The importance of revealing rape victim’s identity

By John Cheeran

Is there life after rape? Should a woman live in a purdah rest of her life, if a maniac forcibly violates her privacy? Should she conceal her identity and the identity of those who are near her and next to her?

Are the media and legal system doing the rape victim and her family a favour by not making public her identity? And withholding all references that may point to her identity?  

I do not think so. By not naming the rape victim, you are not favouring her but perpetuating the shame and stigma that is associated with the heinous act. Rape is not the fault of the victim. By treating rape as an unmentionable crime, the media are treating the rape victim as an untouchable, someone who is different from you and me.

How does the fact that the public do not know her name, help the rape victim handle the trauma that she is undergoing? The fact remains that she has been assaulted, privacy violated. Those who done it deserves to be hanged, after establishing their crime in a court of law.

But why the victim has to be always on the back foot? Why are we shrouding her identity, apparently, in an ethical effort to help her?

In fact, in every rape incident, everyone who knows the victim at an individual level knows that she has been subjected to the crime, however long, and however hard, you try to pretend so. In the latest incident of rape – of a medical student at the Manipal Medical College in Udupi in Karnataka, all the students in that campus now must be familiar with the name of the victim. Knowing the name is not the crime, but in the age of surreal connectivity, there are no secrets left among us. To know is the human urge, especially if it involves someone’s misfortune and misery, such are rape incidents. So would be the village or town that the rape victims come from. Her relatives would know. So would be all her classmates. All of them talk. In a free society, where people are free to gossip, and their fare idea about what is happening around the world will continue to do that, unless we want to be a society where news should be always treated with an ethical pen.

Read the full story

Radia tapes and Indian journalism: Tunku Varadarajan in The Daily Beast

Years from now, earnest journalism majors will study an episode that aired on Indian television Tuesday, in which Barkha Dutt, a massively influential but ethically embattled TV news anchor, submit herself to public inquisition by a panel of her peers. Four flinty journalists grilled the anchor on the extent of her relationship with one of India’s most influential (and, some would say, murky) corporate lobbyists, with whom the anchor was clandestinely taped talking about how to get a pliable politician a job in the Indian cabinet—a placement that would have benefitted the lobbyist’s corporate clients to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. (One assumes that clips of the inquisition will be posted on Ms. Dutt’s NDTV website.)
Think—and I offer this rough-hewn equivalent only to bring the matter to life for an American readership—of Katie Couric as the anchor, caught on tape talking to the flack for Halliburton, on the subject of getting Halliburton’s preferred candidate the job of defense secretary in the run-up to a major war. And think, then, of an hour-long segment in which Couric sits down with, say, Charles Krauthammer, Fred Hiatt, Ken Auletta, and Katrina vandel Heuvel, and submits herself to on-air questioning on the subject—with the aim of explaining, as Dutt has sought to do, on Twitter, Facebook, and in a press release, how her conversation with the lobbyist was within the bounds of ethically acceptable journalism.
Dutt has said, in a nutshell, that the uber-influential lobbyist was just a source, and that she was stringing the source along in order to milk her for as much information as she could get—both immediately, and as editorial investment for the future. Although there is absolutely no evidence that Dutt stood to gain financially from discussing how to place the lobbyist’s man in the Indian cabinet, the conversation reeked of an unseemly proximity between journalist, lobbyist, and corporate interests, so much so that there are vociferous, and entirely reasonable, campaigns to bounce Dutt, as well as many other senior journalists who were also caught on tape, out of a job. The fact that the journalists canoodling on tape with the lobbyist were a “Who’s Who” of sorts of New Delhi’s journalistic elite has fueled a sense of public chagrin that will not easily be quelled. Indians are cynical by nature; and so, when they feel betrayed by the few figures they trust, the disappointment is acute—and irrepressible.
Indian journalism is regarded by many in America (including by my own sainted editor, Tina Brown) as vibrant, rich, and healthy; by contrast, journalism in the West is believed to be in the grip of an existential and financial crisis. But the recent lobbyist-journalist-politician scandal in India (of which everything you could wish to read can be found in Outlook magazine, and here, in this incisively compendious newspaper piece by my brother, an editor at The Hindu newspaper) has dynamited the Potemkin village that is Indian journalism. What has looked to us to be healthy, roseate, and vigorous is, in fact, rotten, corrupt, and frequently amoral.
Indian journalism is woefully bereft of an institutional ethical architecture, relying instead on the ethical instincts of individual journalists. As such, there is a sort of ethical free market in operation, in which readers or viewers make up their own minds on whether so-and-so can be trusted as a columnist, whether this or that anchor can be relied upon to hold no brief for politicians or corporations, whether this newspaper or that can be trusted to report the news without fear or favor. As N. Ram, editor of The Hindu, pointed out in a recent debate on Indian TV, the journalists in question, here, would not have survived five minutes at The New York Times, or the FT.
In truth, Indian journalism is a vast field inhabited by a multitude of interests and abilities, an anarchic Klondike in which fortunes and reputations are being made, and in which the kind of anal but indispensable ethical standards that make the better stratum of American journalism reliable are broadly absent. Many major Indian newspapers practice something called “paid news,” with unofficial rate cards, in which people and companies can get their stories and photographs on Page 1, or their books reviewed, on payment of a fee to the news corporation in question. Politicians, too, must pay, particularly at election time, to get up-front coverage. In the same vein, Indian journalists seldom, if ever, disclose their interests in stories they write about. (An Indian journalist once berated me for “all this American disclosure crap.”)
There is, also, a curious demographic problem: Virtually all the super-elite journalists in New Delhi and Bombay are from families with corporate or bureaucratic connections, men and women who would, in previous generations, have entered the elite bureaucracy themselves, whether it be the Indian Foreign Service or the Indian Administrative Service. Journalism today offers a quicker and more effective route to power, especially now that the bureaucratic services have been opened up to a wider swath of Indians as a result of affirmative action. In essence, the “babalog”—the well-born—who used to dominate the country’s administrative cadres are now crammed into the media. It is the one avenue of real power for India’s otherwise somewhat disenfranchised elites, in the sense that they can’t ever get elected to parliament. So they have turned the media into a form of socio-cultural Establishment and feel quite at home with the other “establishments,” whether business or political, that are to be found in modern, democratic India, regarding theirs as in no way inferior.
A final word: India’s media is still an insulated and protected sector. To this day, foreign media companies cannot own more than 26 percent of an Indian imprint. This has made for an insular press, a corrupt press, an Indian media untested not merely against global standards of journalistic craft, but also against Western standards of journalistic ethics. Dutt, surely, has a heckuva lot of explaining to do. But she’s not the only one in that position—by any stretch.
Tunku Varadarajan is a national affairs correspondent and writer at large for The Daily Beast. He is also the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Fellow in Journalism at Stanford's Hoover Institution and a professor at NYU's Stern Business School. He is a former assistant managing editor at The Wall Street Journal.

