Telling it like it is... with cartoons

With a few deft strokes of his (computer) brush and pen, DNA cartoonist Manjul (he uses only one name) has captured the spirit — and the angst — of the current "people's movement" in a series of cartoons published in the paper this week:

In an interview published in DNA last year, when he had come to Bangalore to receive the Maya Kamath Memorial Award, Manjul had revealed that he began his first experiments with political sketches when he was only 16. His early cartoons were published by a local newspaper in his home state, Uttar Pradesh. Looking back, Manjul says that he found cartoons an appropriate medium for the expression of his own unique political commentary.

Manjul also talks about how he gets the ideas for his cartoons:

“The day begins with poring over newspapers. Through the day, there is much twisting and turning of matters in the head, as one settles on what the subject of one’s cartoon will be. Once I’ve settled on how to present it, though, the drawing is easy,” says Manjul, recalling the words of Abu Abraham: “A cartoonist is a liar who always speaks the truth.”

To read the full interview, go to "Manjul says it all between crooked lines".

"As a TV reporter, I know that my role is only secondary"

Writing in yesterday's DNA, NDTV journalist Sunetra Choudhury offers a stirring riposte to all those who have been critical of our television news channels' coverage of Anna Hazare's anti-corruption movement:

Everywhere I go, every non-TV person I talk to, says the same thing: 'You 24-hour channel people are really overdoing it' 'Don't you have anything else to do?' 'You have made a hero out of Anna Hazare' 'Look at the dumb TV anchors and the questions they are asking' 'How can you say India is with Anna when so many people are against Anna?'

I'm not even going to try to defend every complaint against TV coverage. Lord knows some of the cribs are really valid, but I think it is high time self-proclaimed TV critics really understood what the medium is all about, what logistics they deal with and what kind of pressures that TV reporters, anchors and producers face every second of the day.

After explaining the hazards of her profession, which include "getting elbowed in the gut by other members of the media ... and getting felt up by some of the crowd", she gives us an insight into the problems of covering an event of this magnitude:

Before Anna Hazare sat on his dharna, we TV reporters were called for an editorial meeting. Unlike what the cynics among you like to believe, the strategy wasn't to grab eyeballs by exaggerating the number of the crowds. The problem was more basic. How does a newsroom with limited reporters cover an indefinite fast like this? How do you ensure somebody is always at the site so that if anything untoward happens, we are there to bring you the news?

Remember the unearthly hour Baba Ramdev was shooed out of Ramlila ground? It was because TV reporters were there that any police excess was captured and checked.

This is a very reasoned and cogent analysis of the issues that our television journalists have to deal with. Read the piece in its entirety here: "In defence of the subaltern TV reporter".

What a powerful argument about corruption and our hypocrisy!

Most Indians have paid a bribe. Most Indian businesses cannot survive or remain competitive without stashing away undeclared earnings.

Almost everybody who has sold a house has taken one part of the payment in cash and evaded tax on it.

Yet, the branding of corruption is so powerful that Indians moan the moment they hear the word.

MANU JOSEPH

Open magazine editor Manu Joseph wrote in The New York Times yesterday about "India's selective rage over corruption" (excerpts above).

Joseph, who has also written a best-seller, Serious Men, is known to hold strong views, which he expresses in forceful language, and I admire his writing greatly. In this case, I also happen to agree with his views.

Read the article in its entirety here to understand how to offer a contrarian and, perhaps, unpopular view, without coming across as an insufferable know-it-all.

• To read an earlier Reading Room post about Open, click on "Open sesame...". If you want to know more about Manu Joseph, go here.

• Also read: "Fast and let loose", by Bachi Karkaria of The Times of India.

How Shammi Kapoor saved the life of a Time journalist

BOBBY GHOSH

Bobby Ghosh, the deputy international editor of Time and former Baghdad bureau chief, writes in the magazine that he was never much of a Shammi Kapoor fan: "I found his over-the-top acting style a little too much to take. But I quickly found that the best way to break the ice with people I met in Iraq was to ask if they remembered 'Shaami Kaboor', which is how they pronounced his name."

Then came an incident in the summer of 2003. "I was reporting from a small village west of Baghdad, known to be a stronghold of Saddam loyalists who were fighting against U.S. troops," writes Ghosh.

He continues:

My translator and I were taking a chance that as a person of brown skin, my presence would not rouse any special suspicions. Things were going well for a while: My translator thought it best to introduce me as an 'a journalist from India,' which was, in the narrowest definition, true. People spoke candidly about their love of Saddam and hatred for the U.S.

