do something different. I have enjoyed these past ten years — and I have enjoyed it because we had a very tough competitor in the market, and I have enjoyed meeting them. But of all these products — weeklies, monthlies, dailies, fortnightlies — the weekly has the tightest formula.

• What have been the lessons of the past 10 years?

I have learnt one lesson: whatever you do, journalism should not be boring, no matter what you do. You have to grab the attention of the reader. My own thirty-year mission has been to make serious journalism popular. How do you make the employment guarantee scheme, which is so complex, interesting? It’s not that people are not interested in these subjects. But we (journalists) must learn the art of succintness.

• So the reader does not want news dumbed down?

This is the great fallacy, there is no dumbing down. This is the easy way out, for the journalist to say, oh, there is dumbing down, they are not interested in Brecht, in the films of Adoor Gopalakrishnan, in hard politics, there is something wrong with the audience. I think it’s the other way around.

The other challenge that we have to meet now, especially in reporting politics, is anonymous sources. Collectively we in the media have to say no to people who don’t want to be named. You read the most fantastic stuff, but it is unsourced. The juiciest news in India is unsourced news.

(As told to Mini Kapoor)