Radia Tapes and Indian journalism: Siddharth Varadarajan in The Hindu

As squeamish schoolchildren know only too well, dissection is a messy business. Some instinctively turn away, others become nauseous or scared. Not everyone can stomach first hand the inner workings of an organic system. Ten days ago, a scalpel — in the form of a set of 104 intercepted telephone conversations — cut through the tiniest cross-section of a rotting cadaver known as the Indian Establishment. What got exposed is so unpleasant that several major newspapers and television channels that normally scramble to bring “breaking” and “exclusive” stories have chosen to look the other way. Their silence, though understandable, is unfortunate. Even unforgivable.
After all, the tape recordings of Niira Radia's phone conversations have come to light against the backdrop of the recent Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) report on the allocation of 2G spectrum, which demonstrated how the rules were arbitrarily bent by the then Telecom Minister, A. Raja, in order to favour a handful of private companies at government expense. Among the beneficiaries of Mr. Raja's raj were Anil Ambani. And also Ratan Tata. In one of the tapes, an unidentified interlocutor asks Ms Radia, whose clients include both Mr. Tata and Mukesh Ambani, why “you people [i.e. the Mukesh Ambani group] are supporting [Raja] like anything ... when the younger brother [Anil Ambani] is the biggest beneficiary of the so called spectrum allocation”. “Issue bahut complex hai,” Ms Radia replies. “Mere client Tatas bhi beneficiary rahein hain (my client, the Tatas, have also been a beneficiary).”
Apart from telecom, the tapes also provide valuable insight into the gas dispute between the two Ambani brothers. This was a dispute in which Mukesh Ambani made skillful use of the “gas is a national resource” argument with a pliant media even as he used his influence with individual MPs to try and orchestrate a massive tax concession for his company from the same national resource, Krishna-Godavari (KG) basin natural gas.
In an interview to NDTV and the Indian Express on Saturday — two media houses that have so far avoided covering the tapes — Ratan Tata has called the recordings a “smokescreen” designed to hide the real truth. He is wrong. Utterly wrong. No doubt we know very little about who leaked the recordings and why these were cherry-picked from a wider set of 5,000 recordings the Enforcement Directorate and Income Tax authorities made as part of their surveillance of Ms Radia. But even if the story they tell is partial and designed to expose only a fraction of the corporate lobbying which has been going on, we would be naive to ignore the contents of the tapes or be dismissive about their significance.
In the science fiction film, “The Matrix”, Morpheus tells Neo, “You're here because you know there's something wrong with the world.” The Matrix, he says, is the world that has been pulled over everyone's eyes to blind them from the truth that they are slaves. He offers Neo the choice of a blue or red pill. “You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill ... and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”
The Niira Radia audio archive loaded on to the Internet by Open and Outlook magazines last week is the red pill of our time. It reveals the source codes, networks, routers, viruses and malware that make up the matrix of the Indian State. The transmission of information, also known as “news”, between different nodes is vital for the system to work efficiently. The news is also the medium for reconciling conflicts between different sectors of the establishment. If you hear the recordings, you begin to understand the truth about the Wonderland that is India. No wonder there are many amongst us who would rather swallow the blue pill. For once you go in, the only way out is to keep digging. And yes, the rabbit-hole runs deep.
So deep, for example, that we hear a Member of Parliament, N.K. Singh, who is meant to represent the people and the state who voted for him, brazenly batting for a single-man corporate constituency, Mukesh Ambani.
In one recording, Mr. Singh tells Ms Radia of the firefighting he is doing on behalf of Mr. Ambani to ensure a tax concession the finance minister had announced in the 2009 budget for gas production is made applicable retrospectively. Ms Radia says she has killed news stories about the Rs.81,000 crore super profit Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL) would make were that to happen but Mr. Singh is more concerned about what happens in Parliament during the debate on the Finance Bill. His fear is that if Opposition MPs make a noise about a largesse being given to one company, the finance minister would be on the defensive and the prospect of extending the concession retrospectively would not even arise. Mr. Singh accuses BJP leader Arun Shourie of being on Anil Ambani's side and reveals how he has managed to get Mr. Shourie replaced as the BJP's lead speaker by Venkaiah Naidu. How well does Mukesh know Venkaiah, asks Mr. Singh, who is a Rajya Sabha MP from Bihar on a Janata Dal (United) – JD(U) ticket. Ms Radia replies that a senior RIL executive, P.M.S. Prasad, knows Mr. Naidu well. “Then I am going to get him flown in today to talk to Venkaiah,” Mr. Singh says, “because if he is the first speaker, and he already takes a party line, then it will be very difficult for Shourie in his second intervention, to take a different line. Then we have to orchestrate who will speak, you know, this is the immediate problem right now. Because, frankly, if this doesn't go through, this tax thing, then it's a major initiative taken that then fails to materialise.”
We don't know if Mr. Prasad flew down and met Mr. Naidu as N.K. Singh wanted him to do. But the BJP leader's speech in Parliament two days later has this telltale suggestion: “The Bay of Bengal has become the new North Sea of India. Government departments should not be seen quarrelling whether mineral oil is a natural gas or not. Whatever concessions [are] needed for infrastructure, exploration ... are connected with the energy security of the country.” This was a veiled reference to the Petroleum Ministry's letter to the Finance Ministry asking for natural gas to be given the same tax concessions available to oil retrospectively and not just from the New Exploration Licensing Round (NELP) VIII round which would exclude RIL's KG basin output. A request the revenue secretary had turned down.
In other recordings, we see journalists and editors, who are meant to report and analyse what is going on objectively, offering to become couriers and stenographers and foot soldiers in the war one set of corporate fat cats is waging against another. We also see a political fixer, Ranjan Bhattacharya, whose USP once was his familial proximity to the Bharatiya Janata Party, seamlessly open a line to the Congress and go about his business as if election results don't matter. He boasts about his proximity to Ghulam Nabi Azad and his ability to send a message to “SG, boss”, a reference to the Congress president. He then quotes Mukesh Ambani telling him the Congress party is now “apni dukan”. Mr. Bhattacharya may have been lying about his influence but then the formidable Ms Radia is anything but a dupe.
We also hear in the tapes an iconic businessman, Ratan Tata, who today makes sanctimonious statements about crony capitalism and the danger of India becoming a banana republic, lobbying through his PR agent, Ms Radia, for A. Raja to be given the Telecom portfolio.
If the allocation of spectrum by the Manmohan Singh government in 2008 and 2009 is one of the biggest scams in independent India, then the involvement of businessmen like Ratan Tata, Sunil Mittal and Mukesh Ambani in lobbying for their choice of telecom minister when the UPA government returned to power in May 2009 is surely a very important part of the back-story. But it is a story none of the journalists who liaised with Ms Radia during this time chose to report. More than the squabble within the Dravida Munnettra Kazhagam (DMK) or between the DMK and the Congress, the involvement of India's biggest companies in the process of cabinet formation was the story that should have been headlined. Ms Radia talks of Sunil Mittal and AT&T using Times Now to push out stories about Dayanidhi Maran being the frontrunner for telecom and Mr. Raja being in disfavour. Her own strategy appears to have been to use her relationship with Barkha Dutt and Shankar Aiyar to get the opposite message out onto news channels like NDTV and Headlines Today.
Instead of using Ms Radia as a “source” for covering the DMK, her role, and the role of her principal clients, in trying to push for a minister who was seen even then as tainted ought to have been exposed. But then Delhi is a hothouse of power, and proximity to power deadens one's reflexes and weakens one's nerves. What Indian journalism needs more than anything else today is distance. From both politicians and industrialists. It is never too late to swallow that red pill.

