By Ranjona Banerji
If you live your life on the internet, you may well be confused by a plethora of websites, all of which claim to be part of the news media. Since the advent of television news – especially in India – and of the internet, people feel that they understand how the news media works and they also feel that their voice has a right to be heard within a media framework.
A few years ago, “blogs†or weblogs or online diaries were quite the thing. People wrote their first person experience of how events around them unfolded. In times of crisis, newspapers and news channels used bloggers for information and perspective if they had no staff in that area.
But there was an intrinsic problem then and it remains today. It revolves around a simplistic question: what makes a journalist a journalist? Does anyone who has an opinion qualify? Does every do-gooder walking down a street make the grade? Or is there something more? What is the difference between a police investigator and a private detective? And why do private detectives have licences? Because: credibility.
Most of us who call ourselves journalists have gone through the grind. We have spent years editing copy and making pages. We have spent horrible hours on a soulless beat, gathering information which might even never be used by some evil news editor. We have had our writing or our newsgathering skills or our editing prowess shredded to bits by some senior who knows more and better than us. We have had it drummed into us that we are nothing, that today’s byline is tomorrow’s recycled paper. Those of us who are old enough were paid the bare minimum, so low in fact that the government had to step in with a wage commission to monitor our salaries.
We have watched the process of news being made into a newspaper or a news programme. It is long and laborious and it requires some skills, none of which have to do with how convincing you sound at a dinner party or how many of your friends think that you write well. We have made those judgment calls of what makes the front page and what doesn’t. We have sat through those focus groups where readers told us what they wanted and what they didn’t. We have made mistakes and been humiliated and we have got up and started again because the newspaper has to come out the next day, your or my ego or hurt feelings notwithstanding. In some ways, the grind is even more harrowing for 24 hour news TV people because it never stops.
Hardly surprisingly, we hang on to these credentials. We have earned them. And even less surprisingly, we are sceptical in the extreme of bloggers pretending to be journalists. The Indian webosphere is full of blogs masquerading as news sites. They are usually formed with the conviction that all Indian journalists are terrible inefficient liars, mainly because these said journalists do not support the political opinion of the blogger. Once the so-called news website has been started however, they often find that their opinions are not always enough. So they start picking up news from the same evil journalists that they mistrust.
I have seen a most revelatory email exchange between the people who run the website The Logical Indian and Sachin Kalbag, when he was editor of Mid-Day (he is now with The Hindu) after The Logical Indian picked up Mid-Day articles without permission or attribution. Otherwise known as stealing.
This is an explanation from someone at Logical Indian: “We are not justifying ourselves for the mistake we committed with the recent Mid Day story. This was our biggest mistake as neither we properly credited the Mid-Day article author nor we took permission. We just want you not to build such a wrong perception about us. Your perception matters to us a lot. We have a lot to learn from you and other committed people in this field who can guide us.â€
This is gobbledygook as apparently they never stopped lifting material from reputed and professionally-run news sources.
Another excuse for stealing other people’s stuff and then tagging it as exclusive is this:
“The content was also listed under NEWS and EXCLUSIVE category. By ‘exclusive’ we don’t mean that we own the stories. Exclusive here means the stories which are worth paying attention for.â€
This is even more rubbish. “Exclusive†in the news sense means this and this only: the newspaper or website or TV channels on which you are seeing this news is the only place which has it and is a result of the work put in by that particular journal.
I do not mean to target only Logical Indian. The internet is littered with such websites pretending that they have newsrooms staffed with journalists who do actual work. I would not even call them amateurs. For people who read such websites, I assume they do so because they have grudges against news journals which do not subscribe to their political viewpoints.
This is Sachin Kalbag on his experience with websites like these:
“Here’s a reality check: Newspapers and other media houses spend a huge amount of money in newsgathering. There is a level of skill involved. There are several levels of filters in the newsroom before a story makes it to print. Journalism is both a skill and an art (that some people misuse it is right, but that’s a different debate).
Folks like The Logical Indian just lift those stories and call them their own. It is daylight robbery. Assuming (erroneously…) that LI is read more than newspapers, it is like a rich man stealing from a slum dweller. Just because you’re rich doesn’t give you the right to steal.
It is like, to give another example, one software company stealing someone else’s code, calling it their own, and then profiting on it by selling it in the market.
There’s a reason there are laws against such things. The Logical Indian is wilfully breaking those laws.â€
My view is that journalists have to do more to oust and out such websites. For our readers’ sakes.