Hindustan Times @100: an inside-out perspective

‘Every word and sentence published in the paper should be weighed. There should not only be no untrue statements but also no suggestio falsi or suppressio veri.’

— Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on September 15, 1924, at the launch of Hindustan Times

The News Letter, previously the Belfast News Letteris the world’s oldest newspaper that’s still published. It was first published in 1737. Closer home, the Bombay Samachar was first published in 1822, though it became a daily only in 1855. The first news agencies (or wires) did not emerge until the 1840s.

From then, until the 1990s, nothing really changed. The first radio news bulletin aired in 1920, and the first TV news one in 1940, but the newspaper remained the most effective as well as the most efficient way to disseminate news. The internet changed that because of its ability to separate the flow of information from the flow of goods in a typical supply chain; information is the goods for newspapers, so it’s easy to understand why this upended the business.

Sure, there were process improvements in the intervening years, but the most radical of them, offset printing on paper, was discovered only in 1904; advertising and marketing really took off in the US and Europe only in the boom years after WWII; and it was only in the 1980s that Desktop Publishing caught on in newsrooms.

A newspaper that has been around for 100 years then, has witnessed the impact of all these: the productization of its offering; the productivity gains offered by new technologies; and not just the rules of the game but the game itself changing with the emergence of the internet. All are true in the case of Hindustan Timeswhich turns 100 (the first edition came a week after its launch on September 15, 1924) today, September 22.

Over the past 20 years, the Hindustan Times newsroom, like others — although I’d like to think that there’s none like ours! — has also had to respond to how people consume and react to news itself, and their evolving relationship with facts and truth. At the most basic level, this is reflected in the reader of the newspaper (and the website) no longer being a passive consumer of news, but an active, instant, and sometimes aggressive critic. Social media, especially, has shortened the feedback circuit. Readers talk back, almost in real-time, and sometimes, what they say makes a lot of sense. But social media also creates its own echo chambers, filter bubbles as Eli Pariser terms them, and there are those who expect newspapers to do the same — and are disappointed when they do not. Finally, social media also allows the manufacture and dissemination of fake news.

Big Tech does all this, and profits immensely from it, without bearing the responsibility that traditional media companies do. This is unfair in two ways and to two different sets of people: it is unfair to traditional media companies because playing fields have to be level; and it is unfair to society because anyone creating and disseminating news, thereby shaping narratives and opinion, and exerting influence, needs to be held up to a higher standard (even if they won’t do it themselves).

Newsrooms such as Hindustan Times — I stopped using the term newspaper in late 2006; I remember the year because it was when we were working on Mint’s launch — understand the news continuum, which makes it imperative that even the day’s news has enough value added to it by the time it appears in print because the primary audience for such news is already, thanks to the internet, aware of the basic facts, usually even more. That means we end up having to do what is called Day 2 stories on Day 1, sometimes even on Day 0 (as events unfold) because that’s the nature of the beast now.

Newsrooms work with multiple media now — print, online, apps, podcasts, videos, and interactive graphics. And they have become more specialized; some have data journalism units (both Mint and Hindustan Times were at the vanguard of this revolution, the first even before most people in the trade understood what the term meant); others have coders who are now part of the newsroom, working with journalists to produce stories.

This makes demands of the current crop of journalists and editors that those who came before did not experience. Years ago, I spoke to a group of retired editors (do editors even retire?), gray eminences all, who were struck by how Mint covered elections, and as we exchanged notes, it became clear that many of them would have difficulty fitting into a modern newsroom.

I have previously written about what it takes to be part of or manage a contemporary newsroom, but it’s worth repeating some aspects (even if not in the same words). Today’s journalists and editors need physical and mental stamina (the second because they are exposed to and have to process a huge volume of information). They need to understand data (of all kinds including that on audiences) and be able to interpret it, even if they do not have the means to analyze it themselves. They need to be conversant with technology for three reasons.

One, to help them do their work more efficiently — from mundane tasks such as transcription and translation to higher-order ones such as pulling out one strand of exclusive information from a barrage of social media feeds. Two, to understand how it can help elevate their stories into products the audience would love to consume. And three, to use advanced data analytics or satellite imagery — you’d be surprised to know how accessible both are — to do stories that wouldn’t otherwise have been possible.

The constants in newsrooms such as Hindustan Times — which, hopefully, will never change — are editorial independence; the commitment to what may be considered old-fashioned journalistic principles; and the awareness of those in positions of editorial leadership that they have to serve as moral compasses of the newsroom. Part of that is to ensure that there is no “false suggestion gold true suppression”.

R Sukumar is the Editor-in-Chief of Hindustan Times