We were taken to meet the "Colonel," a 50-something man with an impressive moustache who was in charge of the village's fighters. He was a little more reserved that the others, and answered my questions warily. After the few moments, he asked me, in English, "Who do you work for?"

Reflexively, I replied, "TIME Magazine."

He frowned. "Times, of London?" he asked.

"No, TIME, al-Amreekiyya," I replied.

Immediately, he picked up his AK-47 and pointed it to my forehead. "You American?" he shouted.

"I'm from India," I said.

"No, you're American," he said again. "You will die."

What happened next? And how does Shammi Kapoor figure in this story? Read "How a Late Bollywood Icon Saved This Correspondent's Life".

• UPDATE (October 2, 2013): Bobby Ghosh is now Time's international editor. Another change at the magazine: Nancy Gibbs has just taken over as the managing editor. Read "Woman on top. About Time, some would say".

Why subs, or copy editors, are the lifeblood of a news organisation

Few readers, perhaps, know of the existence of subs, who play a crucial role in newspaper production. It is the sub-editor, now also known as the copy editor (an American term), who has read every word of every news report on the pages he or she has worked on. It is the sub who has, more or less, decided what the pages should look like. It is the sub who has, more or less, chosen the pictures on the page and written all the headlines, standfirsts, and captions. So when there are typos and other errors on the page it is probably because the sub has fallen asleep on the job and there is no second line of defence.

No second line of defence unlike in the olden days when there were teams of proofreaders to go through every galley proof and every page to catch the slip-ups.

I began my career in the olden days — June 1981, to be exact — as a trainee sub with Mid Day in Mumbai. I loved what I did then at the News Desk, and I continued to love what I did (and doing what I loved) for the next 20 years and more before turning to teaching (my life now is not only full but fulfilling).

Not many young people want to be subs now, though. That is one reason why good subs are rare.

And because they are rare, good subs are worth their weight in gold, which is why I tell all my journalism students to think seriously about desk jobs because newspapers all over the country are in dire need of subs...

• who have traditional subbing skills
• are excellent at spelling and grammar
• are good at rewrites and converting to house style
• are capable of coming up with great headlines, standfirsts, and captions
• are generally computer-literate but experts at layout using QuarkXpress (or equivalent page-making software), with management skills and the expertise to oversee the entire production process from raw copy to final pages.

MERRILL PERLMAN

Those are the basic skills of a good sub. But that's not all you need to be a good sub. Let Merrill Perlman, former director of Copy Desks at The New York Times, explain in detail what copy editors do. In a "Talk to the Times" column, she was asked this question by a reader, Bill Fischer:

Does your job and that of the other desk copy editors entail substantive editing and rewrite or is it mostly a matter of cleaning up style, grammar, etc.?

Here is Perlman's illuminating response:

Thanks for walking into our trap, Bill, and allowing me to explain what our copy editors do.

Copy editors are the final gatekeepers before an article reaches you, the reader. To start with, they want to be sure that the spelling and grammar are correct, following our stylebook, of course. But they also want to be sure that they, and thus you the reader, aren't left with a sense that they've come into the middle of a movie, or that they don't understand how something works, or that they're wondering what comes next or what this development means for them, er, you.

They have great instincts for sniffing out suspicious or incorrect facts or things that just don't make sense in context.

They are also our final line of protection against libel, unfairness and imbalance in an article. If they stumble over anything, they're going to work with the writer or the assigning editor (we call them backfield editors) to make adjustments so you don't stumble. That often involves intensive substantive work on an article.

In addition, copy editors write the headlines, captions and other display elements for the articles, edit the article for the space available to it (that usually means trims, for the printed paper) and read the proofs of the printed pages in case something slipped by.

All of this, I might add, is done under crushing deadlines. For breaking news, a copy editor may have less than an hour to read 1,000 words and do everything the article needs. (It can be even less!) We like to get longer articles farther ahead of time, when we can spend a few hours or even a day to be sure it's perfect, but our goal is to get the information TO you, not keep it FROM you, so speed is of the essence.

We've got more than 150 copy editors here — in fact, it's the largest newsroom department — on 14 different copy desks, just about one desk for every section of the news report.

Now you know why subs, or copy editors, are the lifeblood of a newspaper.

(That last paragraph about the NYT's 150 copy editors may draw gasps of disbelief from subs at Indian newspapers, which are known not to employ more than a handful of subs in each shift.)

