As a 20-year-old journalist who entered a newsroom as an intern, here’s what I now feel: We can’t let print die
Pic/iStock
I was doom-scrolling on LinkedIn at 1 am in the night, as a panic-stricken, internship-hungry young adult often does, when I first came across the opening at Sunday mid-day. I applied, thinking, “What are the chances I actually get it?” Chance happened to be on my side, and I landed the job. But I had mixed feelings.
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In a family like mine, reading a newspaper was a very important ritual. Every morning my father used to read one, highlighting all the articles he liked, and leaving it on the dining table. And every evening, when I returned home from school, I would read the articles he highlighted for me. It was his way of telling me what is important in the world. I grew up reading columns, with my father’s little annotations around them, highlighting and marking all the knowledge he thought I must possess to survive in this world.
When I moved away from home, I left this important ritual behind. I am ashamed to admit it now, but I had given up reading newspapers. How dishonest would it be—to contribute to a product I don’t consume myself? I consulted a professor, whose words stuck with me, “Every journalist should experience print once in their life.” I hardly knew what those words meant then.
In Akshita Maheshwari’s perspective, print media has had the luxury of time. It has been seasoned and crafted, over many decades to become the product it is today, and hence, print will always respect its reader’s time. Pic/Anurag Ahire
I come from the digital faction of news consumers. News means now to us—whatever is out there we need to know now—right in the moment. During a panel I attended recently, a panellist said that in the old days, people had the patience to wait for a newspaper the next day. It made me think of how my peers and I had lost the ability to wait for news. Instead, we tend to chase it. Our social media feeds are our sources of news. One can often find themselves watching a cat video right after a Reel made about the ceasefire in Gaza. There is no differentiation between entertainment and news, and if there was, we don’t have the patience to figure it out.
This is when I realised that the digital medium had replaced the “ritual” of reading a newspaper. It is no longer something you wait for. Instead, it happens to you all the time. Very few fathers will sit and annotate articles for their daughters today. Sigh.
As someone just entering the workforce, I am often the youngest person in a team. I am told a lot that time is the most important resource one can have, and I am lucky to have so much of it. This confused me, because I have always thought of time in retrospect. The people I have worked for have had so much time to perfect their craft—I cannot imagine how the time that I have yet to see is more valuable than the time they have already experienced.
That’s why I respect print so much. Digital is new, it is revolutionary even. But print has had the luxury of time. It has had decades after decades to bloom, to be seasoned, to be crafted, to become the product it is today. Print will always respect your time. For print, space is a limited resource. Every word that goes into a newspaper is thought about a hundred times before it becomes something you read. The fact that there is only so much that we can write, sharpens our skills, drives us to give our readers the best we can in the limited space we have.
In the times of the old printing presses, like the Gutenberg press, technology functioned by manually arranging individual metal letters into words and sentences on a lead plate, inking the type with ink balls, then placing a sheet of paper on top and applying pressure to press the ink onto the paper, essentially stamping the words onto the paper. There was no space to make changes once a paper was “put to bed”. So, journalists would have to write near-perfect copies, and that too, as quickly as possible.
Facts were of paramount importance. Newspapers were the only sources people had. And once put down in the newspaper, things couldn’t be taken back. In fact, one would often find the number of deaths reported in approximations. For example, writing “over 500 deaths” instead of “523 deaths”, because by the time the newspaper reached the consumer’s hands, numbers could have gone up.
The days of the Gutenberg press may be long gone, but the practices of the print journalist have all been passed down. These codes of conduct have a trickle-down effect, and they have found their way to me. Print has taught me integrity. Nothing is worth risking your integrity. I know now what my professor meant. The code of conduct of print is the Bible that every journalist must possess.
So, for those reading this physically, thank you for supporting us. And those who are on the website, go buy a newspaper tomorrow. Believe me, its makers will make it worth your while.
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