Root Privileges

journalism

Talking about science, NCBS

On June 24, I was invited to talk at the NCBS Science Writing Workshop, held every year for 10 days. The following notes are some of my afterthoughts from that talk.

Science journalism online is doing better now than science journalism in print, in India. But before we discuss the many ways in which this statement is true, we need to understand what a science story can be as it is presented in the media. I’ve seen six kinds of science pieces:

1. Scientific information and facts – Reporting new inventions and discoveries, interesting hypotheses, breaking down complex information, providing background information. Examples: first detection of g-waves, Dicty World Race, etc.

2. Processes in science – Discussing opinions and debates, analysing how complex or uncertain issues are going to be resolved, unravelling investigations and experiments. Examples: second detection of g-waves, using CRISPR, etc.

3. Science policy – Questioning/analysing the administration of scientific work, funding, HR, women in STEM, short- and long-term research strategies, etc. Examples: analysing DST budgets, UGC’s API, etc.

4. People of science – Interviewing people, discussing choices and individual decisions, investigating the impact of modern scientific research on those who practice it. **Examples**: interviewing women in STEM, our Kip Thorne piece, etc.

5. Auxiliary science – Reporting on the impact of scientific processes/choices on other fields (typically closer to our daily lives), discussing the economic/sociological/political issues surrounding science but from an economic/sociological/political PoV. Examples: perovskite in solar cells, laying plastic roads, etc.

6. History and philosophy of science – Analysing historical and/or philosophical components of science. Examples: some of Mint on Sunday’s pieces, our columns by Aswin Seshasayee and Sunil Laxman, etc.

Some points:

1. Occasionally, a longform piece will combine all five types – but you shouldn’t force such a piece without an underlying story.

2. The most common type of science story is 5 – auxiliary science – because it is the easiest to sell. In these cases, the science itself plays second fiddle to the main issue.

3. Not all stories cleanly fall into one or the other bin. The best science pieces can’t always be said to be falling in this or that bin, but the worst pieces get 1 and 2 wrong, are misguided about 4 (but usually because they get 1 and 2 wrong) or misrepresent the science in 5.

4. Journalism is different from writing in that journalism has a responsibility to expose and present the truth. At the same time, 1, 2 and 6 stories – presenting facts in a simpler way, discussing processes, and discussing the history and philosophy of science – can be as much journalism as writing because they increase awareness of the character of science.

5. Despite the different ways in which we’ve tried to game the metrics, one thing has held true: content is king. A well-written piece with a good story at its heart may or may not do well – but a well-packaged piece that is either badly written or has a weak story at its centre (or both) will surely flop.

6. You can always control the goodness of your story by doing due diligence, but if you’re pitching your story to a publisher on the web, you’ve to pitch it to the right publisher. This is because those who do better on the web only do better by becoming a niche publication. If a publication wants to please everyone, it has to operate at a very large scale (>500 stories/day). On the other hand, a niche publication will have clearly identified its audience and will only serve that segment. Consequently, only some kinds of science stories – as identified by those niche publications’ preferences in science journalism – will be popular on the web. So know what editors are looking for.

Jul 2, 2016
Stenograph the science down

A piece in Zee News, headlined ISRO to test next reusable launch vehicle after studying data of May 23 flight, begins thus:

The Indian Space Research Organisation has successfully launched it’s first ever ‘Made-in-India’ space shuttle RLV-Technology Demonstrator on May 23, 2016. After the launch, the Indian space agency will now test the next reusable launch vehicle test after studying May 23 flight data. A senior official in the Indian space agency says that India will test the next set of space technologies relating to the reusable launch vehicle (RLV) after studying the data collected from the May 23 flight of RLV-Technology Demonstrator. “We will have to study the data generated from the May 23 flight. Then we have to decide on the next set of technologies to be tested on the next flight. We have not finalised the time frame for the next RLV flight,” K Sivan, director, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) said on Wednesday.

Apart from presenting very little new information with each passing sentence, the piece also buries an important quote, and what could well have been the piece’s real peg, more than half the way down:

As per data the RLV-TD landed softly in Bay of Bengal. As per our calculations it would have disintegrated at the speed at which it touched the sea,” Sivan said.

It sounds like Sivan is admitting to a mistake in the calculations. There should have been a follow-up question at this point – asking him to elaborate on the mismatch – because this is valuable new information. Instead, the piece marches on as if Sivan had just commented on the weather. And in hindsight, the piece’s first few paragraphs present information that is blatantly obvious: of course results from the first test are going to inform the design of the second test. What new information are we to glean from such a statement?

