Writers as Editors

I have always been intrigued by the number of eminent litterateurs who have been – and continue to be – editors of frontline newspapers in Odisha. I can vouch for the fact that a prominent writer is the first choice of many entrepreneurs when it comes to handing out the editorship of the newspaper they are about to launch. It is as if being a writer, poet or a critic of repute is all that one needs to become an editor.
I have nothing against writers. In fact, I admire the writing of many of those who have turned editors, usually at a ripe old age when they have retired from whatever they were doing all their life. But I am afraid I don’t quite buy the theory that being a writer – even an outstanding one – is enough qualification for someone to don the garb of a newspaper editor. It may have been an eminent qualification at a particular historical juncture when the language – indeed the state itself – was struggling to carve an identity of its own. The history of the pre-independence era and the first two decades of the post-independence period is replete with stalwarts who excelled both as editors and writers.
But the world of newspapers has changed beyond recognition since then. A newspaper today has no place in it for somebody who writes his weekly column containing nuggets of wisdom and scholarship with an occasional write up thrown in between two columns, engages colleagues in profound pontifications on the matters of the world and stays scrupulously clear of the mundane business of hard news. [Most of these grey eminences are also great draws at literary or cultural functions.]
Today’s newspaper editor has to be a hands-on editor, somebody who does not detest the ‘dirty’ business of news but actually revels in it. He cannot afford to be like this editor who, when asked for his email id, asked his PA with the questioner listening loud and clear; “Gouranga! What is my email id?”
May be it is a generational thing because one is yet to see proprietors or promoters opting for a relatively younger writer as an editor. It is almost always a 60-plus veteran who is preferred for the job. The proprietor, if he or she is launching the newspaper, perhaps believes that an eminent writer brings some brand equity to a completely unknown commodity. If it is a case of hiring a writer as editor of an existing newspaper - which, by the way, is very rare – the thinking perhaps is: a well known writer will add some value to the product. [The choice of jargon from new economics is deliberate because that is what a newspaper today is at the end of the day – a ‘product’.]
With due apology to those who have graced the editor’s chair, most of them only have a passing acquaintance with the events happening around them and around the world. Very few of them have definite, well thought out views on the burning issues of the day. I cannot resist sharing here my own experience with a famous writer – and an outstanding one at that, I must say. Unfortunately, my experience with him was not at as a writer but as an editor. Hours before he arrived in the office, a bunch of stapled editorials neatly torn off from the day’s newspapers would be placed at his table by the office boy. The editor would come around 2 pm, run through the bunch of editorials and then settle down to write the day’s editorial. More often than not, the bunch of editorials that he has just gone through would determine not just the subject but also the content of the day’s editorial. The editorials would frequently be a mish-mash of the points already made in them.
I am not for a moment suggesting that every writer turned editor is like this gentleman. But I dare say many of them are a little too removed from the world of news – perhaps deliberately so. And a man who is not in the thick of news is a liability rather than an asset as an editor these days.
The propensity to hire writers as editors perhaps has its origins in a widely popular misconception peculiar to Odisha that somebody with a ‘literature background’ has a much better chance of excelling as a journalist, presumably because both involve the business of ‘writing’. But as someone who comes from precisely such a background, I can assure you that nothing can be farther from the truth. A man with a literary bent of mind, in fact, has to work twice harder to unlearn all that he has been taught in college and university and learn to write for a newspaper - or a news portal for that matter. There is very little scope for the flights of fancy that a man with a ‘literature background’ is highly susceptible to.
Returning to the subject of writers as editors, I cannot really find an explanation for the reluctance of proprietors to make a professional journalist the editor. Most of them would rather ensconce themselves in the editor’s chair and leave the discharge of editorial responsibilities to a professional journalist who is humble enough to work under a non-journalist as an editor and nice enough not to complain about it. I must confess I was really elated when the venerable ‘Samaj’, considered the most conservative media house in the state, appointed one and then another professional journalist as the editor.

[This column first appeared in The Political and Business Daily]