Merrill Perlman addresses many other important issues related to the operations of the News Desk. Read the Q&A in its entirety here. Study especially the questions and responses given in the two items headlined "Those Pesky Possessives" and "The Comma Before the And". Learning can be so much fun when the teacher has such a great sense of humour.

• Check the spelling, grammar, punctuation, and facts. Then the sub-editor's real work starts, says Andy Bodle on The Guardian's "Mind Your Language" blog. Read his engaging and entertaining post here: "Isn't there a computer program for that?"

• ALSO READ: What happens when subs fall asleep on the job.

Editor Bill Keller on how The New York Times chooses Page 1 stories

The most important decisions in newsrooms all over the world usually involve the layout of the front page. So it will be interesting for aspiring journalists — and newspaper readers — to learn how one of the world's greatest newspapers goes about it. Here is Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, telling readers how he and his staff select stories and photographs for Page 1:

NUMERO UNO: "WE THINK IT'S OKAY TO INCLUDE IN OUR FRONT-PAGE PORTFOLIO SOMETHING THAT IS FUN, HUMAN, OR JUST WONDERFULLY WRITTEN. IT'S PART SCIENCE, PART ART, WITH A LITTLE SERENDIPITY," SAYS BILL KELLER.

There is no rigid formula to the selection of stories and photographs for the front page. We — an argumentative group of editors — try every day to assemble a selection of articles that are important and interesting, but many variables influence the outcome. Some days, we gather for our Page 1 meeting with no doubt about the main stories of the day. Sometimes an event that is undeniably important falls short of the front page because it is unsurprising. Conversely, an event that initially seems like more of the same can seem major when you take into account all the circumstances.

Indian newspapers sometimes feature as many as 20 stories — big and small — on Page 1; more likely than not, you will see a dozen items on our cluttered front pages. The idea seems to be to have something for everyone on the cover itself. But the NYT has a different philosophy:

Most days we have room for six stories and an "Inside" box on the front page, so every candidate jostles with competing news. We try, moreover, not to have an overly homogeneous page — ALL foreign stories, or ALL business stories, or ALL Washington stories. We think stories about how we live often outweigh stories about what happened yesterday. We think it's okay to include in our front-page portfolio something that is fun, human, or just wonderfully written. It's part science, part art, with a little serendipity.

Keller also talks about the evolution of the newspaper front page in this era of hyper-coverage on television and on the web and elaborates on how his newspaper treats a news event whose "factual outline" has already been widely available before the NYT goes to press:

The notion of a Page 1 story, in fact, has evolved over the years, partly in response to the influence of other media. When a news event has been on the Internet and TV and news radio all day long, do we want to put that news on our front page the next morning? Maybe we do, if we feel our reporting and telling of it goes deeper than what has been available elsewhere. But if the factual outline — the raw information — is widely available, sometimes we choose to offer something else that plays to our journalistic advantages: a smart analysis of the events, a vivid piece of color from the scene, a profile of one of the central figures, or a gripping photograph that captures the impact of an event, instead of a just-the-facts news story.

BILL KELLER

These fascinating insights into the workings of a newspaper come in a regular column, "Talk to The Times", in which The New York Times invites readers to submit questions for Times editors, reporters, columnists and executives. Just take a look at the long list of journalists who have interacted with readers and answered all kinds of questions. No newspaper in India cares to get so close to its readers. I wonder why that is.

Read the full Q&A with Bill Keller here.

PS: The New York Times policy is to not clutter Page 1 with ads. How refreshing.

"I am a college student who listens to music I download from the internet. This is probably illegal..."

There must be tens of thousands (millions?) of youngsters out there who qualify to make that statement, at least that first part. Should you continue to do it? That is, steal a work of art over which someone else has invested talent, time, and effort, not to mention money? What are the ethics involved, if at all?

RANDY COHEN

Here, in his response to an anonymous New York Times reader's question (quoted partly in the headline), are the views of Randy Cohen, who till recently wrote The Ethicist column in that newspaper:

To download music from the Net illegally is theft, depriving songwriters, performers, music publishers and record companies of payment for their work. It is not so iniquitous as tossing a canvas sack over Elton John's head and swatting him with a stick until he sings ''Candle in the Wind'' (or stops singing it, depending on your taste), but it is dishonest, and you should not do it.

Mind you, Cohen wrote this back in 2000 (hence the witty reference to Candle in the Wind), but what he says still applies, don't you think?

