THE NEW JOURNALISM

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At the risk of sounding ancient, I see myself today as part of the penumbral generation in journalism. We were the guys who joined print, ran around with pad and pen for years before switching to mike and lapel. After eleven years and a bit in television, and seven years in print, one has been fortunate to have a bird-eye's view to the dramatic changes that have unfolded in Indian journalism. Much has changed, some for the good, some not so good. There is an energy and robustness to the new journalism that I believe is a huge positive: you can accuse the television camera of being intrusive, but you cannot fault it for being dynamic and, as we have seen in the Jessica Lal case, a driving force in our democracy. At the same time, the manic competition has had its pitfalls. One of these is the definition of an "exclusive". When I joined the Times of India in 1988, the rules were clear. You got a byline only if you had an exclusive story. An exclusive was by its very definition a story which no one else had. If you didn't have an exclusive, you lived in the relative anonymity of a "by a staff reporter" byline. Seventeen years later, along with the concept of breaking news, the definition of an "exclusive" has also broken down.

You can have the same interview on different channels playing out, and each channel will carry an "exclusive" band on it. You can do an interview with a politician in the studio, term it as an exclusive, and within minutes the same politician will be giving a press conference in parliament, yet we persist with the exclusive tag. Let me make it clear that I am not attempting to claim the moral high ground here. Far from it. A month ago, we did an interview with Sonia Gandhi. As it so happened, NDTV also carried an interview with Sonia Gandhi around the same time. Both channels played up the interview as an exclusive. Since this column is often a weekend confession, let me confess that the "exclusive" tag shouldn't have been there. Yes, ours was a special interview (yes, it was also her only interview since the walk the talk with Shekhar Gupta where she spoke on such a wide range of "political" issues), but it shouldn't have been an "exclusive". It was an editorial misjudgement, occasioned by the fact perhaps that we were then an infant channel looking to make our place in the sun.

And yet, if most editors know that so much of what passes on television is not an "exclusive", why do we still persist with it? Is it the pressure of television rating points? Not really, because there is no statistical evidence to suggest that an exclusive will always boost ratings. Is it because our competitive juices get the better of good sense? Possibly, but that alone cannot be the reason why grown professionals keep trying to engage in one upmanship.

I have another theory. I believe that we in the media are running out of ideas. Worse, we have lost the ability to go out and actually find a story. When is the last time you saw a story on television that was based on hard documents or investigation, that was then relentlessly followed up, where facts were cross-checked again and again, where honest leg work was a substitute for the attention-grabbing soundbite. The number of stories we've done that can meet these rigorous standards can literally be counted on ones fingers. The best story that I ever did was probably a series of stories on land deservation near Mumbai when I was at The Times of India. It took me four weeks to do the series. No, it did not have an "immediate" impact (Sharad Pawar who was then Maharashtra chief minister did not resign despite the opposition's clamour and PILs being filed in courts), but it did give me a sense of quiet satisfaction of a job well done.

The problem I think is that journalism is no longer about the strong, well-researched story. Its increasingly about screaming from the rooftops, of trying to focus attention not so much on the story but on the individual doing the story. Thats why the pressure to keep using words like "exclusive", "first on", "only on". Its almost as if no one will notice you in the clutter of news channels unless you make a song and dance about it. At CNN-IBN, we want to be aggressive in our journalism, but we are also aware of aggression being confused with mindlessness. Seems easy enough? Not quite. When you are in an environment where journalists see each other as competitors, not as part of a larger process of inquiry and information, then norms and rules of journalism are almost always thrown out of the window. Its also true that in a visual medium there is always the temptation to allow the image to dominate the information. Moreover, as the viewer attention span is reduced, the feeling is that a juicy soundbite will grab eyeballs faster than a well-researched news story. Maybe, we as journalists need to start recognising that a channel is not a one day 24 hour match, its a 365 day hour by hour challenge where our main task is simply to stay on top of the news, without titillating the viewer, but actually enhancing their knowledge. Will it happen? Don't know. Should we despair? Of course not. In this week, we've seen the remarkable manner in which the media -- channels and newpapers -- have picked up the travesty of justice in the Jessica Lal case and made it a national issue. It shows the power of a united media, not trapped by competition, but actually realising that it has to serve a larger purpose. Maybe, we still have a chance to build a new journalism.