Or is it that we’re paying no attention to the science and instead reproducing Sivan’s words line by line because they’re made of gold?

A tangential comment: The piece’s second, third and fourth sentences say the same thing. Sandwiching one meaty sentence between layers of faff is a symptom of writing for newspapers – where there is some space to fill for the sake of there being some attention to grab. At the same time, such writing is unthinkingly carried to the web because many publishers believe that staking a claim to ‘publishing on the web’ only means making podcasts and interactive graphics. What about concision?

May 26, 2016
Has ‘false balance’ become self-evidently wrong?

Featured image credit: mistermoss/Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

Journalism’s engagement with a convergent body of knowledge is an interesting thing in two ways. From the PoV of the body, journalism is typically seen as an enabler, an instrument for furthering goals and which is adjacent at best until it begins to have an adverse effect on the dominant forces of convergence. From the PoV of journalism, the body of knowledge isn’t adjacent but more visceral – the flesh with which the narratives of journalistic expression manifest themselves. Both perspectives are borne out in the interaction between anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and its presence in the news. Especially from the PoV of journalism, covering AGW has been something of a slow burn because the assembly of its facts can’t be catalysed even as it maintains a high propensity to be derailed, requiring journalists to maintain a constant intensity over a longer span of time than would typically be accorded to other news items.

When I call AGW a convergent body of knowledge, I mean that it is trying to achieve consensus on some hypotheses – and the moment that consensus is achieved will be the point of convergence. IIRC, the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that the ongoing spate of global warming is 95% a result of human activities – a level of certainty that we’ll take to be just past the point of convergence. Now, the coverage of AGW until this point was straightforward, that there were two sides which deserved to be represented equally. When the convergence eliminated one side, it was a technical elimination, a group of fact-seekers getting together and agreeing that what they had on their hands was indeed a fact even if they weren’t 100% certain.

What this meant for journalism was that its traditional mode of creating balance was no longer valid. The principal narrative had shifted from being a conflict between AGW-adherents and AGW-deniers (“yes/no”) to becoming a conflict between some AGW-adherents and other AGW-adherents (“less/more”). And if we’re moving in the right direction, less/more is naturally the more important conflict to talk about. But post-convergence, any story that reverted to the yes/no conflict was accused of having succumbed to a sense of false balance, and calling out instances of false balance has since become a thing. Now, to the point of my piece: have we finally entered a period wherein calling out instances of false balance has become redundant, wherein awareness of the fallacies of AGW-denial has matured enough for false-balance to have become either deliberate or the result of mindlessness?

Yes. I think so – that false-balance has finally become self-evidently wrong, and to not acknowledge this is to concede that AGW-denial might still retain some vestiges of potency.

I was prompted to write this post after I received a pitch for an article to be published on The Wire, about using the conclusions of a recently published report to ascertain that AGW-denial was flawed. In other words: new data, old conclusions. And the pitch gave me the impression that the author may have been taking the threat of AGW-deniers too seriously. Had you been the editor reading this, would you have okayed the piece?

Apr 17, 2016
Discussing some motivations behind a particle physics FAQ

First, there is information. From information, people distill knowledge, and from knowledge, wisdom. Information is available on a lot of topics and in varying levels of detail. Knowledge on topics is harder to find – and even more hard is wisdom. This is because knowledge and wisdom require work (to fact-check and interpret) on information and knowledge, respectively. And people can be selective on what they choose to work on. One popular consequence of such choices is that most people are more aware of business information, business knowledge and business wisdom than they are of scientific information, scientific knowledge and scientific wisdom. This graduated topical awareness reflects in how we produce and consume the news.

News articles written on business issues rarely see fit to delve into historical motivations or explainer-style elucidations because the audience is understood to be better aware of what business is about. Business information and knowledge are widespread and so is, to some extent, business wisdom, and articles can take advantage of conclusions made in each sphere, jumping between them to tease out more information, knowledge and wisdom. On the other hand, articles written on some topics of science – such as particle physics – have to start from the informational level before wisdom can be presented. This places strong limits on how the article can be structured or even styled.

