A newspaper is ideally a combination of two fundamental elements: what is in public interest and what the public is interested in. “There is a fine balance between the two and this gets played out in the editorial judgment,” said A.S. Panneerselvan, Readers’ Editor, The Hindu , at an open house with the newspaper’s readers in Bengaluru on Saturday.
The face-to-face interaction allowed readers to interact with the editorial team to give feedback and suggestions. It also provided an opportunity to explain to readers how decisions were taken in the newsroom.
Nirmala Narayanan, one of the readers, sought to know how the newspaper determined what was in public interest.
“Three elements contribute to what goes into the newspaper: informational, critical and adversarial,” Mr. Panneerselvan observed. “This is where the concept of editorial judgement becomes very important. The best thing about a newspaper is that the multiple viewpoints that readers have also gets expressed within the newsroom.” He described the newsroom as an argumentative space, where people debate and discuss news developments before arriving at editorial decisions.
Responding to feedback from several readers about advertisements jostling for space with news, Mukund Padmanabhan, Editor, The Hindu , pointed out that readers’ sensitivity to advertisements appeared to have continued to change over the years. He cited how in the 1880s, one of the early editions of The Hindu had only advertisements on the front page. “This is how newspapers function. It is not a new commercial practice, even for The Hindu . On occasions, we have pulled out advertisements on days when there have been extremely important news developments at significant commercial cost,” he said.
A column for senior citizens and a weekend digest of the week’s news were among suggestions made by the readers.
