Premangshu Ray is a journalist with more than 30 years of experience in media. Over the years, Ray has donned many hats in newsrooms and worked for a variety of media houses in India and abroad. These include The Times of India, Hindustan Times, The Telegraph, and India Today. He has also worked for the international editions of Miami Herald and for Arabian Business, a publication brought out by ITP, one of the largest media houses in the Gulf. He is now the Executive Editor of The Free Press Journal and lives in Mumbai.
Ray considers his most memorable work to be an article he wrote on the homeless in Jaipur soon after completing his journalism course. The article stirred the government to build shelters across the state. Touched by the story, a group of homeless people visited his office and presented him a box of sweets, a gift that Ray considers the biggest honour that he has ever got.
In 2023, Ray used his learnings as a journalist to write a path-breaking and much needed book on journalism titled News in the Making. It is a book that every aspiring journalist must read.
A Bengali foodie, Ray also wrote on cinema and, along the way, interviewed eminent authors and personalities from across the spectrum. Ray spends much of the little leisure time that he manages tracing the origins of words and phrases, with his love for etymology being one of the factors that helps him stay a cut above his contemporaries.
Excerpts from his interview with EasyMedia.in
Q1. What are the most important skills that sub-editors must possess?
Journalism is not a monster that needs to be tamed. However, it is also not everyone’s cup of tea, either. The attributes that I would look for in students who want to become sub-editors are command over the language, an innate curiosity about things, especially those that affect people at large, and an attitude that getting the job done takes priority over everything else, particularly over individual likes and dislikes.
Sub-editors should be able to spot a story and have the capability to restructure the copy in a coherent manner. They should also be able remove ambiguities and redundancies from the copy.
Q2. What are the top three editing errors you see in Indian newspapers?
There are quite a few things that keep appearing over and over again in a copy but should not.
Readers often see reports with the words, “He was immediately rushed to hospital.” Does rushing not imply that it is done immediately, or can a person be rushed at leisure?
What also keeps cropping up are the words “Speaking at a seminar, he said…”. When the sentence says he was “speaking at a seminar”, why are the words “he said” needed. This irritates me to the extent that in one newsroom I had made it clear that the next time I saw it in copy, the reporter and the sub-editor would have a lot of explaining to do.
This happens because the reporter and the sub-editor have not thought of the way this can be avoided. We can simply write “he said at a seminar” at the end of the sentence.
We also see the words “Rs 25 lakh worth of gold”. I would ask whether the Rs 25 lakh is worth gold and if so I would like to know how much gold it is worth. I would venture that the words should be “gold worth Rs 25 lakh”. The gold is worth a certain amount in the currency in question. The currency in question is also worth gold. However, if that is what is intended, journalists must specify the amount of gold that the currency is worth.
Q3. How do editors decide news value of a story?
The news value of a story would largely depend on five parameters. These include proximity, immediacy, magnitude, personality, and general interest.
Readers would naturally be more interested in news of happenings in their surroundings that took place just then, and involved celebrities. They would also be interested if the scale of the event or incident was huge. In this aspect, the bigger would certainly be better as one person dying in an accident would attract less attention than 10 people dying. The interest of readers could also be piqued if the news had general interest, such as when a constable goes out of his way to prevent a school playground from being taken over by anti-social elements.
There could well be other parameters on which such decisions are based but these would be among the top deciding factors for journalists.
Q4. Have you faced pressure from the advertising department about news stories? If yes, how did you deal with it?
Advertisements bring in money and thus should be welcome. However, at times, this causes problems for journalists.
The advertisement department would want the paper to carry articles that portray certain companies or organisations in good light or highlight some event so that they can get ads. However, that would be against the nature of true journalism.
In one paper, we used to put such articles on a particular page and set it in a typeface that was different from what was used for other articles
The greater problem arises when the advertisement department feels that carrying some article might lead to loss of revenue for the newspaper as the incident involves a big advertiser. In the few such cases that I have encountered, we have carried the article but without mentioning the name of the person or the organisation and instead just mentioning the level of the person within the organisation and the sector of the economy in which the organisation operates. In one instance, the paper also decided not to play up the news and carried a two-paragraph article. In all such cases we confirmed that not only was the news reliable but was also being carried by news agencies.
Q5. What are the ethical and legal challenges you face when editing sensitive stories?
Sub-editors will come across articles about gender crime, including rape, crime by minors and also articles that could create communal tension. News of such incidents appearing in papers can add to the woes of the people involved. For journalists, the challenge in such cases lies in carrying the report without identifying the people involved, especially the victims and minors.
The paper should, in cases of gender crime, not mention the name of the victim or carry information through which the victim or the family can be identified. The same would apply in cases involving minors.
In cases involving communal tension, the report should carry the news without any editorialisation and without any hype. It is not the job of journalists to give their opinions or pass judgements on news pages. That should be reserved for the edit, opinion and analysis pages.
Q6. What are the key newsroom challenges and how you deal with them?
Every so often, news would break close to the deadline for the last page to be sent to the press. This is a major challenge faced by editors.
How these situations are handled would depend on the importance of the news. On more than one occasion, it was important enough to be made the lead of the paper. Doing so involved some change in the layout and also a rearrangement of articles on the page. Not all articles were repositioned as this would take a lot of time. Two or three articles were pushed down to the next most convenient slot. One or two were tuned into snippets and, in one instance, one was moved to an inside page.
If the news comes so late that the deadline will be missed and is not very important, it is taken online.
Another situation that crops up concerns developing copy. In this case, we have carried the article with the information at hand and just replaced key parts with the latest information before finalising the page. Any development that takes place after deadline is taken online with a line highlighting the situation earlier in the day.
Q7. What are the challenges that social media has brought to the world of newspapers? How should the news desk handle them?
The proliferation of social media has led to a situation where all kinds of statements and visuals are posted. Often these are not authentic. In some cases, they are blatantly false, or without much basis and corroboration. In some others, people find posts that are seemingly of a recent incident or concerning a certain section of people but actually are much older, in the first case, and concern other people, in the other. In other cases, statements put out are either just one person’s opinion or what one person believes to be true. This is a veritable minefield as newspapers cannot risk not carrying news of importance but, at the same time, they cannot carry incorrect information.
Journalists should verify the news through multiple sources beyond social media, including those involved, news agencies, government and private organisations. This would ensure that the news, if carried, is authentic. Journalists should crosscheck the time and place of occurrence and the people or organisations involved.
Social media also throws up situations where the information, though authentic, is scanty. In such cases, the journalists must use their sources not only to verify all the information but also to gather information to fill the gaps so that a comprehensive article can be written.
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