There are numerous reasons for why this is so, especially for topics like particle physics, which I regularly (try to) write on. I’m drawn toward three of them in particular: legacy, complexity and pacing. Legacy is the size of the body of work that is directly related to the latest developments in that work. So, the legacy of the LHC stretches back to include the invention of the cyclotron in 1932 – and the legacy of the Higgs boson stretches back to 1961. Complexity is just that but becomes more meaningful in the context of pacing.

A consequence of business developments being reported on fervently is that there is at least some (understandable) information in the public domain about all stages of the epistemological evolution. In other words, the news reports are apace of new information, new knowledge, new wisdom. With particle physics, they aren’t – they can’t be. The reports are separated by some time, according to when the bigger developments occurred, and in the intervening span of time, new information/knowledge/wisdom would’ve arisen that the reports will have to accommodate. And how much has to be accommodated can be exacerbated by the complexity of what has come before.

But there is a catch here – at least as far as particle physics is concerned because it is in a quandary these days. The field is wide open because physicists have realised two things: first, that their theoretical understanding of physics is far, far ahead of what their experiments are capable of (since the 1970s and 1980s); second, that there are inconsistencies within the theories themselves (since the late 1990s). Resolving these issues is going to take a bit of time – a decade or so at least (although we’re likely in the middle of such a decade) – and presents a fortunate upside to communicators: it’s a break. Let’s use it to catch up on all that we’ve missed.

The break (or a rupture?) can also be utilised for what it signifies: a gap in information/knowledge. All the information/knowledge/wisdom that has come before is abruptly discontinued at this point, allowing communicators to collect them in one place, compose them and disseminate them in preparation for whatever particle physics will unearth next. And this is exactly what motivated me to write a ‘particle physics FAQ’, published on The Wire, as something anyone who’s graduated from high-school can understand. I can’t say if it will equip them to read scientific papers – but it will definitely (and hopefully) set them on the road to asking more questions on the topic.

Mar 21, 2016
The bad, avoidable and useless forms of journalism

Bad journalism: A Hindustan Times report on March 2 claims a high-schooler from West Bengal won a “prestigious” scholarship sponsored by NASA to study at Oxford University, having been selected on the back of a theory she had developed on blackholes. The piece was one-sided.

Avoidable journalism: The report – one among a dozen others, all on the same lines – turned out to have many holes. One of the first giveaways as usual was the language used to describe the science. Huffington Post India was (among) the first to publish NASA’s clarification, that such a scholarship as the student had claimed didn’t exist. I wrote about it in The Wire.

Useless journalism: On March 4, Hindustan Times reported that the high-schooler’s claims were a hoax, writing “her claims [had] been widely published in the Indian media, including [on] TV channels and reality shows.” It conveniently overlooked that Hindustan Times itself had published the report as well. So, what should’ve been a retraction ended up being another article – as if its March 2 report had been a bit of news.

Archiving:

Mar 4, 2016
The downward/laterward style in science writing
One of the first lessons in journalism 101 is the inverted pyramid, a style of writing where the journalist presents the more important information higher up the piece. This way, the copy sort of tapers down in importance the longer it runs. The idea was that such writing served two purposes:
1. Allowing editors looking to shorten the copy to make it fit in print to make cuts easily – they’d just have to snip whatever they wanted off the bottom, knowing that the meat was on the top.
2. Readers would get the most important information without having to read too much through the copy – allowing them to decide earlier if they want to read the whole thing or move on to something else.
As a science writer, I don’t like the inverted pyramid. Agreed, it makes for pithy writing and imposes the kind of restriction on the writer that does a good job of forcing her to preclude her indulgence from the writing process. But if the writer was intent on indulging herself, I think she’d do it inverted pyramid or not. My point is that the threat of self-indulgence shouldn’t disallow other, possibly more engaging, forms of writing.

To wit: my favourite style is the pyramid. It starts with a slowly building trickle of information at the top with the best stuff coming at the bottom. I like this style because it closely mimics the process of discovery, of the brain receiving new information and then accommodating it within an existing paradigm. To me, it also allows for a more logical, linear construction of the narrative. In fact, I prefer the descriptor ‘downward/laterward’ because, relative to the conventional inverted pyramid style, the pyramid postpones the punchline.