In the beginning was the picture...

By John Cheeran
Conventional wisdom has it that a picture speaks better than thousand words. May be, may be not. A picture without context can often be mere light and shade, arresting in its imagery but failing in its objective to inform and provoke those who pause to gaze.
Providing context to pictures is its own reward. The job description can at best be compared with the man who hammers the last nail to the coffin to ensure that the ghost does not walk free when deadlines crawl across to newsroom. A well-written caption is the last and most comfortable resting place for a well-shot picture.
Pictures are not paintings. Everything that goes with journalism is pure craft and despite the long rope of subjectivity you cannot but be clear in your words and images that are offered to the reader out there. Hence, photojournalism is no art. It is a craft that requires painstaking gathering of information of about the subjects that enter the viewfinder, so that we could be those, who know what we are doing. So we can escape forgiveness in the morning.
Artists can afford to be lazy, independent, and muddled headed. Artists can always blame those who stopped by to look at their work, for not having got the message right. In journalism, the blame rests with journalists, not with readers.
The man who hammers the nail into photographs in a newspaper does not have a large enough peg to hang his words. A sutradhar is not supposed to rewrite the script of the play but he only provides the context so that spectators are able to appreciate the nuances behind the unfolding images.
A caption writer aims to illuminate pictures with sufficient and relevant information so that they are truly worth more than a thousand words, if not more. Photojournalists are not the best of writers, but great communicators. In an age when reporters are allowed by editors to assume that their role in journalism is to write stories with the freedom and verve that were once the preserve of fiction writers, photojournalists are the only people who turn up at a news event, wait for the right moment to bring back with the defining moment of the day. Captions only strive to encapsulate the background and take the story forward. Assuming that St. John would forgive me, let me walk away by saying, in the beginning was the picture and the picture was with the page.

Journalism has changed, indeed

By John Cheeran
Everyone says journalism has changed.
Yes, I should know, it has changed. Now newspapers ask readers what do they want from them.
Not so long ago, newspapers led from the front by breaking stories, bringing down skeletons from the cupboards of movers and shakers, unmasking the faces of high and mighty, and by asking irksome questions, and in the process, ferreting out information.
Are editors abdicating their responsibilities by bringing in guest editors and having conversations with people whom the paper considers as High Net Worth Individuals?
I cannot but say that when editors seek applause from the likes of Rahul Bajajs, Ratan Tatas, Nandan Nilekanis, Narayana Murthys and Prasad Bidapas, it is a dangerous trend. A trend of servility that can spell the doom of news gathering as much as the penchant for paid news.
Yes, it is important to get your ying and yang right, but not at the cost of your backbone.

