A rolling journalist gathers moss

It is not only Fleet Street that has changed over the decades; the working lives of journalists and journalism across the globe have also been transformed

It was sometime in 2003. I was on a bus from Bristol to London, not really looking forward to the boring 2-hour journey. A new smartphone — my first — had arrived from the mobile provider a week ago, and after circling around the alien object for some days, I had just begun to learn how to use it. Then, alongside my full-time academic job, I was contributing to an Indian news agency, which helped retain links with the real world (academia can lock you in ivory towers for good). Hoping to kill time on the bus, I took out the phone, still uneasy with its functions and the tiny tactile keyboard.

Since there was enough time at hand, I wondered if it might be possible to slowly type out a small story as a test, my first ever attempt to write on a phone, while on the move. It took me a while, but after about 250 words, I hit the ‘Send’ button, sure that it would be lost in cyberspace or not used due to the several typos I discovered later (as you so often discover only after clicking ‘Send’). I sat back to enjoy the fleeting countryside, but was soon pinged several times by colleagues in New Delhi: the story had not only reached them, it was put out, and had soon made its way to the websites of several leading newspapers and online news sites.

I still remember the thrill of the moment, not about the story’s contents or the speed at which it surfaced online, but how the small gadget had enabled transmission across continents in seconds, annihilating the long time and effort that was previously needed. It used to be more difficult to send a story than to get a story.

Memories flooded in of my time in north-east India and reporting from other datelines in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before the telecom revolution. I would invariably type out a story at least three times: on the typewriter; on the teleprinter, only to be told that it was received garbled at the other end; scurrying to the telex office and typing it out again, and told ‘recd garbled, re-send’; booking a ‘lightning’ call to phone-in the story and also simultaneously handing it in to be sent by telegraph. You can imagine the chaos when filing four or five stories in a day from newsy locations.

So being able to send a story in seconds from a moving bus was a special moment. It is not only Fleet Street that has changed over the decades; the working lives of journalists and journalism across the globe have also been transformed at various levels — for good or ill. For me, the single-most change has been in the area of technology, having witnessed advances and changes since the time I joined soon after my teens: from the days of linotype and hot-metal, galleys, reading headlines and text in reverse on stone, page-proofs, dictatorial foremen — to mostly silent newsrooms with journalists working in silos on customised software. Technology has now made multimedia journalism possible, across text, video and photo, simultaneously — all this and more on a smartphone, while on the move.

If technology has leapfrogged in recent decades and enabled better, quicker journalism, it is a matter of intense debate whether standards have improved. New technology also means quick feedback from readers, access to archives, instant online publishing, abolishing the role of proof-readers. Much else had changed in newsrooms during the 2000 decade or so, but most of them bypassed me while I was in academia through a Cambridge fellowship, doctorate from Leicester and teaching/research in Bristol — until the imposter syndrome hit hard and I returned to journalism in 2013 to that heady mixture of irreverence, adventure, serendipity and the magic of words.

During that time in academia, my journalist friends said I must be a good academic, since I am not much of a journalist, while academic friends thought I must be a decent journalist, since I am not much of an academic. Both were wrong. Never mind if you are a rolling stone or a journalist, if you keep at it long enough, you end up gathering some moss and more.