What is it like to be an editor at TOI?

Kingshuk Nag
03 December 2012, 04:53 PM IST

About two years ago the top honchos of a top English paper approached me with a job offer. What was unusual was the 'sweetener' they proffered. "You will be delighted to work with us, because this will release you from your caged existence and offer you the independence that you have never experienced in TOI," said the topmost guy of the company who was talking to me. Any amount of protestation that as Editor of one of the editions of TOI, I was not leading the kind of life that Indians lived under the British raj fell on deaf ears.

Over the years, TOI has been the subject of fierce attack by representatives of rivals posing as independent analysts. Of late, the attacks have intensified and have started to come up at short intervals. Though it is not difficult to fathom the reasons behind these repeated attempts at demonizing TOI, what is abominable is that the attacks seek to portray journalists – and especially the editors of TOI – as nothing more than stenographers taking down notes from representatives of management.

I am now completing 20 years in TOI, out of which over 12 and a half has been as an editor. I don't mean editor of a section of the paper but as a full-fledged editor of an independent edition (which means that under law I have been liable for whatever is published in the edition). But in all these years I have never had any representative of management tell me what to publish and what not to. Nobody has ever given me "any line", like you should be harsh on this guy or you have to be soft on this person. But this is exactly what happens in many other publications. The front page list of stories has to be faxed at a certain hour every evening to the publisher of this leading newspaper which has multiple editions and has a hoary ancestry. The same is the case with many other big newspapers whose proprietors demand to know in advance what is going on the pages of the paper that they own. The censors' scissors are wielded by them very often. But I have seen nothing of this kind in TOI.

Not to talk of the shareholders and top managers of BCCL (the company that owns TOI), never has the overall editor-in -chief demanded to know the contents of the edition that I am responsible for bringing out. This has had a healthy spin-off effect down the line because neither do I as an editor give a line to the correspondents working with me. So imagine my utter dismay when a new recruit (who came from another paper in another city) came to me and asked "on this particular issue" what is our paper's stand? It was his turn to be surprised when I told him that we did not take biased and predetermined positions on issues and wrote about them with a 360-degree approach, covering every conceivable aspect. A little less than a decade ago, the promoters of a newspaper were assiduously courting me for their publication. So persistent they were that I travelled to another city to meet the top boss of the company. The boss disarmed me by handing over a blank appointment letter and asked me to fill up the salary that I wanted. But the very next moment his game was up when he produced a detailed list of staffers who would work with me and what work would be allocated to them.

I beat a hasty retreat and realized many years later how wise I had been to refuse the tempting offer. The journalist, who was later hired for the position offered to me, walked out of the office one evening after work searching for the car given by the newspaper. Puzzled at not finding the car where it was parked, the journalist was wondering what to do next when the security guard came running. "The management has withdrawn your car," the guard to the journalist who was left holding the keys. The management had taken this step to infuse a new culture in the newspaper and as part of this exercise, handed over to the journalists a list of "friends of the proprietor" (about whom only good things could be written) and "enemies of the proprietor" (against whom the journalists had to go full throttle and unearth scandals). I have to disappoint the critics of TOI and tell them that our company has never given me any names – either in writing or verbally. In this context I must mention one incident. On November 8 2004, when I was the Resident Editor of TOI at Ahmedabad, a new press building that we were constructing collapsed leading to the death of some workers. The normal instinct of any publication is to hide any negative news pertaining to it. But in this case I told the top management representatives in New Delhi that I would be carrying a news item because this was 'news' and could not be censored. They asked me to go ahead and the story was published as the second lead on the front page. It can still be seen on the epaper of TOI's Ahmedabad edition. Before joining TOI I used to work for a leading business magazine. It was a small team and the publisher of the magazine, an amiable and generous person, was fully involved in all aspects of the publication. He actively participated in editorial meetings and was very democratic in his ways. He never ordered us to write a story in a particular fashion but would make gentle suggestions in meetings about how to do it. He would go on persuading – in the most democratic fashion – till you fell in line. Imagine my surprise then when I landed in the offices of TOI in a new job and figured out that the shareholders of the company were not involved in day to day or (even month to month) editorial matters. It was really a newly found independence. So imagine my shock on being told that I am living in a cage!