Teaching journalism

Three years ago the University of Bombay introduced a new professional degree course in mass media. It offered a Bachelor of Mass Media degree after three years of study. The first two years of the course were spent on the finer theoretical points of advertising as well news media industries.

In the third year, the students were asked to opt for either journalism or advertising. And the class then branched, and prepared for a year exclusively to be professionals ready to join their chosen industry.

Bombay has always been a commercial city of opportunities. The course’s value in the job market was immediately grasped, and students coughed up higher fees for the professional degree. In the third year, 16 colleges in the metropolis are readying to eject their BMM or Bachelor of Mass Media students into the industry.

Since 1990 I had been a reporter with several major Indian newspapers and had done a stint with a television news channel. I had been a media columnist for a brief while too. Plus, I had an e-mail id, and knew how to chat with somebody on the MSN messenger. I also used the Google.

So I was particularly confident of teaching a class of Generation X two papers; Feature and Opinion Writing and The Role of the Press in Forming Public Opinion. Four months down the line, what I had thought of as my biggest advantage, knowing the basics of operating the email and the internet, turned out to be my biggest bug bears.

The class had ten bright students, from wonderfully diverse backgrounds. Six of them were girls ranging from progressive families to conservative ones. Four of the six had their own mobile phones, which their conservative college had banned students from carrying to class. One of the girls had already graduated from the commerce stream, before joining this course for another degree. She was not likely to work, since marriage was round the corner. However, she wanted to learn so that she could help make her children more informed and aware. Another was heading for the US.

Of the four boys, one was an engineering student who dropped out after three years of a four-year electrical engineering course, one had already finished a diploma in Education after a schooling in Hindi medium, the other two had done Commerce and Science in their undergraduate years, before settling for the media.

Of the class of ten, eight had their own personal computers and Internet connection. The other two had constant access to the Net.

My class was the class set to graduate from Vivekananda College, Chembur, in central Bombay. Within a month of teaching twice a week, I tried to ring in the reality of journalism. I told the eloquent speakers and grandiose writers that more cooks have been lost to the world by taking to the arts. And that school toppers in English, or the Booker winners of their respective homes and neighbourhoods, even school and college magazine editors, were not good enough to be journalists and reporters. And that the ubiquitous “flair for writing” had little to do with journalism, especially at the beginning of their careers.

My own journalism professor’s riposte to a fellow student, with an M Phil in English Literature to boot, came handy. The said friend had just finished a passionate plea to include “inexorable” in her copy on mineworkers on the grounds of “style.”

“From this copy I do see faint contours of a possible individual style, emerging in another thirty years from now.”

I told them that adjectivised prose was not good writing. They looked blankly at me; deliciously sceptical even in blankness. So I decided to take an impromptu test. I gave them two minutes to write down as many good adjectives as were possible on a paper. Time over, I snatched the nearest student’s paper, and asked the rest of the class to cross out from their list those words which I read out from the list in my hand. I repeated this with another student’s paper and by the end of the tenth list, we had only three adjectives that were not repeated. And they were on the list of most introverted boy in class. That is why, I told them, that thrilling at adjectives might not end up as good writing because, too many use the same adjectives. And therefore were clichés.

I kept making similar points on style and language and the need to gather information, as accurately as possible. I told them to keep their opinions out of the copy, and predictably exposed many opinions they did not think were opinions, but had easily slipped into their copy, where they looked grotesquely communal, pathetically provincial or laughably wrong. However, their skills seemed to be fine, like all 21-year-olds they were easy to excite, provoke, offend and please.

I tried to expose them to a variety of styles. Directed them to online versions of some very prestigious magazines, the usual suspects, and some stylised little magazine kind of writings available on the Net. The Net was a boon I hoped to milk. And, soon enough several students started to come bleary eyed to the class, complaining their reading never ended.

They started to read more and more of current journalistic writing. Started to delineate stylistic differences and differences in perspective of various, magazines, newspapers, and leading columnists. They started to get excited about their profession. I encouraged them to do their first assignments about the subject closest to their hearts.

So I had a spate of thoroughly spikeable copies on all their favourite subjects; environment, child helplines, and battered wives. After ironing out some of the writing issues, of both content and style, they were asked to write on issues that were not commonly discussed, or those they did not want to hear of.

A better set of stories emerged, on gay culture in Bombay, lives of bar girls, how a High Court deadline to convert the city’s 80,000 diesel taxies to CNG was threatening the families of taxi men.

I did my best. And in retrospect, I think I helped teach them a few lessons on professionalism, the imperative of deadlines, the need to keep their copies simple.

I however feel I could not transmit the very instinct of journalism. The need, even passion, to set things right, to want to bring the bad guys to book, to want to do things for the underdog. Simply, to develop a social conscience.

I sagely told them it was particularly imperative when they begin their innings in the field. And that, eventually they’ll all end up like all good journalists do, smoking, drinking, and boasting, besides reaching home late and never seeing the sun rise.

That was one point that never seemed to have convinced many of them. A semester is now over, several of them have become better writers, some have learnt subtler skills of interviewing and cajoling people to talk, others have learnt a thing or two about headlining and working on the layout of a paper, by working on the lab journal.

But, I have a distinct feeling that my failure is bigger than the modest success. The ease with which I could teach and drill skills into them, never worked when it came to idealism. I think the reason is that there was a greater receptivity to skills. And great resistance to idealism. How forlorn and old fashioned the word sounds even now.

There was a collective belief in chutzpah and a mortal fear of failure. They often mouthed homilies of management books, but rarely seemed to have understood its meaning. It sounded so much like the posturing of the young and the bold.

They were overexposed to the fireworks of the new world in flash, on the net, on television; but uninformed about almost every issue beyond the last Star News bulletin. We used to call such people “newspaper intellectuals,” for being only current affairs oriented. That lot had degenerated to frame freaks, or Internet ineffectuals!

An example, once I asked if any in the class wanted to become foreign correspondents. Almost the whole class chorused, but of course, muffled by the loftiness of their stated agreement. Then I asked them if they liked Henry Kissinger, and virtually none of them had heard of him!

Where the knowledge was lost in information….And Google?

I am confident that most of my class who take up jobs will succeed. They are bright. They are hard workers. They are hungry for recognition. They are quick learners. And they are too aware of competition and raring to go.

By the summer of 2003 they would have become pretty good for cub reporters. They will be fiercely competitive and should soon give some of the deadwood in news establishment a run for their money. Their youth, and their drive to succeed should take them ahead, and fast.

But above all else, one thing that will guarantee their success is their almost maniacally morbid aversion to losers. They hate to lose, and hate to associate with losers. It is seen as strength, but to me that could also explain their insensitivity to the losers of the world. Sadly, their country still has ninety-nine losers to every single winner. And somewhere the media might also be getting youngsters more thrilled at profiling winners than voicing the plight of those losers.