The curious case of dissing opinion websites

With the rise of opinion-based websites, a curious trend has emerged in the mainstream media - of dissing them. Writing in Vantage, the Caravan's own digital platform, TR Vivek took a shot at what he called the "J-minus model" of opinion websites:

"The emerging digital content model…is a simple marriage between new age tweets and old letters to the editor, with the resultant product providing outrage ammunition for the barrackers on social media. Such opinion by its nature is free, and such opinion writers take the sweat out of editing and planning - you calendarise the pipeline, with X's column due at Y hour on Z date. There is no need for editors who are capable of spotting interesting leads, commissioning them, and working with field reporters and photographers to chase down the more unwieldy stories."

Vivek furthers his point by speaking of his time at Swarajya, the Right-leaning magazine where he worked as editor for three months:

"Every second piece that came to our desks for publication - be it on cricket, cinema or civic pride - would inevitably be an evisceration of Nehruvian socialism, written by someone not yet twenty-five. In one such instance, an irate community correspondent, when asked to substantiate a passage bordering on the perfidious, argued that since there would be a statutory disclaimer at the end of his piece, the editors should confine themselves to issues of grammar and syntax."

I will come to Vivek's specific complaint about the "evisceration of Nehruvian socialism" in a bit but let me address the broader issue first. The opinion website model, as Vivek too points out in his piece, is easily replicable and may engender a mushrooming of such outlets on the web. Vivek, however, declines from mentioning his reservations with this fact per se. He harbours reservations on what this model may mean for the journalistic integrity of the newsroom but omits to consider that the quality of content, be it online or offline, will always play an important role in the popularity of a news outlet. If there are ten websites offering opinion, users will flock to the ones where opinion is robust enough to command attention. Whether that opinion emerges from in-house reportage - the concern that most exercises Vivek - is another story.

When I was a full-time journalist at a Delhi-based newspaper, a conversation that often took place on the desk (this was the late aughts) was the growing need for newspapers to develop a pipeline of good writing talent. "Anyone can bring me the facts of a case," an editor said on one occasion, "but unless I have someone who can turn around that information appealingly and crisply, I am at risk of losing my readers."

Of course, the reporter-writer dichotomy may not work for a long form magazine like Caravan but that fact does not take away from the growing need for good writing that is not necessarily borne of reportage done by the same person. I use writing here not merely to refer to the filing of a news report, which function separates the desk from the bureau in any news setup, but also writing that stems from information culled from other sources. With the rise of online media and with Twitter and Facebook too acting as secondary (even primary in some cases) sources, one way a news outlet can distinguish itself is through the quality of its analysis and editorialising.

Vivek's concerns were echoed by another writer, this too for Caravan. The magazine ran a piece called "Minority Report" in the Perspectives section of its December 2014 issue. Referring to the national breath of coverage in Times of India, the writer Surpiya Sharma, a reporter-writer at Scroll, wrote: "These reports may often appear insignificant, adding only small bits of information to what is already known, but the careful aggregation of minor facts is what allows reporters, commentators and readers to discern larger patterns. The steady, uncelebrated process of newsgathering also makes the media an essential invigilator of power. In an ideal newsroom, beat reporters - the primary information-gatherers - slowly acquire enough expertise to become specialists."

To me this appears to be nostalgia for an age where information gathering and analysis proceeded at a pace that allowed for reporters to learn on the job. Today's vastly different scenario does not permit a slow learning curve. If anything, the debate in the media has shifted to whether reportage, especially on television, has descended into the gutter due to the rapid hunt for eyeballs. To then criticise opinion websites for a lack of rigour can be a little rich.

Besides, with the India launch of such websites as Buzzfeed and Huffington Post, the online media space will continue to evolve towards a setup where opinion writing is sought. The real question is not whether this is a good or bad outcome because it is inevitable, but what form this writing should take, because even there, purists who prefer traditional narrative techniques balk at the growing popularity of listicles and images-driven content.

Finally - and this is where I wish to address Vivek's discomfort with Swarajya - there is also the fact that readers/viewers hunger for a more diverse body of opinion than traditional media outlets can provide. Perhaps no incident captures this better than the Porbandar operation which ushered in the new year with the kind of newsworthiness hacks die for. Only, there was much protracted hand-wringing over the facts of the case. Was it really a terror attack in disguise? Had the Coast Guard been hasty in dubbing as darker what was only a smuggling operation? Worse, had the defence ministry played cheerleader through its subsequent utterances? Even a cursory viewing of news channels in the aftermath of Porbandar would lay bare the minds of its leading lights, and how facts were only addendums to be used and perhaps discarded in furthering the "cause", whatever hue the cause be. Equally, for the newspapers, one could guess the line the edit pages would take even before one had the copy in hand.

The traditional media climate is India is then hewing towards the US model, where most news consumers pick up their outlets based on said outlet's political inclination. Are we then on the way to having our own versions of Fox and CNN?

The question to ask is if such a partisan media climate won't further divide the polity down the middle. By allowing both sides of the debate to flourish, opinion websites can provide much needed respite from the shrillness of traditional media. Long gone are the days when readers expected newspapers to set the agenda for them. In the information age, consumers of news are bombarded with enough and more sources of information. It is only fitting that they be provided with multiple viewpoints too, to help them make up their mind. In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, for example, DailyO published pieces that defended both sides of the divide - the right to freedom of speech versus the need to be careful about representation of religious figures.

Such broad-based editorialising gives a reader of any ideological persuasion an opportunity to see what the other side has to say. This is a far better ecosystem than the sermonising echo chamber that the traditional media is increasingly becoming. It ought to be welcomed.