
BLOGS
Courier boys and Globalisation
06/6/2014
What could be the dubious relationship between Guar fali crops in Rajasthan and the oil crises in USA? Ever thought of how daily wage labourers in Indore could be made lab rats for German pharmaceutical companies? And if you had to pick between Lara Dutta being crowned Miss Universe and acute drought in Kalahandi, which one would you write about?
The one hour long session by Richard Mahapatra, senior editor in Down To Earth, on Globalisation of news stories examined not just the transition of the Indian newsroom and the kinds of headlines stories that it came out with, but also gave a tiny glimpse of the changes in government policy that has shaped post liberalisation India, and an insight into the tough moral dilemmas that reporters are often put at in times.
"With every cabinet meeting the geography shrinks a little more and more. We always get reports of new investments being opened up in until then unknown places," said Mahapatra, and pointed out that post liberalisation, 60% of the articles that appeared were regarding globalisation in one way or the other, and the situation was so much so that the vernacular newspapers were quite perplexed in getting an apt translation for the term that now plays a determining role in the economy. He went on to explain how globalisation changed the government's priority, and how corporate subsidies won the tug of war with public social expenditure.
But what would easily set one thinking, especially if one is in the field of journalism, would be his thought that local stories have the potential to become some of the best global stories, and that all it takes to achieve this is to figure out the global link that it has. "But one of the main failures at the editor's part is that they are not competent to establish these global links. They only establish the obvious links and do not look deep, and the net result is that stories with global potential remain local stories."
Nevertheless, no matter how much the news rooms have changed and no matter how much the editors fail at giving the global link to potential local stories, a journalist's role as a courier boy (as Mahapatra put it) has remained constant throughout these testing times.
By - Pankaj Menon