However, two caveats.
1. The downward/laterward doesn’t make anything easier for the editors, but that again – like self-indulgence – is to me a separate issue. In the pursuit of constructing wholesome pieces, it’d be an insult to me if I had an editor who wasn’t interested in reading my whole piece and then deciding how to edit it. Similarly, in return for the stylistic choices it affords, the downward/laterward compels the writer to write even better to keep the reader from losing interest.
2. I usually write explainers (rather, end up having tried to write one). Explainers in the context of my interests typically focus on the science behind an object or an event, and they’re usually about high-energy astronomy/physics. Scientific advancements in these subjects usually require a lot of background, pre-existing information. So the pyramid style affords me the convenience of presenting such information as a build toward the conclusion – which is likely the advancement in question.
  However, I’m sure I’m in the minority. Most writers whose articles I enjoy are also writers gunning to describe the human emotions at play behind significant scientific findings. And their articles are typically about drama. So it might be that the drama builds downward/laterward while the science itself is presented in the inverted-pyramid way (and I just end up noticing the science).
Looking back, I think most of my recent pieces (2011-onward) have been written in the downward/laterward style. And the only reason I decided to reflect on the process now is because of this fantastic piece in The Atlantic that talks about how astronomers hunt for the oldest stars in the universe. Great stuff.
Dec 5, 2015
Caution: This piece contains a lot of mentions of the word ‘jargon’.

Credit: The Sales Whisperer/Flickr

When writing one of my first pieces for The Hindu, I remember being called out for using a lot of jargon. While the accusation itself may have been justified, the word my supervisor chose as an example of the problem was surprising: “refraction”. He wanted me to spell it out in 10 words or so (because we were already running out of print-space). When I couldn’t, he launched into a long tirade.

It’s easy to spell out the what of refraction in 10 words – just refer to a prism. But if you’ve to understand the why, you’ll end up somewhere in the vicinity of quantum mechanics. At the same time, there are some everyday concepts in our lives that are easier understood the way they appear to be than in terms of what they actually are. This is where I’d draw the line of jargon. While everything can be technically simplified to the predictions of a complicated theory like quantum mechanics, jargon is that which isn’t at its simplest in the most pragmatic sense.

Clearly, this line lies in different places for different people because it can be moved by specialized knowledge. Writing in Nature or Science, I can take for granted that my audience will understand concepts like resonance or Feynman diagrams. Writing in The Hindu, on the other hand, all I can take for granted is reflection and, hopefully, refraction. Then again, these are publications who (ought to) know what their target audience is like. So I ask: If you were writing for a billion people, where would you assume the line is?

To me, the line would be at the statistical mode.

What irks me is that – in India at least – the statistical mode for different topics lies at incomparably different places. For example, I would be able to get away with ‘repo rate’ and ‘tortfeasor’ but not ‘morbidity’. My first impression was to somehow peg the difference to the well-established lack of scientific temper. But then I realized what the bigger problem was: news publications in the country are in a state of denial about lacking the scientific temper themselves, and consistently refuse to subject financial and legal news to the same scrutiny and the same wariness with which science news is treated.

If editors really wanted to take responsibility for their content, they wouldn’t let repo rate go through the press, or tortfeasor, or short fine leg, or Brent crude, or fiscal deficit*, or the history of the BJP**. However, they have let these bits of information go through without any apprehensions that they might be misunderstood or not understood at all. And by doing so, they have engendered an invisible reading culture that enforces the notion that these words don’t require further explanation, that these words shouldn’t be jargon – rather, wouldn’t be jargon if not for the reader’s ignorance.

In this culture, business and politics news (henceforth: fin-pol) can be for the least common denominators among all readers while science news… well, science news isn’t for everyone, is it? While the editors have misguidedly but efficiently dejargonized fin-pol news, with the effect that while fin-pol content is considered conventional, science news is still asked to be delivered sandwiched between layers of didactic material.

Another problem – this one more subtle and less prevalent – is that fin-pol reporters can often bank on historical knowledge while science reporters, word for word, remain constrained by the need to break down jargon. In other words, the fin-pol writer can assume the reader knows what he/she is talking about but ‘Feynman diagrams’ have to be repeatedly laid out unless the article is explicitly specified as being one in a series.

*If I can’t use ‘refraction’, you can’t use ‘fiscal deficit’.

**If you refuse to learn from sources other than the media as to who MSR Dev is, I refuse to let myself be persecuted for not learning from sources other than the media as to who SP Mukherjee was.

Jan 25, 2015
Back to work

When I decided to quit The Hindu and leave for grad studies at New York University, my parents, relatives, their friends, my father’s boss at work, his family and their friends all said that I’d made the right decision. “If you don’t finish your higher studies now, you won’t ever do it” was the refrain.

