Cover of NDTV's book More News is Good News: Untold Stories from 25 Years of Television News
Those of us who work in the news today are in debt now to an inexhaustible supply of insta-sources. Crucial (and often the earliest) alerts are sounded online. A photo, a tweet about someone, a tweet by someone, a Facebook page screenshot. Very often, we solicit info, and then get to 'sifting the junk from the news junkies'. The access to this hands-on-everywhere, dizzyingly open-plan workforce means that you're never done covering the news. Less is rarely more. And more is always within reach.
The sheer volume of content and the pace of consumption mean that online news is occasionally guilty of 'the media's declining interest in weighty matters and its growing obsession with process and trivia in the Internet age', a problem area discussed by American journalist Peter Hamby in his
paper 'Did Twitter Kill the Boys on the Bus? Searching For Better Ways to Cover a Campaign'.
Sometimes, it makes for just sloppy or superficial journalism. But the inexhaustible demand for content means that what may not have been considered newsworthy earlier will now find space. Someone is always logging on, someone is hitting refresh. I concede 'news never sleeps' is nowhere near as sexy as 'money never sleeps', unless Ryan Gosling can be persuaded to say it. But here we are, in prime time, 24x7.
Proving adequate to the task is exacting. The 2014 general election was a master class in learning to get comfortable on the edges of normal. And then we quickly learnt that getting comfortable was the most dangerous mistake of all.
But that came later. Digital news, for me, began to be taken seriously in India in 2009. A year earlier, the 26/11 terror attacks had seen millions of Indians across the world log on to watch the horror unfolding at home. In those seventy-two hours of the siege in Mumbai, we ripped through the bandwidth that was budgeted for a year. Unlike us, some other websites discontinued the live feed well before the attacks had ended because it was just too expensive to keep going. For ndtv.com, there was no question of a lockdown on access to an event that was changing us with every terrifying minute of its unfolding.
But that was our website showing what was running on TV. It was the death of Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y.S.R. Reddy in a helicopter crash in September 2009 that saw news sites creating wall-to-wall coverage. At NDTV, we covered the tragedy and its aftermath far more extensively on our website than we did on air. And as a news story, it compelled our online team to very quickly reallocate resources, redesign the flow of news coverage, and scale up the newsroom. We also learnt that online, we would often follow a very different news agenda than that of our television channels. We were clear that we didn't want to be a replica of NDTV 24X7 online; if that was all we offered, an overhang of what was running on television screens, we believed we were doomed.
The traffic that swiftly outstripped our expectations meant we were now way past Go.
By the time 2014 rolled around, there was much talk of how this would be the first Indian election with a sizeable Fifth Estate. Too soon, it became clear that the Fifth Estate would, in fact, be prime and not peripheral turf, and that if you weren't going to partake, you better just get out of the way.
We spent months training a very young, relentlessly bright and, gauging by the food deliveries, perma-hungry newsroom on the portended lay of the land. The team, to its endless credit, never flagged in its enthusiasm or diligence. We rehearsed for different possible news scenes. We established the rules, and then grilled each other on them. We taught ourselves to write faster, source more, triple-check.
And then we missed the mark. By a long shot. In a flurry of emails, as the BJP was debating Narendra Modi for prime ministerial candidate, someone copied and pasted a tweet that seemed to suggest Sushma Swaraj had made a statement against Mr Modi. The Twitter handle of the person who had posted this information was lopped off in the email. Without checking Sushma Swaraj's Twitter account, the information was sent out as an alert to the millions of users of our app, and attributed to her. It was a lapse of judgement, an absence of common sense (why would a leader publicly rail against another under the circumstances?), and an immense casualty of the pressure to put out the news as quickly as possible. The BJP boycotted our studios for a week. We were unequivocally apologetic, as we should have been, and flogged on social media, as we deserved. It was an extreme case of the Fat Finger syndrome that had sent the centre of gravity wobbling. And on Twitter, the reprisal was full-force. Ms Swaraj showed immense grace in accepting it had been a careless mistake, but a mistake, nonetheless. We were tossed grenades day and night by the BJP's supporters online, declaring that we acted with spite, and that the misinformation was manufactured to drive a wedge between the BJP's top leaders at a crucial time for the party.
We hunkered down. New rules were formed and imbibed urgently.
Breaths were missed, deeper breaths were taken, and then we got back to work. Voting was weeks away.
The election was fascinating and exhausting to cover online, replete with teachable moments. The response to any political story was measurable within seconds, the interest in online news soared. Politicians and commentators stopped treating websites as a referential repository of what television channels had aired, and keenly followed what was being posted, how quickly, and with what sort of feedback. For the first time, digital news wasn't an add-on. It was the thrumming centre.
On 16 May 2014, as Narendra Modi was elected prime minister, ndtv.com made history, registering 13 billion hits, a record for India. There were welcome signs of the evolution of a new audience, one that sought news first on the desktop and, more often, the phone; to be at the cockpit controls was a heady and unforgettable experience for a newsroom where the average age is a little short of thirty.
Which is just as well. Because the agility and rapidity needed of online news requires an alignment with technology, to say nothing of fast food, that appears to come naturally to those of recent vintage.
Also needed is the sort of skin that a rhino might fantasize about. Criticism in the world of bits and bytes is neither eloquent nor original, and it is as illogical as it is infinite. 'Feedback' crackles with the sort of abuse that would be acceptable nowhere else, and usually trawls a gamut from toxic to profane. The invective can be ignored (though most of us hit the block button sparingly), but what should serve as a five-degree alarm is the disappearance of and undisguised contempt for any difference of opinion. Political net neutrality is equated with spinelessness. Loyalty to a political party, which apparently must be pledged in absolutist and frequent online declarations of admiration for its leaders, appears to necessitate the renunciation of any objectivity. Journalists who question the actions or views of a party, a trait lacking which they should be benched, are to be branded traitors to the nation, or sell-outs to other parties, with some being nominated to both categories like Meryl Streep at the Oscars.
At the very start of 2015, a boat, allegedly carrying explosives, was blown up and while we were awaiting confirmation of its ownership, we broke the news saying that it was 'reportedly a Pakistani vessel' based on what sources had disclosed. That we waited to ascertain the details aggravated thousands. Within seconds, we went with what the defence ministry officially announced in its press statement. But because we didn't immediately declare it was a Pakistani boat, we had apparently proven to be pro-enemy and anti-government.