My experiments with Journalism

This is a story that is nearly 13 years in the making.

Over the past two years, I have written this a few times but have hesitated to publish. I didn’t want to come across as seeking attention.

But of late, I am realising it is better to record some insights. This could help someone who might cross the same paths as I have.

This is the story of how I got to where I am today.

Discovering blogs — first step

The blogging phenomenon hit the Indian shores in early 2000s. By 2004, Chennai, the capital city of Tamil Nadu, India, had a small but influential group of bloggers.

I was a journalist with The Hindu then searching for interesting stories to tell. I was always interested in technology, and blogging was right at the intersection of technology and culture.

More importantly, bloggers were gaining popularity or, as people like to refer to it today, social influence.

It was the month of September of 2004. I invited over to my office a few prominent bloggers.

I remember the meeting like it happened yesterday.

I sat down with the bloggers in the classy environs of the first floor of the office of South India’s oldest newspaper. Those fantastic sofas!

During the course of that conversation that day, something changed in me. My approach to journalism would never be the same again. I felt what we were doing in the traditional mainstream setup was getting outdated fast.

I remember filing that copy and working with the designers to put out a decent infographic.

I have always collaborated closely with graphic designers from very early in my career. I always knew that journalism was going to become extremely visual. My colleagues over the years will vouch for this.

That story was published on September 22, 2004.

I was an active blogger by then and even managed to get on board a few of my colleagues. At least one of them has become a social media ninja these days. But let me not digress.

A big opportunity came my way in the year 2005. My City Editor, one of my mentors and well wishers, nominated me to be a part of a classroom on Online Journalism at the International Institute of Journalism in Berlin.

It was a three month workshop for journalists from developing countries to get some idea about how online journalism was changing the scenario in the vibrant German mediascape.

Not only did I have a great opportunity to get some insights into the newsrooms of the future — including such things as integrated newsrooms — I also made some great friends.

When I came back to my journalism role in the newspaper, my mind was always thinking about how to get ahead of the curve.

Going the video route — getting more adventurous

I started experimenting on newer formats — first video and then audio — through 2006 and 2007.

I had the opportunity to revisit International Institute of Journalism, Berlin again in 2007 for a short duration course on Multimedia Journalism.

This time I came back with an Olympus camera purchased from the popular MediaMarkt store.

I started doing video logs for a few assignments.

On April 24, 2007, I created a blog called news 360 degrees and even put out a mission statement about news going beyond the newspages and onto video and audio logs on the Web.

The blog still exists on Google’s Blogspot, and once in a while I go there just to smile at my own audacity.

My blog post caught the attention of a few journalists. In fact, there was even a job offer in one of the comments. Sadly I noticed it much later. Image: Screen capture using Skitch

One of my first Vlog (video logs) was a product demo I shot using my Olympus camera. At that time, I did not know how to upload a video into a streaming service. So I asked the company to help me with it. That video is still available on Daily Motion site.

The big experiment — Ergo

I got a big break in the second half of 2007. The board of directors of The Hindu Group of Publications decided to launch a limited circulation, free tabloid targeting the high networth IT crowds, primarily youngsters.

The publication was called Ergo, derived from Cogito Ergo Sum. (A quiz master helped with finding the name.)

At the launch, I was once again talking very idealistically and probably getting a bit ahead of myself.

“Ergo will also be much more than a tabloid. It will be a true 21st century media organisation.” Ergo will also feature an extensive, interactive online portal that will host blogs, videos and podcasts to give readers a full multimedia news and entertainment experience.

((taken from a report filed in The Hindu dated December, 8, 2007.))

At Ergo, I was also to execute most of my plans with a small group of journalists, most of whom were mavericks in their own right. It was a fun office, or that is what I would like to believe. The proof would be in how people who worked there remember it. But we did have a table tennis table.

Ergo ran from December 8, 2007 to July 31, 2009. It was produced by young journalists keeping in mind the interests of a young target group. We experimented with audio and video, and we even had themes that were ahead of its times.