COURTESY: STEPHAN PASTIS

Cohen also explains, again in an intelligently entertaining manner, why illegal downloading of music is also unethical:

Your temptation is understandable. In a perverse kind of social progress, the Internet makes it easy to steal songs right in your own home, while you're still in your pajamas. You might almost make a case that it is unethical of Time Warner, say, to tantalize honest music lovers beyond human endurance. This is a ticklish line of reasoning, however, perilously close to blaming the victim. That is, even if I sashay around town in a sport coat made of $100 bills, your robbing me is unethical. Unethical, but understandable.

Want to read more? Go here.

• THE VEXED ISSUE OF PLAGIARISM

What does Randy Cohen have to say about plagiarism by college students in their written assignments? Read his answer to this preposterous question posed by a parent:

When my daughter and her fellow college students handed in term papers, their professor had them submit their work to Turnitin.com, a Web site that detects plagiarism, something he had never done before. This has a whiff of entrapment. Shouldn’t the prof have announced in advance that this would be required, giving the class a chance to clean up its work?

Cohen replied: I’m astonished you believe a professor should help cheaters “clean up” — more accurately, “cover up” — their deceit. It should be needless to say that students ought not cheat in any case. If the professor provided a distant early warning each time he intended to actually confirm students’ honesty, he would in effect encourage them to cheat whenever he did not issue such a warning. He might as well send out an Evite: Feel free to plagiarize this week; I won’t be checking.

Read Cohen's full response here.

And to view, and read, the collection of Ethicist columns published in The New York Times over the years, go here.

What is the point of a "book review" section?

SAM TANENHAUS

If you have ever asked yourself this question, or if you have ever tried to articulate an answer to this question, you will appreciate what The New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus has to say on the subject:

Our mission is very simple: to publish lively, informed, provocative criticism on the widest-possible range of books and also to provide a kind of snapshot of the literary culture as it exists in our particular moment through profiles, essays and reported articles.

There are many, many books published each year — hundreds stream into my office in the course of a week. Our job is to tell you which ones we think matter most, and why, and to direct your attention to authors and critics who have interesting things to say, particularly if they have original ways of saying them.

At a time when the printed word is being stampeded by the rush of competing "media," we're here to remind you that books matter too — that reading, as John Updike's invented novelist Henry Bech says, can be the best part of a person's life.

Tanenhaus, in a Q&A with readers on the NYT website, also enlightens us on the nature of his job, on the "absorbing and stimulating" tasks of a section editor at one of the world's greatest newspapers:

I oversee what goes into our pages and also manage a highly talented staff of editors and collaborate with our brilliant art directors ... in putting together each issue. These are absorbing and stimulating tasks. Which review should we put on the cover the week after next? How can we strike a good balance of fiction and nonfiction, high culture and pop culture, politics and science, etc.? ... Should we emphasize illustrations in a given week or photography?

Tanenhaus then gives us a peek at specific responsibilities:

Of course I read a lot each day, but in the office my fare is reviews, reviews, reviews in their various stages, from "raw copy" through final edits. This is also the case for my colleagues. Their days are spent assigning and editing and, the bane of our collective existence, fact-checking. I can't emphasize just how much of it goes on and how many different dimensions it takes.

The most demanding fact-checking is required, oddly enough, by fiction. Does the reviewer have the character's age right, the color of her eyes, the sequence of events in her past or her parents'? Does she drive a minivan or an SUV, and does she park outside a mall or on a side street? ... Fact-checking is drudgery, but it has to be done. We all "do windows" at the Book Review.

But it's not all drudgery, he writes:

[There] are fun jobs too, like reading the letters we get each week (including the many that come in via email). Our letters editor ... combs through all the correspondence and selects the most promising (the best argued, best written, most provocative). Then she brings them into my office and several of us go over them together. We're all proud of our lively letters page.

Book-reading, the great reward of the job, becomes at times a guilty pleasure, reserved for evenings and weekends. Since my own taste is for fiction, it's exciting to get early copies of the new Bolano, Pynchon, Sebald, Lethem, Eggers, or Mailer, or to see maturing novelists like Jennifer Egan or Claire Messud develop their talents in a surprising new way.

There are many interesting topics covered in this Q&A, including the selection of the "Ten Best Books of the Year" and the issue of bias in book reviews. Read the column in its entirety here.

What is it like to be a writer?

In preparation for the long Independence Day weekend, I ordered three books from Flipkart last Sunday, three books that I think I'm going to absolutely love reading: Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology Of Humor Writing From The New Yorker, by David Remnick and Henry Finder; Hitch-22: A Memoir, by Christopher Hitchens; and The Big Bookshelf: Sunil Sethi In Conversation With 30 Famous Authors by Sunil Sethi.

