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| Sunday, 25 July 2004 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Loaded journalism is a recipe for disaster - N. Raam, (Editor, The Hindu newspaper of India,) By Kaminie Jayanthi Liyanage
This means that print journalists had only that much of devastatingly short, lead time to deliver the full apparatus of his tricky-titles and horseplay of infortainment to snatch and manipulate the befuddled mind of the news-besieged reader. "This is the first element of the news situ in journalism," N. Raam, Editor, The Hindu newspaper of India, was saying at the special workshop he held for local working journalists at the Indian Cultural Centre on Wednesday. "Eye tracking research done by Mario Garcia of the Garcia Media in Florida proves the point for good visual journalism, particularly on the front page." Brief articles, clever and fun-formative catchlines, the dominant picture of the page being three times as big as the other pictures on the paper - these made up the decisive meat in the race for reader voracity! Raam also minced no words in belting out his views on "editorialising in the guise of news", in the name of interpretation, as he put it. "Loaded journalism is a recipe for disaster. No one knows what the news in it is!" Not a good practice to mix in too much opinion expressing in a news presentatilon of wholly facts, he was commenting. Do not mix up news, and news analysis - or labelling, as he called it. Another escalation Raam had in his spirited lecture, which kept the usually nodding newsmen as erect as flagstaffs, was how to draw the 'Lakshman Rekhawa.' No walls should be raised between marketing and editorial, he was arguing. "Make allowances for new innovative ads which appear as if they are sponsorships, while remembering that the primacy of the editorial function is made certain." This applied in a situ in which increasing numbers of the MBA-acquired, recruited in Indian newspapers played remarkable roles. A sort of a climax was created when Raam named intellectual and cultural terrorism as a trait to be avoided in a well principled journalist. Excellent in advocacy, but a blatant impossibility in adherence, in the local personal terrains loaded with partialities, myopic loyalties and obtuse fixations! "Journalism must be secular and rise above all religious constraints," advised Raam. Which, in other words, meant keeping at careful bay, the moral policeman raising his baton in all our religious and cultural compulsions, to entertain only when necessary, as a weighty thought of infortainment, on which specially the electronic media was heavily dependent today. (The workshop was jointly organised by the Indo-Sri Lanka Foundation and India-Sri Lanka Alumni Association of Journalists.) |
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| Editorial | Security Produced by Lake House |
Time spent on reading the average daily newspaper is declining in the
world. Surveys have revealed that particularly for the youthful reader,
this duration of reading could be as short as 22-19 minutes a day!
