The Hindu Business Line : That's the take

For all the bright young people aspiring to be a Barkha Dutt or a Rajdeep Sardesai today, there's a field message coming through loud and clear. Think holistic. Be a generalist, then a specialist. Get tech-savvy. Fine-tune your G.K. Evolve your personality. If necessary, retrain.

The field is wide open today. Apart from 24x7 and NDTV India, the group has also launched its business channel called Profit. Then, there's Headlines Today and a slew of new Times channels.

What's being redefined within the electronic news media? A very recent ad gives us a cue. It seeks: `Video journalist.' Faculty at mass communication institutes offer another hint. One person units could be a key future direction. Development journalism remains the need of the hour, stress media professionals.

"The fast pace of the industry requires multiple skills. No longer can a newsperson stop with being a good anchor or a good reporter or a good interviewer. You have to be all these and be a good producer, script writer, editor, sound mixer and so on," says Prof Sreekumar Menon, core faculty at the Asian College of Journalism (ACJ), based in Chennai since 1999.

Ramesh Prabhu, professor of journalism at Bangalore's Commits (Convergence Institute of Media, Management and Information Technology Studies), seconds that. "Recently, when Times TV was recruiting, they advertised for three categories — reporters, correspondents, and video journalists. Channels are now looking at single person units. That makes sense when they don't have too many stories coming out of, say, Nellore or Guntur, Chitradurga or Davanagere."

His colleague who teaches audio-visual communication, B.K. Prabhakar, has 30 years at Doordarshan to his credit. He asserts, "The equipment today is affordable, and very user-friendly. So, trainees can easily update themselves on new technology."

Gaurav Momaya (23), a student from Hyderabad, says, "When we shoot on CCD cameras or mini DVs, they are so compact and easy to work with. As is editing technology within digital media. So, even if M.F. Husain goofs up, his work can be improved on!"

Hemangini Gupta, a broadcast journalism graduate from ACJ, now in print media, appreciates the sizeable course component she did with a BBC instructor. "Since February-March 2003, there have been huge opportunities in TV mega channels for bright, young, enthusiastic people, not necessarily from journalism schools."

Twenty-plus Hemangini, who kickstarted her career with a stint at Aaj-Tak/ Headlines Today from October 2002 to May 2004, identifies another trend, "Most channels are looking for bilingual people, preferably those who are not too experienced. I think the focus is on `telling stories' in terms of bringing freshness, an original perspective to your reports, whereas earlier the focus seemed to be keenly on experience, age and knowledge."

Is freshness, then, near all? Ranita Hirji, Dean of Studies at Commits, which has offered Master's courses in audio-visual communication since June 2002, points out that her centre is affiliated to the Makhanlal Chaturvedi National University of Journalism at Bhopal. "Since the young today belong to an `instant mantra' generation, many opt to do broadcast journalism because they are not confident of writing for print. They learn very quickly that they need greater language proficiency for TV journalism because, with changing technology, there is no time to rewrite copy.

"Today the main TV news programmes are usually followed by detailed news analysis in the form of chat shows, interviews, panel discussions, expert comments, opinion polls etc. One might call it the electronically evolved form of newspaper and magazine journalism. Newcomers soon realise that glamour can add to intelligent presentation, but not be a substitute for it," she says.

"I don't mean to undermine the importance of technical skills, but I think these are easier to learn and upgrade," says Deepa Kamath, a National Institute of Design (NID) alumnus who specialised in video programming within Communication Design, and reported for NDTV's `Limelight' cultural-entertainment weekly capsule for Star News from 1999-2001.

"We may have over a hundred channels, but the vast majority either source software from the US or produce largely mindless programming. I think there are young people trained to tell real and powerful stories, but don't find enough space to tell them. Documentary-style public broadcasting has found space the world over. Surely there is space for it here."

Voicing an insider's stance, Nupur Basu (an independent documentary filmmaker and NDTV's special correspondent for eight years) sums up the sea change since she switched from print to TV in the early 1990s: "From a single channel then to 100 channels now, it is clear that only the big fish will ultimately survive, since most concentrate on entertainment and lifestyle stuff. Within the big boom in news channels since the satellite revolution in south Asia, news sells in a country with a very politicised citizenry. What is significant is the manner of news coverage from State-controlled DD to today's private news channels."

What about the areas of focus in the visual news media? "Whenever I teach at a media school, I emphasise the tremendous responsibility TV reporting vests in us. Ours is a powerful medium, so the challenge lies in projecting the real problems of the 600 million in our villages whose voices need to reach the policy planners and government. It is essential for good development journalism to stop concentrating on the lives of the bold and the beautiful, the predominant trend today," Nupur asserts.

"Instead we need stories on how one in three children in India is born underweight, the declining sex ratio, the sub-starvation among rural people hit by drought and indebtedness and how food grains meant for the poor are diverted to the blackmarket," she adds.

Will future frames be more newsworthy? Menon fervently hopes so: "We have to admit we work in a largely orthodox, unimaginative industry, with little introspection or change... I don't see why a reporter couldn't have written the articles that Amitav Ghosh wrote for The Hindu after the tsunami in the Andaman and Nicobar islands... "

Picture by A. Roy Chowdhury

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