The Big Bookshelf and Hitch-22 arrived by courier three days ago. The first book I opened was The Big Bookshelf and Sethi's introduction itself — alone worth the price of the book — offered these fascinating insights into the world of some of the world's best-known writers:

The Bengali writer and social activist Mahasweta Devi felt the urgency to explore the oral legends surrounding the life of the Rani of Jhansi for her first book, a biography of the warrior-queen, with such intensity that "I borrowed money from relatives, got into a train, left behind a small baby with his father and went to Jhansi".

***

Whatever the motivation or their chosen route to writing, most authors professed an abiding passion for books from childhood. Reaching across to tap my knee, the novelist Nadine Gordimer, whose early education was patchy, admonished: "Reading, my dear, is the only training for a writer from a young age. You only become a writer by being a compulsive reader."

***

Asked what his advice to a young writer would be, the American travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux offered a tip: "Go away. Yes. Leave home, leave your parents and leave all the comforting things that hold you back... because if you stay... people will ask you what you are doing — what you are writing, what you are publishing. They ask you questions that you can't answer."

***

Here is the best-selling thriller writer Jeffrey Archer's regime that he briskly rapped out: "I write up to seventeen drafts. I get away for two months and I wake up at 5.30 in the morning. I write from six to eight and take a two-hour break, I write from ten until twelve and take a two-hour break, I again write from two until four, followed by another two-hour break, then I write from six until eight, light supper, go to bed at 9.30 or 10 and begin again at 5.30 the next day. Fifty days of that in a row."

***

The novelist Upamanyu Chatterjee, who leads a double life as a senior civil servant, sets himself a certain number of words a day, or how to resolve an idea or a problem in the plot, as a daily target. He writes every morning before leaving for office.

Returning home in the evening, "I sit down and peg away. Sometimes I achieve that target just before I go to bed."

Chatterjee takes about five years to complete a novel but there are others who take longer. It took Kiran Desai nearly seven years of a sequestered life to finish The Inheritance of Loss.

A more extreme example is that of the British-Pakistani fiction writer Nadeem Aslam who took more than eleven years to complete his prize-winning novel, Maps for Lovers.

Aslam grew up in a small town in Pakistan, attending an Urdu-medium school till the age of fourteen, when his family was forced to migrate to Britain to escape political persecution. "When I arrived in England my English was, 'This is a cat,'... My life was broken in half."

Instead of going to college, for many years he eked out a meagre living, working on building sites and in bars so that he could read in libraries. He would retreat into a private world to be able to write. "There were times when I draped the windows with black cloth. There was no phone, no TV, no radio, no newspapers and I just filled up the freezer with food and didn't leave the house for two and a half months."

***

IT'S RAINING BOOKS

You know how one thing leads to another.

Here I was, having lunch at the college yesterday and checking the "Writing Tools" blog on Poynter. I saw a reference to the new New York Times beta site, where a grammar link popped up. On the grammar site I saw a reference to some grammar blogs; one, especially, stood out and I noticed a little feature on a book, The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself).

As I have noted, one thing led to another — the book is now being shipped to me by Flipkart. Make that book No. 4 ordered on Flipkart in five days.

Want to know more about The Subversive Copy Editor? Go here.

The morality of mortality

English poet and novelist Stephen Spender was staying with fellow poet W.H. Auden when the latter received an invitation from the Times (London) asking him to write Spender's obituary. He told him as much at the breakfast table, asking roguishly, "Should you like anything said?"

Spender judged that this would not be the moment to tell Auden that he had already written his obituary for the same editor at the same paper.

— This little gem is from Hitch-22: A Memoir, by Christopher Hitchens, who writes in the book that he himself has never written an obituary of a still-living person because "I cannot, not even for ready money, write about the demise of a friend or colleague until Minerva's owl has taken wing, and I know that the darkness has actually come. I dare say that somebody, somewhere has already written my provisional death-notice".

(What a striking phrase that is about Minerva's owl taking wing, a reference to the philosopher Hegel's oft-quoted line: "Only when the dusk starts to fall does the owl of Minerva spread its wings and fly.")

• Another must-read: Oriana Fallaci and the Art of the Interview: In a eulogy written for Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens recounts "his last visit with the tempestuous Italian journalist, and her last — never published — scoop, a sit-down with the Pope".

• UPDATE (December 16, 2011): Christopher Hitchens died yesterday in Houston, Texas. Read the New York Times obituary here: "Polemicist Who Slashed All, Freely, Dies at 62".