Formulaic journalism

Just when you think you have seen it all in journalism, there comes along a chap whose utter disregard for looking beyond pre-conceived sentences proves you still have a lot to learn about journalists and their love for trapping their minds in all sorts of cliches.

One such chap was a newly joined young reporter in a newspaper I once worked for. To be fair, it was an unfamiliar territory for the guy; it was not his city, not even his country by hundreds and hundreds of
kilometres. A news report he filed, one of those pretentious assignments where the reporter is briefed on the desired conclusion even before the event takes place, came to me. He confidently began his news story like this: The city (Mumbai), which is used to frequent power cuts...

I nearly fell off my chair. The tea, I distinctly remember, did spill out of the cup in my hand. A few years earlier I would have spiked the story outright, but it is a corporatised media world today. Still, anybody doing a story remotely connected to electricity and Mumbai ought to know that while there are power cuts all over the state, there is no load-shedding in the city. I cut out the offending sentence and proceeded with the story; it was clear that this guy had no knowledge of the city, had assumed the whole country was seeing load-shedding and, worse, had fallen back on a cliched opening style for his story.

By the way, this guy turned out to be quite a visionary reporter of sorts. Before the week was out, there was a major power cut in the locality where our office stood.

Nowadays bosses are rarely satisfied with straight reports. They want a spin on every news report. Once I got a report to look at that was about vegetable prices going up in Navi Mumbai.

I was told to give a spin to this one too. And I swear on my honour that the spin I was asked to give was that the vegetable prices in Navi Mumbai had gone up because of inflation.

There are often even more glaring errors that make it to print in spite of our best efforts, all because we rarely suspect anything can go wrong with a certain kind of sentence if the form of it has been used
successfully hundreds of times before.

I shall end this small discussion with an example from something that appeared in print recently. In a report on a tragedy that killed many, there was a box item that railed against the government, saying none of the dead had yet been given compensation.

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