Two digital evangelists were in Chennai last Saturday to talk about the power and reach of social media. Raheel Khursheed, Head of News, Politics and Government, Twitter India, and Sree Sreenivasan, former teacher of digital journalism at Columbia Journalism School and the current Chief Digital Officer for New York City, looked at the virtually connected world and came up with interesting observations. However, they would have hardly realised that they were stressing the importance of legacy media while celebrating >digital media .
Mr. Sreenivasan quoted in his presentation the former Wall Street Journal publisher Les Hinton’s rather apocalyptic saying: “The scarcest resource of the 21st Century is human attention.” As a person handling complaints from readers of a legacy newspaper, this observation seems to be an off the mark characterisation of the readers of legacy newspapers in general and The Hindu in particular. Over the last four years, I have received complaints and suggestions in myriad forms from the readers whose attention span is not only long but who are also hawk-eyed while reading the newspaper.
Three weeks ago, Tony Joseph, the former editor of BusinessWorld magazine, reviewed Tiger: The Life of Tipu Sultan (Juggernaut Books) by Kate Brittlebank. The Web edition of this newspaper carried the right title of the book and used the correct book jacket to illustrate the review. However, the print edition carried a different title: Tipu Sultan’s Search for Legitimacy: Islam and Kingship in a Hindu Domain , also by Kate Brittlebank but an earlier one published by the Oxford University Press. A reader, R.K. Sharma, wanted to know whether the >book reviewed by Mr. Joseph was Tiger: The Life of Tipu Sultan or the earlier 1997 edition. The Sunday Magazine team said that the older book jacket was inadvertently carried in print and that they fixed it for the online version of the review once they noticed the slip-up.
The inadvertence trap in journalism is the biggest minefield page editors have to navigate on a daily basis. It slyly makes its presence felt and mostly happens because of a momentary loss of concentration. The idea of having a multi-tiered gatekeeping mechanism is to ensure that the text is cleared by more than just one pair of eyes before publication. But this process is not enough if the desk is sourcing images from the Internet. Given its huge potential, the Internet will always throw up a multitude of images, and in the case of a known Tipu scholar like Kate Brittlebank, any search engine will show most of her works, published over a period of time by various publishers. The inadvertence trap, like the booby trap, does take a toll.
Don’t short-change trust One of the reasons for the existence of this office is to ensure that mistakes are mended in a visible manner. The change of the book jacket for the review, “A tiger by the tail” (July 31, 2016), was not acknowledged by the usual disclaimer, which spells out the nature of correction. This invisible mending is what forced the reader to come up with a probing question. The reader was not told which version was correct. The invisible mending short-changed the trust reposed by the reader in the newspaper.
A newspaper despite its deadline-driven process remains the first draft of history. And history itself is a very difficult discipline. There are instances where writers capture the difficulties of history with all its complexities. Man Booker Prize-winning author Julian Barnes, in his 2011 novel, >The Sense of an Ending , has a powerful meditation on history as well as fixing responsibility. One of his characters asks: “Isn’t the whole business of ascribing responsibility a kind of cop-out? We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals… It seems to me that there is — was — a chain of individual responsibilities, all of which were necessary, but not so long a chain that everybody can simply blame everyone else. But of course, my desire to ascribe responsibility might be more a reflection of my own cast of mind than a fair analysis of what happened… The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.”
The corrections and clarifications section has not only helped me to understand the full import of Barnes’s novel but also to look at the journalistic processes in a new light, where I can disaggregate structural flaws and limitations in the process on the one hand, and the individual lapses on the other. As a newspaper of record, our main task is to provide fair and accurate text to the best of our ability. Barnes’s character in the same novel also explains history: “History is that certainty produced at the point where imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” Everyone agrees that journalism, like any other human endeavour, will bear the markings of human frailties. The act of visible mending in this newspaper is a commitment to make the documentation less inadequate and more dependable. Invisible mending may undermine the trust of the readers. And that is a very high price to pay.
readerseditor@thehindu.co.in
