Evolution of the newsrooms in India
newsroom is the central place where journalists—reporters, editors,
and producers/publishers, along with other staffers—work to gather
news to be published at various platforms. The newsrooms have
gone through several changes in the last 50 years, with computers
replacing typewriters and the internet replacing teletype terminals. Now
the smartphones with mobile applications becoming the advance tool for
information dissemination at all levels—has further changed the scenario
and made the works of the news professionals rather competitive.
Here VS Raja, VP (Project & Engineering), HT Media Ltd recounts the
anecdotes of evolution of the newsrooms in India.
The news most of the time originates
from the pen of a reporter or a
correspondent. It is his view of
the event as he sees it. This has been the
truth from time immemorial. What has
changed is the technology that helps him
reach his reader much faster and with a
more complete story.
For a man on the street, if you are working
in a newspaper, his first guess would be
that you are a reporter. If your answer
is a No, he would expect you to be a
journalist at least.
The ultimate bottom line to the efficiency of
any newsroom is how much the reporter’s
story got enriched and complete, how fast
the story reached and to how many readers.
Today’s newsrooms enable content sharing
across the print, radio, television, internet,
etc, and provides a very wide reach to the
journalist who sometimes puts his life at
stake to create a great story.
The era of the 70s
In the 1970s when an event occurred in a
remote part of the country, a reporter in
India had to do some very strange things
to reach to his story. He would get a trunk
call booked many hours earlier to get the
first clues of an event. He would then reach
the place on a train or a rickety bus and
may be, walk a long distance to the event.
Once he got the story, he would have to
go to the nearest post office to send the
story by telegram to his newspaper office.
If he was lucky, he could send some photos
with great difficulty through a facsimile
transmitter from the head post office.
News agencies like the UNI, PTI, Varta,
API, Reuters, and a few others were
the lifeline for filling up the pages.
These agencies would send stories on
Fax and Tele-Printers. Each story would
come in many takes and the news editor
would sort the news manually and distribute
to his teams.
The only media available to the reader was
the radio broadcast which was the primary
medium for news followed by the printed
newspaper which gave or tried to give
more details of the event.
Those who could afford a radio had one
and were made to pay annual licence fee
for the same. Newspapers were a privilege
of a few and some read them a couple of
days later, but it did not matter and some
never cared.
Today is the age of the internet
The reporter of today faces a much more
complex and serious situation. Before he
even comes to know of an event, the videos,
blogs and reviews of the story have all
reached the reader.
My story is neither about what happened
before the 70s nor is it about what will
happen in future. It has more to do with
the rapid change this industry went through
from the 70s till now.
Seventies were what was called last phase
of the hot metal era. During this time
the stories would be written manually by
aggregating content from the tele printer,
the telegrams and what was heard on the
long distance trunk call. The manuscript
would go to a Lino Operator who would
punch your story to make metal slugs.
There were no typewriters or computers,
most journalists did not know typing.
Yes the edit page and the senior editors
had stenographers to type their stories.
Each story went through a process of
proof reading followed by assembly of the
page on a stone along with metal blocks
for the photographs and advertisements.
Air conditioning was relatively unknown
phenomenon in most newsrooms.
Newspapers were predominantly black
and white. Colour printing was only meant
for magazines.
The exciting 80s
Then came all the excitement and newsrooms
started to transform in the later part of
the 70s and the early part of the 80s. The
type casting machines were replaced by
what were called the proprietary systems.
Companies like the linotype, monotype,
and intertype who were earlier making
slug casting machines for more than 30
years converted to computerised composing
machines and type metal was replaced by
photographic film and paper as a medium
for creating the master pages for printing.
Stereos got replaced with aluminium plates
and letter press rotaries got replaced with
offset machines. Slowly the systems started
entering the newsrooms and editors and
reporters did not have to go to the composing
departments to get their manuscripts
linotyped and cast into slugs.
The newsrooms of the 80s were an interesting
combination of reporters, sub-editors, senior
editors on one hand and the proof readers,
page makers, designers and many others.
The privileged lot was the PTS operators
who would be sitting in extremely clean
and air-conditioned environments, more for
the machines rather than for themselves.
You had to take off your shoes to enter
their arena.
Transformation of the
vernacular press
Interestingly, it was the vernacular press
and the regional press which was always
ahead of the national players, more so
because the evolving technology was much
cheaper and adaptive to the needs of the
multiple languages and diversity of the
Indian newspapers. In the early 80s, Apple
Mac and the PC were adapted by the
newspapers for word processing especially
by the regional languages as the vernacular
fonts required more graphic capability and
complicated key board adaptability.
During the beginning of the 90s, open
systems started taking over the black
boxes of the proprietary systems. Slowly,
colour emerged as a choice for both the
editorial content, infographics as well as for
advertising. Newer versions of PCs like the
486s and Pentiums completely transformed
the newsrooms and editorial departments
took over the logging of data as well as
making pages of the newspapers into their
fold. With the emergence of faster PCs
at lower cost per seat, there was a huge
expansion in the generation of data and
the strong need for content management.
Internet and mobile:
New growth engines
During this period, internet, mobile
communication, higher bandwidths for data
networks, and a host of other technological
advances changed the newspaper scenario
completely and newsrooms as we see today
started evolving from the earlier format of
linear workflows to collaborative newsrooms.
A lot of newspapers developed in house
systems to process content and facilitate
the numerous electronic files as otherwise
content would vanish from the system never
to be found.
Content Management Systems:
The harbinger of change
Traditionally, newspapers in India
had separate newsrooms for multiple
publications and completely separate
editorial resources to create content as
well as process it. In the early 2000s,
two large newspapers Dainik Jagran
and Dainik Bhaskar collaborated with
a young entrepreneur, Sanjaya Gupta of
4Cplus to develop a Content Management
System to suit the peculiar needs of large
Indian newspapers which have a lot of
cross flow of data, multiple column sizes,
geographies, and entirely different dialects.
We created a common content management
system for Hindi, English, Gujarati and
a reporter at any location could file a
story in any language. The story would
automatically get into the defined basket
at the destination. As the content comes
from various sources in various formats
the system was designed to convert all
stories, graphics, pages and pictures into
predefined formats. All the advertisements
would be placed automatically at the
predefined page positions. Web content
would be created and updated automatically
on the web site.
This content management system is now
very popular and adapted by almost 90
newspapers in India for its wide range of
applications and ease of usage as well as
the usage in multiple languages and dialects.
The larger English newspapers like The
Hindu, The Times of India, use CCI and
Hindustan Times and Mint use EIDOS for
its newsroom applications. Most Indian
newspapers have e-papers, websites, and
various e-properties linked to their news
engines and are highly popular with the
large overseas Indian population.
Newspaper is a very popular medium in
India and still has a large growth curve
compared to other countries where the
growth is either stagnant or negative.
VS Raja, VP (Projects and Engineering) at
HT Media Ltd has been working for the
last 36 years in the areas of innovations,
projects, training and development. He
has worked in various organisations like
The Printers House, The Times of India,
The Indian Express and was instrumental
in conceptualising and implementing
the Content Management System for the
Bhaskar Group.
