Changing work ethics

BY SEVANTI NINAN 




The tragedy in my old fashioned view is that someone who climbs too fast misses out on learning, travelling, getting to know beats, a process which also helped you discover what really interested you. 



On the one hand journalists today command prices they never did before, at ages unheard of before. On the other hand journalistic ignorance and incompetence has touched wondrous heights. The imagination boggles at what the two together mean for the p rofession. High flyers who, like the house hunter in the TV ad who does it all on the computer, never learnt to gather information from anywhere other than the Web? Reporters who cannot structure anything more complex than a 600-word story? Are we headed for a blossoming of media without enough of an underlay of able journalism? 

In the print circuit they will tell you that it is TV that is the culprit on the first count. The blossoming of channels has meant that even a complete novice can job hop with alacrity, upping her salary with each move. If you are bright (read from a college or school that makes it into a magazine rating), confident, can write rather than report, and can push rather than connect (remember the questions a TV reporter recently asked a child who had seen her mother being murdered) you are made, baby. You will have a market for some time to come.
Different values 


And who knows, maybe TV is guilty on the second count too. Shortly after this column began some 16 years ago, I remember writing about a fellow journalist who would breeze through complex subjects with great panache on television, that she was able to successfully substitute self confidence for extensive research. Today there is a virtual epidemic of that malaise. TV reporters sashay forth, gesturing expansively as they dish out quickie analyses. Good looks and self confidence are at a premium. Knowledge of subject? Who needs it when all you have to do is stick a mike in somebody’s face and toss off an opinionated sentence to round off a piece to camera? And when some one from the backend of the studio is feeding into your earpiece what questions to ask? 

The tragedy in my old fashioned view is that someone who climbs too fast misses out on learning, travelling, getting to know beats, a process which also helped you discover what really interested you. Not only do reporters not know where to place commas in their copy, many will rise two or three levels without having travelled through, rather than parachuted into, district India. But thanks to television which brings access, they will be on first name terms with the politicians and businessmen they are expected to cover. It has become a cliché in journalism education circles that every bright-eyed aspirant wants to be a Barkha Dutt. If there are any role models at all from print they are likely to be those editors who have a parallel track on TV. 
Rampant plagiarism 


With more media training establishments in existence than ever before, more allegedly trained people enter the profession today than they did in my time. Are they taught how to read government or parliamentary reports or budget papers for stories? Or about the difference between fact gathering, opinion, and analysis? And what does the growing epidemic of plagiarism say about whether they are taught anything at all about how to handle attribution? 

The Delhi edition of this paper has been paid the compliment of having its stories regularl lifted, more or less wholesale, by a tabloid. And the reporter who does it takes a byline! Bloggers increasingly amuse themselves by spotting plagiarism in the mainstream press. Nor is borrowing confined to our part of the subcontinent. I emailed a Pakistani journalist to say that it looked like he had lifted the introduction to an interview from an Indian website. He responded with alacrity to say that of course he had. He did not know much about the interviewee, so he searched the Web. Quotation marks? Whats that?

It only takes a couple of first-hand encounters with today’s newsgathering tribe to confirm that something has changed. When I wrote a media book 12 years ago, the Internet had just come to India that year and was nowhere near the kind of crutch it has become. The only people who wrote about my book were those who read it. Today things are rather different. The publisher’s marketing arm sends out a publicity mailer over the Internet and it is picked up wholesale and slapped onto a newspaper or TV website. I marvel at the creativity that goes into weaving parts of the mailer and the back page blurb, along with a para here and there from what someone else has written, to produce what looks like a three column review, no kidding. Do we need to bludgeon personal computer manufacturers to remove the cut and paste function from their machines to save the profession?