Rogue theories must go, says TJS George

Editor's note: Almost a year ago, I had persuaded TJS George, eminent editor and author, and my journalism guru, to write a piece for the launch of DNA's Bangalore edition. The points made by TJS are still relevant.

By TJS George
The birth of a baby – any baby – is a joyous occasion. It is a journalistic duty, therefore, to say a hearty “Welcome” to DNA as it takes birth in Bangalore. Duty done, we can now turn to life as it is lived in these days of terror, economic as well as ideological.
Let no one deny that DNA has shown exemplary courage in its Bangalore opening. This is a town where there are already seven general interest dailies and six business dailies. That is thirteen newspapers every day in English alone, to say nothing of those in Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, Urdu. This unnatural congestion is either a tribute to the reading habits of Bangaloreans or a pointer to the publishing industry’s madness. Perhaps DNA’s courage is sustained by the strong possibility of one or more of the aforementioned thirteen disappearing in the not too distant future.
Is DNA also being honourable besides being courageous? It’s no secret that it has been having a full-fledged staff for several months and that it has enlisted a not insignificant number of paid subscribers. It would have been commercially justifiable if the project were postponed for a year, the staff demobbed and the subscriptions refunded. But to fulfil its commitment to staff and subscribers is the more honourable course. It is good to believe that, considering the somersaults that have transformed the newspaper industry in its essential basics in the last couple of decades, elements of honourableness survive in some corners.
For now at any rate, we can also draw some solace from the way India is defying world trends on the publishing front. Just days before DNA’s opening in Bangalore, two of the world’s greatest newspaper legends tottered in their foundations. The Tribune Company filed for bankruptcy. This company is the owner of iconic titles in the US such as the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun and Hartford Courant besides the Chicago Tribune. The great New York Times itself announced a cut in its quarterly dividend, suffered a 60 percent fall in its share price, watched its advertising revenue nosedive by almost 14 percent and, in a final cruel blow, pledged its landmark headquarters building in New York to raise badly needed cash. Predictably, Rupert Murdoch appeared on the scene hungry to buy the ailing giant as he had bought other evocative temples of publishing like the Wall Street Journal and, much earlier, the London Times.
India has bucked the Western trend so far. But this does not put Indian newspapers for ever above the logic of economics. The global slowdown has already started hurting. The most profitable papers are engaged in a headcount audit, preparatory, no doubt, to staff cuts. The India Today Group has closed its Bengali edition “due to market conditions”. Many inflated salaries have been brought down to earth.
Sooner rather than later, a historical correction must take place in our newspaper business.
The numbers must find a natural, sustainable level. More importantly, there must be a return to the reality that running a newspaper is different from making cement or selling toilet soap. In recent decades we have seen the enthronement of the rogue theory that a newspaper company’s only responsibility is to make money for its shareholders. Milton Friedman who aired that theory for capitalism’s glory has been repudiated in his own country, in the wake of America’s economic doldrums, by erstwhile champions of capitalism. Bill Gates said pointedly that corporations cannot be blind to their social responsibility. In publishing, more than in other industries, decency must be a dominant virtue. For the news industry to play its part in human progress, the citizen must prevail over the marketeer who feeds off him.

The News Americans Need

By Dan Rather
(First published in Washington Post)

You don’t have to care about media companies or reporters to care about the state of the news, because if it’s in trouble — and it surely is — this country is in trouble. That’s why, while speaking recently at the Aspen Institute, I called upon President Obama to form a commission to address the perilous state of America’s news media.
Some might scoff at the notion that a president and a country occupied by two wars and a recession should add the woes of the news media to an already crowded plate. But the way the news is delivered, and the quality of the information the American public receives about what’s going on here and abroad, has and will continue to have a profound effect on these very issues and on the overall quality of government by, for and of the people.
I am not calling for any sort of government bailout for media companies. Nor am I encouraging any form of government control over them. I want the president to convene a nonpartisan, blue-ribbon commission to assess the state of the news as an institution and an industry and to make recommendations for improving and stabilizing both.
Why bring the president into it? Because this is the only way I could think of to generate the sort of attention this subject deserves. Academia and think tanks generate study after study, yet their findings don’t reach the people who need to be reached.
We need a real and broad public discussion of the role news is meant to play in our democratic system of government and a better public understanding of the American news infrastructure’s fragile condition. We need to know how things got this way and what we need to change.
An intense period of corporate consolidation over the past 25 years, aided and abetted by deregulation by the Federal Communications Commission, has reduced to a mere handful the sources from which most Americans get their news. While independent reporting has been winnowed and homogenized, the news organizations responsible for this reporting have largely fallen under corporate mandates to increase profits quarterly — which has meant a reduction in newsgathering personnel, the shuttering of overseas bureaus and the nearly complete subordination of a public trust to the profit motive.
Moreover, corporate values of risk aversion have increasingly filtered down to newsrooms, supplanting news values. The big conglomerates that own most of America’s news media may have, at any given moment, multiple regulatory, procurement and legislative matters before various arms of the federal government; their interests, therefore, can often run contrary to the interests of the citizens whom journalism, at its best, is meant to serve. There is little incentive to report without fear or favoritism on the same government one is trying to lobby. Increasingly, the news we get — and, significantly, the news we don’t get — reflects this conflict of interests.
The news infrastructure, weakened from within by this corrosive dynamic, is at risk of toppling altogether because of a separate, though not unrelated development: the coast-to-coast collapse of the newspaper industry, which has lost the key revenue streams of classified and local advertising to the Internet.
For radio, television and, yes, the Internet, newspapers have been and continue to be the foundation on which “hard” news rests. They provide the reporters who are our primary and often our only independent sources in places as close as city zoning hearings and as far away as Indonesia. Anyone who has worked in other media knows that, if newspapers are taken out of the equation, dwindling news resources will be stretched to the breaking point.
You will not turn on your television and hear an anchor admit this. What you will see, instead, is more opinion, commentary and marketing masquerading as news. You will get more in-studio shouting matches between partisans, moderated by openly partisan talking heads.
And so shows that can be produced on the cheap, with little to no real reporting, fan impotent citizen anger at a government whose workings, absent hard-hitting reporting, seem ever-more opaque — and at a world that, absent consistent, contextualized coverage, seems to defy comprehension.
We need news that breeds understanding, not contempt; news that fosters a healthy skepticism of the workings of power rather than a paralyzing cynicism. We need the basic information that a selfgoverning people requires. The old news model is crumbling, while the Internet, for all its immense promise, is not yet ready to rise in its place — and won’t be until it can provide the nuts-and-bolts reporting that most people so take for granted that it escapes their notice.
This is a crisis that, with no exaggeration, threatens our democratic republic at its core. But you won’t hear about it on your evening news, unless the message can be delivered in a way that corporate media have little choice but to report — such as, say, the findings of a presidential commission.