They were wrong. From what I’ve experienced this last three weeks, graduate studies requires commitment and good time-management, both of which I imagine can be mustered irrespective of age (no reductio ad absurdum, please). However, their if-not-now-then-when argument held in another sense.

Professional work as a journalist with a newspaper is different from studying journalism. Deadlines are more visceral when you’re working. Your colleagues don’t expect you to do your best, they expect you to do it right. Commitments are neither fixed nor finite because it all comes down to you. And you’re thinking “what next” all the time.

Once you’ve been like this for two years – and had a whale of a time doing it – being back in school can be jarring. For one, you notice that your attention span is nowhere near good enough. You’re used to keeping up with the news, and the news was never 6,000 words long nor anything short of crisp on any line.

For another, meetings that lasted three or six hours always involved arguments. When was the last time you sat and just listened to anyone for that long (without being high)?

When you worked from home, you knew you were being paid for it (however little). You didn’t work toward grades that involved months of work. You might’ve known you weren’t the best science journalist in the country but getting a small story good and right made you happy. It was your kingdom and you were king. The self-determinism was the perfect anesthetic to the cynicism you wallowed in.

But as a grad student, you lose all of that. You feel like you’re on a leash. I know I do. I won’t deny that there are good experiences to be had as a student, too (and in New York for added measure), and I’m trying to milk them for what they’re worth. Nevertheless, I don’t understand why some of my friends want to be students again.

I for one can’t wait to get back to work.

Sep 21, 2014
Being a science journalist with dignity
Classes at NYU have started! On day one, Michael Balter, who is a senior correspondent for Science, kicked off the program with an introduction to interviewing by, simply enough, interviewing each one of us, having us introduce ourselves at the same time. I’m not sure about how much others were able to take away from it, but I couldn’t much until Michael told us that he was getting each one of us to say something interesting. And it was only in hindsight that his demonstration started to make sense to me.

After introductions, we got into discussing Michael’s classes, how they’d be structured, what we’d be expected to do and what goals we’d better have in mind. While they wore on, what struck me hardest was my great inexperience as a science writer. Despite having spent two years at The Hindu reporting on science as well as grappling with tools to take the subject to a bigger audience, all that I’d thought were problems that only accrued with time found mention in our classroom discussion on day one.

Maybe we’d take on these problems “in detail” in the coming months, but their quick acknowledgment was proof enough for me that I was in the right place and among the right people.

Participating in the discussion – led by Michael’s comments – finally gave me the sense of dignity in being a science journalist that I believe is not easy to acquire in India except, of course, together with being considered exotic. It was reassuring to be able to discuss my problems in detail, especially being able to pick on small, nagging issues. For example, stuff like “What do you do when a scientist you’ve spoken to asks to see the story before it is published?”

It seems the answer’s not always a simple “No”.

The class on Day 2, by Dan Fagin, was more introspective. Seemingly, it was the class that explored – and I suppose will continue to explore – the basics of journalism in detail; what a news story is, where story ideas come from, etc. – the class that will keep us thinking about what it is that we’re really doing and why we’re doing it. And just to make things more interesting – and obviously more educative – each one of us in the class was assigned a beat to cover for the semester, so chosen that they lay completely outside our respective comfort zones.

Taking my cue from Masterchef USA, where so many attempts to cook the personally uncookable had paid off and trying to play it safe with “just chicken” had backfired, I got myself assigned genetics, secure in the knowledge that:
1. If I do screw up, I will screw up gloriously.
2. If I end up being able to write about experimental physics and genetics with equal ease, I will also likely feel up for anything.
Toward the end, and just like on orientation day, Dan had another nugget of golden advice. He said that while writing his stories, he had in mind not his entire potential audience but one reader in particular – a fantasy reader: a man named Stan whom Dan knew, who wanted to know everything about the world but actually didn’t know anything. “Pick someone like that, and my advice is don’t pick your mother because she will like everything you write.”

At this point, although I would like to keep writing, I’m going to have to get started on my assignments. So I’m going to leave you with this quote from an amazing blog post by Paige Brown Jarreau I read on SciLogs the other day, to give you a sense of why I’m writing “NYUlab” in the first place.

So if you are a student, especially a student of mass communication or a student studying at the intersection of two different fields, I highly encourage you to blog. Use your blog to make connections between concepts in vastly different fields of study, or that seemingly occupy different parts of your brain. Tie your art classes to science communication. Tie your biology classes to your information theory classes. Tie your knowledge of human cognition to environmental and scientific issues. Don’t let anything you learn or read about go un-applied.

