Grandma journalism

She came, she hobbled yet she smiled. She taught and she corrected, she encouraged us to write and not merely report This was Robin Reisig, a Columbia University professor who took a module for us in ACJ. She introduced us to the possibility that not all reports have to be written as if succumbing to a realisation that no one would read it anyways.

She erased the distinction that almost every Indian journalist imbibes at some point of the career. The distinction between 'features' and 'report writing'. "Why not combine both?" she would ask. "Put yourself in the place of an average reader. Would you like to read copies which merely adhere to the what, when, where, whys, whos and hows? Add a little description, profile the charecters a bit and then you have 'a story' in all sense of the term,"

She was right, her ideas were perfect and i continue to respect them. Its just that Indian newspapers still seem stuck in the notion of a dry rundown of facts and my naive attempts to add a featurish touch to 'newsy' stories were inadvertantly chopped and remorphed into the 'prescribed' format by a sub-ed, who i am sure would have raised an eyebrow at the language, mentally clucked in sympathy and then tapped Ctrl X.