If you are like I......

Yanks Thump Sox
Prime rate to remain stable, Bernanke says


By Gene Weingarten
Sunday, June 22, 2008; Page W32
If you are like I, you are pretty sick of reading articles about how the financially-troubled newspaper industry is making desperation budget cutting moves: Downsizing its products, laying off staff, buying prostitutes for advertisers, and so forth. But believe me, you'd be even sicker of it if you were INSIDE a typical American newsroom these days, where it's sometimes hard to hear over the 200 decibel background drone of human whining.
One frequent newsroom complaint is that they are cutting back drastically in the use of copyeditors. It's true, but I for one am not complaining. I say good riddance.
The era of the copy editor is gone. Copyeditors were once an important part of the journalism process, back when journalists weren't as educated as they are now. Back then, your typical reporter was named 'Scoop" and he was a semi-literate cigar-smoking, fannie-pinching drunk with bad teeth in a wrinkled suit and a card that said PRESS stuck in the hat-band of his fedora, and they'd generate their stories by bribing sources, pistol-whipping people into talking, eavesdropping from inside closets, etc. A reporter was hired for cheek and muscle, not their writing skill, so you needed an extra layer of editing.
Copy editors were fine-tuners, fixing basic but important things that a first line of editing might'nt catch: Typos, errors in facts, spelling, syntax, punctuation, clarity, word usage, style, parallelism, and not letting sentences run on. They would also bear principle responsibility for headlines, photo captions, story jump lines, as well as catching the occasional, inadvertent cultural insensitivity. Because the job requires patience, maturity, intelligence, attention to detail, and an extremely sedentary workday, fat old Jewish ladies have often made good copyeditors.

But nowadays, things have changed. "Scoop" is gone. Young reporters are all named "P. Laurence Butterfield Jr." and they arrive at their first newspaper job fresh-faced and competent, straight from New Haven, Conn., with their high-faluting Princeton educations. They don't need copyeditors.
This is a true fact: I'm writing this column the very week after dozens of copy editors left my newspaper through an early retirement buyout, and I have noticed no difference at all whatsoever in the quality, accuracy
CONTINUED ON PAGE 17
or readability of the product.
The inessentialness of copy editors is underscored by the advent of sophisticated spellchecking systems which have introduced a hole new level of error-free proofreading. No longer can we say that the editor's penis mightier than the sword. The sword's main foe is a computer now, and the computer is up to to the task.
But nowadays, things have changed. "Scoop" is gone. Young reporters are all named "P. Laurence Butterfield Jr." and they arrive at their first newspaper jobs fresh-faced and competent, straight from New Haven, Conn., with their high-faluting Princeton educations. They don't need copyeditors.
Truth to tell, I feel badly for all copy editors whom, I'm afraid, will suddenly find themselves out of a job. Time has past them by, however, efeated the Red Sox 6-5 in extra innings and it doesn't make sense for us to weep for copyeditors anymore than it makes sense for us to lament the replacement of bank tellers with automated ATM machines.
So to all my former copyediting colleagues, I wish them a soft landing. Finally, I'd like to give particular shoutouts to my friends Pat Meyers and Bill O'Brien, two longtime copyeditors for the Washington Post who took the early retirement: We'll miss ya, guys, even if we didn't need you all that muck.
How good a copy editor would you be? See how many of the 57 errors of fact, grammar, syntax and style in this column you can catch, and then read the corrections below.
Gene Weingarten can be reached at weingarten@washpost.com.

