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Friday, August 6, 2010

My First-ever Orientation speech at the MS University, Faculty of Journalism, Baroda

Good Morning, everyone. My congratulations to all of you for getting selected for this programme and I thank you all for inviting me to this Orientation Programme for the Print Journalism course.

I don't intend to lecture you today on the merits of print journalism and the career opportunities it presents. I'd rather have you ask me the questions and tell me why you want to be here, what are you looking for in this course and how this course will help you achieve your goals.

I know many of you here are not looking for a career in newspapers. Television and internet are far more glamourous and far-reaching than newspapers can ever be. But I am sure, all of you would certainly think of the newspaper when you would think of journalism. That is the power of association!

So what do you think print journalism is about? Who are the people newspapers cater to? Are they the readers, the journalists or the advertisers? Much as we'd like to believe that newspapers are tools to provide information to readers at large, the newspaper is and has always been a vehicle for advertisement. Think about it. The paper has to sell to give information to people. And the paper has to generate money to produce the next issue. If any of you ever visits The Times of India Building in Mumbai, try and access the archives there. They have a vast repository of issues starting from the first edition of the TOI in 1838 till present. If you browse through the microfilms of the paper till 1940, you'll find that for little over a century, the front page of the TOI was filled with just ads. Then came the Letters to the Editor and then the news.

Why I am telling you this is for you to understand that newspapers are not just about news. They're about packaging news. How you write what you write is as important as who you write for. The first printed newspaper in India was the Hickey's Bengal Gazette, a weekly founded in 1779. By today's standards of journalism, it would have been labelled "tabloid" and "yellow", for it concerned with the activities of the wives of the British officers of The East India Company. The paper was extremely popular, not only among the British posted in India at that time, but it also inspired Indians to write newspapers of their own. Over two hundred years later, we again see the advent of tabloid-journalism that is bringing about a change in how we gather and perceive news.

India publishes over four thousand newspapers daily. The most widely circulated regional newspapers are the Malayala Manorama in Kerala and the Hindi-language Dainik Jagran. English is not a language of the masses. Compare the English newspapers and regional dailies in the smaller cities. Take for example, Gujarat Samachar or Sandesh versus TOI Baroda. Which do you think does more justice to coverage of news and events in the city? It has to be Gujarat Samachar or Sandesh. Regional newspapers cater to smaller audiences and hence are more effective in highlighting local issues. Every newspaper has a role to play and caters to a certain audience. And if they don't or try to shift their focus off their target audience very suddenly, they stand to lose in the media battleground.

What I want you to do is evaluate your reasons for taking up a course like this. Journalism is not just about writing good articles or getting sound-bites. It's about communication at various levels with the readers, fellow journalists, editors, advertisers and all the stakeholders in the industry. The more you understand the industry, the more adept you will be at handling the ever-increasing pressures of the job.

With every invention of mankind, the definition of truth has evolved. Before the printing press, what was spoken was true. After mass publication came in, only what was read was true. After radio came into existence, only what was heard was true. With the advent of television, only what was seen was true. And now, after the advent of the internet, only what we see, hear and read first is true. Time has become the single-most driving force in today's media and newspapers, because of manufacturing stresses, have had to devise new ways to cope up.

This course seeks to help you develop some of the skills you’ll need in the industry.  Journalism is about packaging news in a way that gives the maximum amount of information in the least amount of space as early as possible. People spend decades in this industry and are still clueless about what makes a great newspaper. A newspaper evolves with time. And so journalists have to keep upgrading their skill-sets. There was a time when writers would write and editors would edit. Not anymore. Journalists are expected to multi-task – to write, edit, photograph, design and make pages. But these are skills you can always pick up as you go along. What a journalist needs most is curiosity – a curiosity to know about things and people around you, a curiosity to find out about things that are described ‘mundane’ or ‘ordinary’ and a curiosity to know what’s unknown.

Luckily, all of you have time on your hands. I sincerely hope you will use these two years efficiently to chart your paths in career fields of your choice.

All the best and thank you.

1 comment:

hiren antani said...

ya, that's true, after years of experiences most of the journalists could not find what make any newspaper so great and what make it fall. I think still everyone is searching this....