Tomorrow's News, Tomorrow's Journalists

New media is the place to be

What would my ideal journalism job be? The question takes me back to elementary school composition exercises. What do you want to be when you grow up? I pretty much knew I wanted to be a journalist for most of my life. There was a period when I thought I wanted to venture into genetics or architecture but my less than stellar aptitude in Science, Physics and Math pretty much negated those options.

I never gave much thought about what kind of journalism I wanted to pursue till a few years ago. If you’re English educated in India, the only place you can be is in the national press. For those who get their liberal higher education in the metros of the nation, writing in local vernacular papers or magazines is unthinkable. It’s not something we do. So we slog away in colleges and journalism schools hoping to say someday that I am from Times of India or The Hindu or some other equally illustrious metro based national daily which is read by about 3-4% of the country. The phenomenal growth of 24×7 news channels in India in all the Indian languages and especially in English and Hindi changed that to a great degree. Aspiring journalists switched their preferences over to television which is currently, more prominent and better paying in India. Not me though. I can’t think of a job in television. It’s repetitive, highly monotonous and limits creativity.

Like most aspiring journalists, I do have the one paper or magazine I absolutely must work for before I die and that is The Hindu, one of the finest newspapers in the country. But it doesn’t have to be a long gig; a brief internship stint would be just fine. I want to be on the inside of a newspaper that I love and admire and see why they are the way they are. If I could stretch the limits of my imagination and capabilities, I guess being part of the foreign correspondence bureau of The Hindu would be awesome.

But on a more long term basis, I think web journalism is where I truly want to be. Like most people of my generation, I think new media is where the future lies. It’s nascent and not institutionalized in the way print or television has been. That is what makes it that much more exciting to work with. It’s a chance for one to change traditional ideas about how journalism should be. To break down the old understandings about news value or narratives and  maybe even invent new ones. My ideal job would be having my own website with maybe a small scale staff and finding that middle path between news and feature writing. To achieve the balance between hard hitting stuff and infotainment like Salon.

But on the whole, it’s not something I plan on doing right after college. Ideal jobs are ideal when you get them at a stage in your life when you feel you’re ready. Before that you must pay your dues, gather much needed, valuable experience, take what comes your way and branch out into different fields and finally settling down where you think you belong. I believe that any job in journalism has a lot to teach us – about good and bad content, about principles, about realizing what we’re good at and zoning into what we really want to be doing. To be steadfast to an immature dream that we chart out at 16 or 18 and not let the profession change us for the better is a great disservice we do to ourselves. We shouldn’t be putting up with any job but rather try and enjoy it , do our best with it and take from it whatever we can to something better as and when the opportunities come along.

Deepti Bharthur- http://deeptispeaks.wordpress.com