I started in journalism in 1989. That's too many years to count, so I won't. This was still my third year into Engineering, I’d done a walkabout of sorts, and decided that I needed to figure the real world on my own. I walked into the office of an Eveninger’s editor, said I wasn’t yet a graduate, but I wanted to work there. After an interview I can’t remember, he hired me for a princess-ly salary of Rs 700 a month. This allowed me to rent a place, pay my semester fee of Rs 200, attend lab at college, and go to work every day.

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My first two editors and three bureau chiefs were old school. And I’m grateful for that. They taught me things that would shape my life and my thinking. And while I can’t say they did great things for my career – I can say, it’s not their fault.

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Of the many things the old school didn’t like, was the idea of journalists being the story. And for good reasons, I think. The idea was to let our work speak for us.

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There were two Chinese Walls in journalism those days. One of them people still remember, though it’s crumbling—the wall between Journalists & Management. People remember it because of the rise of web-journalism and what has come to be known as “Independent Journalism.”

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But there was another, more important wall, that no one remembers anymore—the line between news and opinion.  Between reporters and opinion writers.

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That line crumbled from inside because reporters wanted to grow up to be editors; and editors who had long since moved into opinion writing and management, felt free to claim the burden and onus of being on the field.

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Three things helped it along.

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Technology made it easier to acquire information through phone and the internet, which was a good thing. But it also meant that more interactions happened on the phone and via e-mail, than face-to-face. That limited the kind of people who were being spoken to and the kind of knowledge and stories that were being accessed.

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Suddenly, journalists were literally just phoning it in and in a few years, investments in travelling to the story went down. Eventually, stories started coming to media houses from local sources who had not only received no training or mentorship, but whose personal stake in an article was unknown and often, unverifiable.

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Simultaneously, ‘Management’ practices creeped into newsrooms, where the reporter became like the sales or marketing agent, while the editor, now always on the phone with various ‘sources’, represented the know-all marketing guru.  Editors gathered un-attributable rumors which they believed in implicitly because they came from ‘highly placed sources,’ while reporters ran around trying to verify them.

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The world turned upside-down – news was now being gathered to verify someone’s views.

Finally, Television helped it along greatly. One never knew who the new-age TV Anchor was: Journalist, News Reader, Interviewer, Presenter, Celebrity, or just a loud-mouth.

As the line between news and views became more and more blurred, the effects were felt on everyone it touched – the sources, producers and consumers of a faithful record of contemporary history, that used to be the core competence of the news media industry.

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All of this to say, I suppose, is that the best way to know me is, is still through what I write.

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- SR