When I started my career in journalism, the field was not new to me. My father was already a journalist and I had all the information about journo, their habits and their weaknesses.
I imbibed only the good qualities and retrenched the weaknesses to the extent possible. When I was in my first year college, I took charge of the editorial part of the Ahmedabad division’s Times of India and Economic Times. No, not as its in charge but handling a small portion of work which routine journalists refused to do. I handled the Response Features (or in other words advertorials) for both these newspapers. But well before that I contributed regularly to a Wednesday column called Mid-Week Montage with satirical articles. My first payment was Rs 250 and it was something that I could never imagine because I was in school at that point of time and I became the youngest salaried guy in my class.
Week after week, I got this amount for which I had to go to the Times of India office and gradually, somebody in Response Team called me asking if I could do the editorial part of Response Features. I did and was paid Rs 1000 per article which was not bad at that time because journalists were paid pittance and there were too less opportunities too.
But today journos are not paid salaries but ransom. Newspapers converted itself into corporate houses and began hunting for journalists offering unrealistic salaries. The climb was so high that when we started our portal, we could get none for the kind of salaries we were offering. On the contrary, people laughed at us. But when the promoters are themselves journos, there was nothing to worry as we could do what ten journalists could not. Thankfully, we saved all those money which came handy today.
Now the scene is shrinking. Not only salaries have fallen drastically but the question now is whether there will be job safety at all? How is that some newspapers run their editions in total losses offering hefty sums as salaries? What is the revenue model they are looking at? We learnt the hard way of generating revenue and corrected some our mistakes too. What we did and how we did and also the scenario of the current journalistic meltdown will be carried in the next edition.
I imbibed only the good qualities and retrenched the weaknesses to the extent possible. When I was in my first year college, I took charge of the editorial part of the Ahmedabad division’s Times of India and Economic Times. No, not as its in charge but handling a small portion of work which routine journalists refused to do. I handled the Response Features (or in other words advertorials) for both these newspapers. But well before that I contributed regularly to a Wednesday column called Mid-Week Montage with satirical articles. My first payment was Rs 250 and it was something that I could never imagine because I was in school at that point of time and I became the youngest salaried guy in my class.
Week after week, I got this amount for which I had to go to the Times of India office and gradually, somebody in Response Team called me asking if I could do the editorial part of Response Features. I did and was paid Rs 1000 per article which was not bad at that time because journalists were paid pittance and there were too less opportunities too.
But today journos are not paid salaries but ransom. Newspapers converted itself into corporate houses and began hunting for journalists offering unrealistic salaries. The climb was so high that when we started our portal, we could get none for the kind of salaries we were offering. On the contrary, people laughed at us. But when the promoters are themselves journos, there was nothing to worry as we could do what ten journalists could not. Thankfully, we saved all those money which came handy today.
Now the scene is shrinking. Not only salaries have fallen drastically but the question now is whether there will be job safety at all? How is that some newspapers run their editions in total losses offering hefty sums as salaries? What is the revenue model they are looking at? We learnt the hard way of generating revenue and corrected some our mistakes too. What we did and how we did and also the scenario of the current journalistic meltdown will be carried in the next edition.