Over time, I’m hoping my experiences at NYU will pay off in much the same way, by becoming closely tied to different aspects of my life. Have a nice day!
Sep 4, 2014
No country for new journalism

(Formatting issues fixed.)

Through an oped in Nieman Lab, Ken Doctor makes a timely case for explanatory – or explainer – journalism being far from a passing fad. Across the many factors that he argues contribute to its rise and persistence in western markets, there is evidence that he believes explainer journalism’s historical basis is more relevant than its technological one, most simply by virtue of having been necessitated by traditional journalism no longer connecting the dots well enough.

Second, his argument that explainer journalism is helped by the success of digital journalism takes for granted the resources that have helped it succeed in the west and not so much in countries like India.

So these points make me wonder if explainer journalism can expect to be adopted with similar enthusiasm here – where, unsurprisingly, it is most relevant. Thinking of journalism as an “imported” enterprise in the country, differences both cultural and historical become apparent between mainstream English-language journalism and regional local-language journalism. They cater to different interests and are shaped by different forces. For example, English-language establishments cater to an audience whose news sources are worldwide, who can always switch channels or newspapers and not be worried about running out of options. For such establishments, How/Why journalism is a way to differentiate itself.

Local v. regional

On the other hand, local-language establishments cater to an audience that is not spoiled for options and that is dependent profoundly on Who/What/When/Where journalism no matter where its ‘reading diaspora’. For them, How/Why journalism is an add-on. In this sense, the localism that Ken Doctor probes in his piece has no counterpart. It is substituted with a more fragmented regionalism whose players are interested in an expanding readership over that of their own scope. In this context, let’s revisit one of his statements:

Local daily newspapers have traditionally been disproportionately in the Who/What/When/Where column, but some of that now-lost local knowledge edged its ways into How/Why stories, or at least How/Why explanations within stories. Understanding of local policy and local news players has been lost; lots of local b.s. detection has vanished almost overnight.

Because of explainer journalism’s reliance on digital and digital’s compliance with the economics of scale (especially in a market where purchasing power is low), what Doctor calls small, local players are not in a position to adopt explainer journalism as an exclusive storytelling mode. As a result of this exclusion, Doctor argues that what digital makes accessible – i.e. what is found online – often lacks the local angle. But it remains to be seen if this issue’s Indian counterpart – digital vs. the unique regional as opposed to digital vs. the small local – is even likely to be relevant. In other words, do smaller regional players see the need to take the explainer route?

Local-level journalism (not to be confused with what is practiced by local establishments) in India is bifocal. On the one hand, there are regional players who cover the Who/What/When/Where thoroughly. On the other, there are the bigger English-language mainstreamers who don’t each have enough reporters to cover a region like India thanks, of course, to its profuse fragmentation, compensating instead by covering local stories in two distinct ways:

as single-column 150-word pieces that report a minor story (Who/What/When/Where) or

as six-column 1,500-word pieces where the regional story informs a national plot (How/Why),

—as if regional connect-the-dots journalism surfaces as a result of mainstream failures to bridge an acknowledged gap between conventional and contextualizing journalism. Where academicians, scholars and other experts do what journalists should have done – rather, in fact, they help journalists do what they must do. Therefore, readers of the mainstream publications have access to How/Why journalism because, counter-intuitively, it is made available in order to repair its unavailability. This is an unavailability that many mainstreamers believe they have license to further because they think the ‘profuse fragmentation’ is an insurmountable barrier.

There’s no history

The Hindu and The Indian Express are two Indian newspapers that have carved a space for themselves by being outstanding purveyors of such How/Why journalism, and in the same vein can’t be thought of as having succumbed to the historical basis that makes the case for its revival—“Why fix something that ain’t broken?”. And the “top-drawer” publications such as The New York Times and The Washington Post that Doctor mentions that find a need to conspicuously assert this renewal are doing so on the back of the technology that they think has finally made the renewal economically feasible. And that the Times stands to be able to charge a premium for packaging Upshot and its other offerings together is not something Hindu or Express can also do now because, for the latter couple, How/Why isn’t new, hasn’t been for some time.

Therefore, whereupon the time has come in the western mainstream media to “readopt” explainer journalism, its Indian counterpart can’t claim to do that any time soon because it has neither the west’s historical nor technological bases. Our motivation has to come from elsewhere.

Jul 26, 2014