CORRECTIONS

Here are the errors in fact, grammar, syntax and style that a good copy editor would have caught.
Paragraph One: Six errors.
Opening line should begin "if you are like me," not "like I."
No hyphen in "financially troubled."
"Downsizing" should be lower case.
"Budget-cutting" should have a hyphen.
Syntax requires moving "desperation" after "budget-cutting."
"200-decibel" should have a hyphen.
Paragraph Two: Four errors.
"They" has no antecedent; should read "publishers."
"Copy editors" is two words.
The phrase "I, for one," needs two added commas.
Paragraph Three: Eleven errors.
"Copy editors" should be two words.
"Scoop" has an incorrect open quotation mark.
Comma needed after Scoop.
"Semiliterate" has no hyphen.
Comma needed after "semiliterate."
Should be "and wearing a wrinkled suit" to correct impression that it's his teeth in the suit.
It's "fanny," not "fannie."
"Hatband" has no hyphen.
HE would generate HIS stories, not "they" and "their."
"His" writing skills, not "their."
Paragraph Four: Six errors
"Mightn't," not "might'nt."
"Typos" should be lowercase.
"And not letting sentences run on" is bad parallelism."
"Principal," not "principle."
"Copy editors," not "copyeditors."
Grotesque cultural insensitivity in the line about Jewish women.
Paragraph Five: Four errors.
A comma is needed after "Jr."
It's "highfalutin," not high faluting.
Yale is in New Haven, not Princeton.
Copy editors is two words.
Paragraph Six: Two errors
"True fact" is redundant.
"At all whatsoever" is redundant.
"Continued" line is an error: One error.
Paragraph Seven: Six errors.
"Inessentialness" is not a word.
"Spell-checking" is hyphenated.
"That" have introduced, not "which."
"Whole," not "hole."
"Pen is" not "penis."
There is an extra "to" in the last sentence.
Paragraph Eight: One error.
The entire paragraph is repeated from above. Since it will not be individually copyedited again, this counts as one error only.
Paragraph Nine: Nine errors.
"Badly" should be "bad."
"Who," not "whom."
"Jobs," not "job."
"Passed," not "past."
There is errant baseball type included.
"Copy editors" are two words.
"Any more" should be two words.
"Automated" and "machines" are both redundancies.
Paragraph Ten: One error.
It is upside-down.
Paragraph Eleven: Eight errors.
"Copy editing" is two words.
Wish "you" a soft landing, not "them."
"Shout-outs" has a hyphen.
"Myers," not "Meyers."
"O'Brian," not "O'Brien."
"Copy editors" is two words.
"The" Washington Post, not "the."
"Much," not "muck."
The Headline: One error.
So, we get the 59 errors enumerated above, plus one more, to total 60: The final error is that we said there were only 57 errors.

Can newspapers survive?

By Michael Gawenda
There is incessant chatter about the need for a new model for newspapers in the digital age, which might be true, but in the meantime, profitable newspapers are being butchered. Talk of a new model is nothing but empty words.
The editorial cuts announced by Fairfax, publisher of the Herald, in response to a fall in advertising revenue, were chilling. The economic slowdown is the immediate cause, but this was coming for at least a decade. It is a failure of imagination and commitment, a result of a lack of experience and knowledge and love of newspapers. I am not opposed to cuts in editorial staff as a matter of principle. Not every job has to be preserved and protected. I am not saying the Herald and The Age cannot be great newspapers with fewer journalists. They can. And they have to change.
But for real change, courage is needed, as are vision and risk-taking and, above all, a commitment to newspapers and journalism that, frankly, I do not see at the moment.
Young people embarking on a career in journalism should not despair. Things change, often in unexpected and unforeseeable ways. Newspapers can do some things no other medium can match - not television, not radio, not the internet.
One of the great mistakes newspapers have made in recent years is trying to address their weaknesses rather than build on their strengths. So we have shorter stories, bigger headlines, more graphics, more bells and whistles, more tricked-up, overblown pages, more pages meant to look visually rich but which, in the main, look desperate and garish.
This attempt to ape the internet in print is being driven by middle-aged people who, in truth, have no real feel for the net and therefore no real understanding of its strengths and weaknesses. The next generation of journalists, who have grown up in the digital age, are much more likely to understand what newspapers can offer that digitally delivered journalism cannot.
Only newspapers can build a community of readers. What builds that community? Well, for a start, a shared sense of what the newspaper is about, what it considers important, interesting, entertaining and thought-provoking. A shared sense of the city, the country, even the world. That's about telling stories - stories from our courts and police force and local councils and businesses and governments and hospitals. No web news site will ever tell such stories.
Is this investigative journalism? Of course it is. How many newspaper articles do you consider compelling and revelatory, articles that only a reporter, going out there and doing the reporting work, could have brought you? Newspapers need to be in the business of news, but they need to report news that only a newspaper can do well.
The rest, reports of news conferences, PR-driven events, announcements - all of that can go online. Newspapers need to get smaller, clearer in their focus.
Most of the lifestyle sections should migrate to online. That doesn't mean newspapers should stop writing about food, for instance, but think, when was the last time you read a truly well-reported story about food? The reviews and the listings - and entertainment and television guides - are much better done online.
Unlike some people, I believe the future for newspapers is not in commentary and analysis. The internet is awash with commentary. You can read the columnists on every major - and minor - paper in Australia and around the world on the net, and a number of sites aggregate this stuff.
Newspapers should not abandon commentary and analysis, but it should really be just another form of reporting - tell me something I have not thought about. That can be done only by people who know more about a given subject than I know. Too many columnists actually know less than their readers.
Newspapers need to build on their strengths: Forget big headlines and huge and often meaningless graphics. Instead, arresting photography, great illustrations and wonderful editorial cartoons. And stories, well-written and compelling stories, well-edited and with smart and entertaining headlines, if possible, without lousy puns.
Will this sort of newspaper, half the size of most of the papers we produce today, succeed?
Can newspapers have smaller circulations and fewer readers, a premium cover price, no lifestyle sections, no special circulation deals - which basically involve giving the paper away - and be profitable? I think so.
What size staff is required to produce such a newspaper? I suspect a smaller staff than those producing today's papers. I am sure the newspaper and online sites of the newspaper need to be brought together because without that sort of integration, neither will succeed.
Do newspapers have a future? And how long is that future? Well, I ask you to imagine Melbourne without The Age and the Herald Sun or Sydney without the Herald and The Daily Telegraph. Imagine Australia without The Australian.
If you can imagine such a future, in my view, that's in part because of our failure to produce newspapers that attract the sort of fierce and lifelong loyalty they once attracted.
Michael Gawenda is a former editor-in-chief of The Age. This is an extract from his A.N. Smith Lecture in Journalism to be delivered tonight in Melbourne.

Who edits our newspapers?

By John Cheeran
The Sunday Times of India has carried a letter in today's edition.
It begins " Indira Gandhi famously said, “You were asked to bend but you chose to crawl.” Independence Day celebrations at the Juhu campus of SNDT University reminded me of this quote."

So who edits Sunday Times Of India? or who edits these pages?
Are copy editors not supposed to correct facts, even if they belong to a letter?