We used to run several special columns

• Made in Madras, which focussed on brands that were established when Chennai was still Madras. The column brought out the entrepreneurial spirit and innovative nature of businesses that took root in Chennai
• First Innings, which focussed on startups and entrepreneurs. The column even crowd-sourced content from Twitter. The twitter handle has survived to date — @firstinnings
• Too Good for Critics, which focussed on small eateries that lifestyle publications will often miss out in reviews. We would treat even street food like it was the best meal one could have and review both the food and the people who made the food.
• ClickPick, a crowd-sourced column that would feature a photo clicked by one of our readers — an IT employee — and reward him with freebies that our marketing team could arrange. In the two years the tabloid ran, we received 30 GB of photos from our readers.
• Office Angel, another crowd-sourced column where IT workers were asked to nominate any of their office staff — attenders, drivers and the likes — as their office angels. Of course, we got a lot of mail from guys who would nominate the -ahem ahem- angels they longed for. We kept a watch on abuse.
• Motorhead, a weekly column that would focus on what automobile fans could look forward to
• Portfolio, a column that would focus on fashion trends.
• Namma Chennai, a calendar of events around the city worth attending.
• Big Story, a weekly once deep dive into issues that concern the youngsters — from environment to gender to career
• Window Shopper, a column that focussed on lesser known stores across the city selling quaint things.
• U-Turn, an original single panel daily comic that introduced a new cartoonist.

Ergo was both unorthodox and unpredicatable, much like the people who worked there. I would often push reporters to do things they did not agree with. The reporter who worked on the First Innings column did not understand what the fuss was about Twitter — which explains just the nine tweets she put out. But then, this was 2007 and Twitter was, well, not such a big deal.

Not every one was comfortable doing multimedia journalism.

Here is an example of someone who is not such a natural handling a Vlog interview.

But then we had someone was a natural too.

From December 8, 2007 to July 31, 2009, Ergo published 408 issues.

I managed to save 279 issues of Ergo as PDFs on Scribd.

In my final note for the publication titled The Spirit of Ergo, I managed to thank everyone who was part of the publication either directly or indirectly. That note is available on Scribd. (The great irony in this is this: We created the account on Scribd using a hosted Gmail service. That has expired, and all our uploads are available on Scribd. But today, even though I can access it online, I cannot download it without paying!)

Rejoining the Internet Desk and days of darkness

Though the management attributed the shutting down of Ergo to the financial climate that prevailed in the media industry then — the doom and gloom had affected advertisement revenue which is the lifeline to a freely circulated product — I was unable to move on immediately.

The initial idea was to continue Ergo as an online-only product but I could not manage it entirely out of student reporters. Though we did put out a few updates over the next few months, I had suddenly lost my drive.

I went into a shell of sorts. But I picked myself up and started working on the team that was revamping The Hindu’s website. The best part: I was back with my mentor.

At this point, I started experimenting a little bit with audio podcasts, where we tried repurposing The Hindu’s editorial in a podcast form. I trained a few journalists on Internet Desk on ways to use Audacity to cut these podcasts. And though I was able to edit audio, I found the UI on Audacity too tough to handle. Also, I had a very low tolerance to editing audio, which required hearing the cues over and over again. For this reason alone, I have enormous respect for audio engineers.

From my point of view at least, text and video editing is quite easy. Audio editing is the toughest job.

As I continued to be with the Internet Desk, I felt a little disinterested because I always wanted to work with creating original content. Instead, I found that we were handling a legacy website, primarily repurposing the print content, and the job involved more of curation than creation.

This bogged me down considerably.

All of this came to a head when I got a one star rating in my company’s first ever appraisal. I received a cheque for Rs.1,000, one that I was so angry about and did not even bother to encash. I have retained the letter.

Back to Reporting

By mid-2012, I walked up to my editor and told him I wanted to get back to reporting. I told him I was unable to continue in the Internet Department where I was just sitting around curating content or moderating comments. Those were important tasks, no doubt, but for my temperament I needed something more creatively challenging.

