Careers
Mass media can be said to be a media which can carry information and
communication across to a large audience in the same standard manner.
Examples of mass media are radio, newspapers, television ,magazines,cinema,
books and of late the Internet. The mass media serves a variety of purposes
including information, communication, entertainment, advertisement and opinion building.
Newspapers form an important aspect of mass media and journalism is a key
element of any newspaper. The word comes from journal derived from "jour"
which means "day" in French.In fact the earliest newspapers can be traced to the
early Romans who used to put up a handwritten bulletin at the main public square
in Rome.
A journalist can be broadly defined as one whose primary occupation is gathering
writing, editing and presenting events occurring in various spheres be it political,
economics, the arts and culture or sports to a very generic audience. In this
profession there are many areas where one can work in. These are Reporting,
Sub-editing, Editing etc.
Reporting can be of two types-regular reporting and investigative reporting.
Regular reporting would be reporting of daily news in a plain,matter-of -fact
manner. It covers the event as it occurred without making any judgements
about it. These would be routine events which are of public interests like the
visit of a dignitary or a report on a test match being played. Investigative reporting
on the other hand entails an in-depth study of the issue in question. Here the
reporter often goes deep into the matter and gathers first hand information. After
gathering all the required information, the information is analysed and
conclusions drawn out of it. These conclusions are presented to the public
and they are made aware of the occurrences. The regular reporting would be
of a daily variety while an investigative reporting could take a long period of time.
The editorial department of any newspaper is as important as the reporters it has.
The editorial department works as a team and the team consists of writers,
re-writers or sub- editors and editors etc. The writers are the people who write the
stories and many a times it is the reporters themselves who do it.The re-writers
are also called as sub-editors and their job is to read the copy of the writers.
They have to polish and refine the stories written by the writers so that it is
presented to the readers in an intelligible manner.Besides this, there are other
duties of the sub-editor as well. They have to give appropriate eadlines to a story.
This is very important because many a times a reader just glances at the
headlines and decides whether to continue reading or not. They also have to
grade and arrange the news as to which should occupy more important
position etc.
Besides these, there are other areas in which one can specialise in a newspaper.
These are photography, photo-journalism and cartooning. Nowadays , a lot of
graphics are used in newspapers and this is also a growing area. As the saying
goes "a picture says more than a thousand words" and newspapers are relying
more and more today on visual communications. Hence these areas present
a lot of opportunities.
India on account of its diversity presents a diaspora of readers and hence
newspapers. Apart from the main English newspapers, a lot of regional and
vernacular newspapers are widely read and are doing very well.They are powerful
because they reach the interiors of the country and read by the rural masses.
A lot of opportunities present themselves in vernacular journalism also.
In this discussion we have restricted ourselves to print journalism and have not
talked about radio, television and web journalism.These will be dealt with when
we cover careers in these areas.
Thus we see that opportunities abound in journalism and if one has enough fire
in the belly, one can be a live example to the adage "the pen is mightier than the
sword"