As far as I know that remark was made by L.K. Advani after the Emergency was lifted.

The same edition carries an AP wire story from the US which tells how some guys were fined for fixing the grammar in signboards in a park.
May be fixing facts, and grammar are punishable in newspapers too.

When Garcia Compliments Gulf News

By John Cheeran
I haven't seen an astute salesman other than the celebrated newspaper designer Mario Garcia. Garcia belongs to many schools,as and when it suits him, but most part of the time, he swears by packaging.
Now Garcia has redesigned many Indian newspapers including the Hindu and Hindustan Times. There may be admirers for such changes in design. I don't want to quarrel with that. But essentially Garcia is the guy who believes in packaging the shit.
And that's what he has done with Gulf News in Dubai. Gulf News is an huge free mailer masquerading as a newspaper. It relies on syndicated stuff and wires to fill up its 72 pages of main edition, assorted supplements and throw away magazines.
Now, I respect Garcia as a designer. I'm not surprised when he praises Gulf News in his latest blog entry.

But Mr. Garcia, you have improved the design of the paper. But what about the content? Gulf News can't even get right a promo, which you have shown in your blog.
The newspaper proudly says: Beyond the news: a variety of magazines compliment the Gulf News's content and coverage."

Now Mr. Garcia, what do you have to say about magazines COMPLIMENT the Gulf News?
When you next time preach your gospel at the spacious, and anti-septic news room of Gulf News, will you tell the editors at the newspaper that there is a difference between COMPLIMENT and COMPLEMENT, and the ability to choose the right word helps a great deal to produce a decent newspaper?
I'm sure you will not. For I remember the last time when you talked about split infinitives at your impromptu sermons, its managing editors fainted.
So what if Gulf News murders English, the murder happens on glossy pages and in a pool of expensive North American templates.
Long live the salesman.

Internet Fix: Journalism Made Simple at Gulf News

By John Cheeran
Old habits die hard.
Ask any journalist, s/he will tell you.
Internet has eased the lives of typists masquerading as journalists. Offenders often try to couch their plagiarism by claiming to do research. And in the Middle East journalism, ‘lifting’ stories is a way of life.
On July 12, 2008, Gulf News Sport section carried a horse racing preview for the Ascot Summer Miles Stakes, where the Dubai-based stable Godolphin ran, as the lead story.
It’s a by line story. When a newspaper lets you take a by line, it’s a signal to readers that here the writer has done some hard work to ferret out information. A newspaper, normally, should take pride in by line stories because that’s what it gives a distinct voice in a crowded media market.
In this STAR RETURNS story, the Gulf News journalist has stooped so low to denigrate the newspaper and his profession by lifting the entire story from the website of the stable Godolphin, www.godolphin.com
The Gulf News horse racing expert normally pretends that he has a direct line to trainer Saeed bin Surour’s thoughts. So in the second paragraph itself, the Gulf News writer says Surour is ‘excited’. In fact it is the Godolphin website which says the trainer is ‘excited.’ The Gulf News expert only swallows the same feeling.
And he goes on to quote Surour three times in the story without spelling out whether he actually spoke to the trainer. Camouflaging, at its best.
All quotes attributed to Surour is a straight lift from the preview www.godolphin has published on its site. Godolphin has uploaded its preview at a convenient time for would be plagiarists. At 14.55 hrs. (Read the original preview at http://www.godolphin.com/NewsArticle.aspx?id=4038)
That gives plenty of time for journalists to cook up their own by line stuff.

By not attributing Surour’s quotes to www.godolphin.com, the Gulf News horse racing specialist has misled his readers and editors. To anyone believing in the integrity of journalism this is nothing but unabashed plagiarism.
No one who has left some pride in his profession and integrity (after more than 20 years in the business) would resort to such desperate measures while taking a by line.
Only when quoting Simon Crisford, the Gulf News horse racing expert refers to the Godolphin website, but again without naming the website’s details.
So by carefully not attributing Surour’s comments to www.godolphin.com, the Gulf News horse racing expert has tried to claim that his quotes are exclusive.
Take out quotes from this preview which are straight lifts from the godolphin website, there will be only a gaping hole in the place of preview. For that the writer has shamelessly taken a by line!
And any defence on part of the writer that he has not committed plagiarism but only research is shredded to pieces by the last paragraph of his preview.
The Gulf News Preview’s last paragraph, which is not a quote, is a word-to-word lift from www.godolphin.com.
In fact the last seven paragraphs of the Gulf News Preview, by lined by its horse racing expert, is a word-to-word lift from the www.godolphin.com
Respected sirs, ladies and gentlemen, what should one call this? Please advise me.
Is this journalism?
Faithful Xeroxing of another’s Intellectual Property?
Today I find it highly embarrassing to recall that I once worked for Gulf News.
As the BONEY M song said about Rasputin, “It was a shame how he carried on.”
The tragedy is that he still carries on.

Gulf News Exposed: Again

By John Cheeran
Some guys will never learn.
In Tamil, that great Indian language, you call such gentlemen thirutha mudiyatha kazhuthai (Thi Mu Ka). This colourful phrase’s English version could be ‘Donkeys who could never be improved upon.”
I hate to feast on editorial errors but what Gulf News dishes out in its sport section each day, brings tears to my eyes.
If it is possible to rape a newspaper, then that is what being done right now by a few gentlemen in that newspaper, stripping away the last vestiges of credibility of this broadsheet.
Take today’s (June 23, 2008) Gulf News sport front page.
The lead story of the section opener is edited in an atrocious fashion.
The Gulf News sports journalists could not get the name of the star UAE footballer Ismail Mattar right in the picture caption that accompanies the lead story. A hungry sub-editor swallowed a T from Mattar! The story itself throughout suffers from ill-informed editing.
The third paragraph (see the image on top right) says “The Syrians tool the lead.”
Interesting. Spell check can never be a substitute for your language skills. A bit of attention could have set the tool into ‘took’ and saved the report that details the crucial World Cup qualifier clash between the hosts UAE and Syria.
And that’s not enough. The same sentence finishes by saying “Al Hussain who placed home.”
Placed home, what?
It should have read as placed the ball home. As a journalist, it is hugely embarrassing me for to chronicle the mistakes of a newspaper in this manner.
But does anyone care for the brand equity and credibility of the Gulf News?
Is there anyone in the management (editorial or marketing) of the Gulf News who cares to read his/her own newspaper in the morning?
Or have they all begun to read The National for their news?