And I had missed reporting. I would like to think I was a good reporter in the run up to my career, especially between the years 2002 and 2007, when I managed to proactively report on civic issues and local governance.

The poor appraisal rating was stinging me. I would later hear about how this was done to spur me to take action.

Rejoining reporting was never going to be easy. I was gone away for a good five years, and held such positions as being an editor. So naturally, some well meaning friends told me that things have changed. A well wisher called me to his room and gently prodded me on how I should show results soon else I might be in line for other big dissapointments.

The wonders of paternalistic nudges!

By early 2013, I was finding my groove again, and then the opportunity presented itself. Controversy broke surrounding the release of Kamal Haasan’s film Vishwaroopam. I dove neck deep into reporting this — live tweeting the breaking news, creating hashtags, etc, etc — and all of a sudden it all came right back.

I got a decent rating in the appraisals, and with it my first promotion in eight years. Talk about the pursuit of happyness.

By this time, even the student reporters of Ergo had all established themselves. And everyone who was a full time reporter there had scaled heights I could not imagine so early into my own career at a respective time.

Things were looking kind of bright again.

Social Media Strategist

By end of 2013, there was another big change at the top of the management at my workplace.

I was given a new job description: “Reinvigorate the social media strategy of The Hindu and spread it to all the centres of publication.”

I was made the Deputy City Editor (online), once again an experimental post created to facilitate a tangential approach.

The Hindu had a small team working on social media strategy by then — they had created some Twitter and Facebook accounts — and had reasonable traction going. But my task was to standardise it across the various editions and identify and train a few people on it.

I was looking for a new branding. And that is when I zeroed in on The Hindu Connect.

I spent considerable time preparing everyone to get onboard Connect.

We started creating Connect pages on Facebook and Connect handles on Twitter. Each centre will have a Connect coordinator.

I spent days and nights working on this. Some days, I would set up an account and message my editor at 1:30 a.m. and we would immediately get things up and running.

The Design Editor of The Hindu would push out his recommendations, we would optimise it for the pages, and all of this happened at a breakneck speed. It’s a miracle that things are still working well now.

By February 2014, we had Connect branded social media pages up and running across 13 bureaus of The Hindu. All the reporters were encouraged to share and crowd source news.

We even drastically pipped the social media pages of competitors by huge margins.

Sabbatical and what the future beckons

In March, 2015, I took a clean break from work.

I was a bit tired, a bit confused, a bit disillusioned and also a bit wary if all my experiments actually meant something.

A lot of my friends call me the ideas guy, but what good are my ideas?

I went into a deeply philosophical, at times even spiritual search.

I traveled quite a bit. Not just because of wanderlust, but also because I genuinely felt that I knew very little about India.

After a year of doing bits and pieces work — freelancing for a few websites or just blogging a bit — I started exploring whether I could start my own media company.

I would visit offices of entrepreneurs I knew and started pitching ideas. The ones who cared for me would try to encourage me a bit but would subtly send across the message that I understood nothing about business or money.

I started studying stuff like how to generate a business model.

Again the same anxiety would set in: how will I concentrate on my core strength — creating compelling stories — if I kept worrying about such things.

During one of my meetings, a young entrepreneur, who has become a friend over the past six to seven years, provoked me: “If you were to design a news organisation now, given your understanding of how things work, how differently would you do it?”

I have been thinking of a publication, or two, for some time now. In fact, I soft launched it last year, and tried to build it, one story at a time.

Three months back, I joined a prominent software products company that I have been admiring for several years now — right from 2007 when I used to meet their product managers and they have even figured heavily in Ergo.

All of a sudden, I see some light at the end of the tunnel.

I have been wanting to create a website dedicated to stories of the People.

And I have never ever stopped Experimenting.

I experiment THEREFORE I am.

Cogito … Ergo … Sum