'Quiet' an achievement: Classic howlers in Dubai journalism

By John Cheeran
This surely must rank as one of the classic howlers in journalism. A sub-editor who does not know his English, despite having formally studied it, and dumb enough not to rely on a dictionary in sheer arrogance or ineptitude, plunges the newspaper’s brand equity to new depths.
When Sachin Tendulkar celebrated his birthday on April 25, 2006, the Dubai-based Gulf News newspaper decided to gatecrash the party with a lead headline that said volumes about the illiterate journalism that it does in the Middle East. See the image on top right. The sub-editor who wrote the headline, apparently, is unaware of the world of difference in meaning between ‘quiet and quite.’ And quietly the headline went all the way to press, to be a living proof of the quality of journalism that the newspaper practises.
Well, as the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky observed “everyone has a right to be stupid, but one should not abuse that right.”
If only such gentlemen journalists could heed Trotsky’s wisdom!

Xerox Media and Mohammad Asif!

By John Cheeran
Journalism is great, and online journalism is greater.
One should call journalism of this age, and especially in the Middle East, Xerox Media, for its tendency to whore the news agency copies.
As wire agencies broke the news of Pakistan fast bowler Mohammad Asif arrested at Dubai airport on charges of possessing illegal drugs, what do the Dubai-based newspapers do? Just xerox the story and simply put By A Staff Reporter.
That’s what Khaleej Times’s online edition proudly did, grabbing the AFP story and giving some value addition by adding By a staff reporter!. (http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/theuae/2008/June/theuae_June87.xml&section=theuae)

Gulf News' online edition fell back on Reuters to run the item.
And news had to flow from Lahore; not from Dubai where things were happening.
Hard work, one must say!

Read the AFP copy here
Pakistan's cricketer Asif arrested in Dubai on drugs charges
2 hours ago
LAHORE, Pakistan (AFP) — Pakistani fast bowler Mohammad Asif has been arrested at Dubai airport on charges of possessing illegal drugs, cricket officials said Tuesday.
The 25-year-old Asif was seized while returning home from India after featuring in a domestic event that ended on Sunday, a Pakistan Cricket Board official said on condition of anonymity.
"Yes, we can confirm about Asif's arrest. He was stopped at Dubai airport on charges of carrying opium and was supposed to be brought before the magistrate on Tuesday," the official said.
The PCB would brief the media about the situation later on Tuesday, he said.
"We have few details so we are gathering more and as soon as we get them we will brief the media. As far as we know he flew out of Bombay on Sunday morning and was detained at Dubai airport," said the official.
PCB human resources director Nadeem Akram is in Dubai and has also hired a lawyer to assist Asif, the official said.
Reports from Dubai said the local police have conducted several tests on Asif and would bring him before the magistrate later Tuesday.
The arrest is just the latest controversy to hit Pakistan's troubled cricket team over the past two years.
Asif was banned for one year after he tested positive for the steroid nandrolone in October 2006. Fellow paceman Shoaib Akhtar was banned for two years on the same charge.
The bans were however lifted on appeal two months later.
Akhtar meanwhile is appealing a lifetime ban imposed in April for repeated disciplinary problems.

'Dont' do this to journalism, my boss! Quality of journalism in Dubai!

By John Cheeran

Do you want to work as a journalist in Dubai?
Do you want to work for the market leader in Dubai?
Please take a look at these clippings culled from Gulf News, Dubai.
The editor journalist who has given this sport page headline does not know the difference between don't and dont. Such talent is rewarded without fail in the organisation!

God save journalism and readers of this newspaper in Dubai.

Tough weather for journalists in Kerala

By John Cheeran
Journalists in Kerala face a tougher time than the much romanticized farmers and their suicides.
Salaries are low and journalism has been just that – a respectable profession.
Deepika, Kerala’s oldest living newspaper, has sacked a string of journalists without giving them the stipulated one-month notice.
Deepika has witnessed managerial earthquakes in the last two years thanks to dreaded financial bottom lines and the latest axe wielding can be again attributed to that.
It only goes to show how precarious an existence, journalists in Kerala lead, despite the state’s upsurge in newspaper circulation and readership.
Someone should intervene.

Do you want to become a journalist? log on to Online Centre for Media Studies

By John Cheeran
Are journalism schools worth the hefty fees they charge?
Are you satisfied with the quality of Indian journalism? Would you like to communicate better with your colleagues?
Do you want to go beyond mere blogging?
Do you want to master the crafts of editing and reporting?
Well without leaving your desktop or laptop, now you can become a better editor or reporter.
http://www.ocms.in/ offers you the right kind of courses whether you are a student or professional of whatever background.
With a course that lasts only 12 weeks, Mr Sunil Saxena, the man behind the Online Centre for Media Studies, has ensured that what you learn is what you must.
You get all the meat, no bones.
With a course fee of Rs 15,000 one should point out that what http://www.ocms.in/ offers is value for money.
India’s first and finest online journalism college could give shape to your ambitions of a news breaker and newsmaker.
Go, log on to http://www.ocms.in/ now.