No one in the actual newsroom, but hard decisions aplenty

In normal times, newsrooms throb with life. Reporters are on the phone, grilling sources. Sub-editors are tersely editing infelicities out of articles and composing what is essentially a small book, daily. The video team grapples with temperamental studio guests, and the online desk competes with the rest of the world every minute.

Across the floor, copious amounts of coffee are drunk. Tempers are often short, competition is keen, and everyone leaves exhausted, only to do it all again the next day.

What a difference a pandemic has wrought. The number of people in the newsroom ranges from none to a handful. Some colleagues haven’t seen each other face-to-face for a year. Everything is done from home. The physical aspect of a newsroom has transformed to the extent that it will feel very strange when we go back to normal.

The touch-and-feel product it creates, the newspaper, has changed less: It has lost a few grams in weight, which like with any crash diet, will come back once the rigours end. More noticeable is how a lockdown hits circulation and advertising revenue.

But of all that’s changed, what gets the least attention externally is how difficult some newsroom decisions become during what is, essentially, wartime.

Here’s a sampler: How do we deal with a story that has been unremittingly miserable for the best part of three months? How much do we show and tell, how critical should we be, how biting our text and how stark our images? How do we craft headlines to let words evoke emotion, without becoming an emotional mess ourselves? On the safety front, how much risk do we take sending our reporters out into the field?

There are no easy answers. We know that this pandemic has taken a toll on the readers’ mental health, and on the newsroom’s. For three months, wherever you looked or listened, Covid was all you got. Some took refuge in the IPL and Netflix. But social media -- and this is where most journalists live much of the time nowadays -- reflected with a vengeance the horror of what had come to pass. Heart-rending appeals for oxygen on Twitter. Terrifying tales of bodies in rivers, or piled high in ambulances. Cremations in parking lots. And on the phone, a rasping, midnight fright from a colleague with very little lung capacity left.

So, when a bright young photojournalist comes up with striking shots of cremations at sunset -- saffron flames rising against a twilit sky -- you decide, against your journalistic judgement, to downplay it a bit. You may even bury cremation shots in an inside page, risking demotivating the journalist, who has worked at some personal risk. At one point, we took the call to exercise restraint in showing dead bodies to a shell-shocked readership, even at the cost of telling the story fully, which is what we do for a living.

And when health reporters file stories questioning every silver lining, you gently try and extract some hope from them. They do an outstanding job, and they still have free rein to go after a once-in-a-century story. But we ask them, and others, to seek out the inspiring as well, and luckily there is plenty of that in the heroism of frontline workers, nurses and doctors.

Most journalists are trained to see the bad news first. Good news is usually not news. As George Orwell may have said: “Journalism is printing something that somebody doesn’t want printed. Everything else is public relations.” But what do you do when all you see is bad news? How does one balance the need for full, honest and hard reporting with the responsibility of not completely puncturing public morale?

We tell our reporters to not write emotionally but to write to evoke emotion. There is also the opposite problem to excess emotionality. Like cops desensitised to gory crime scenes, journalists often develop the faculty of inuring themselves to distressing developments. The skill lies in retaining the sensitivity to tell that story appropriately, otherwise you get headlines like the one I saw on a website (not one of ours): “The virus is coming for your children!”

But for all that restraint there is pent-up wrath in even the most dispersed newsroom. A government misstep (and there were plenty) comes in for a regular roasting. Shameless vote-grubbing, claiming credit when there is little to claim, and doing a disappearing act only to reappear when things are getting better evoke more anger than in peacetime. There is fury at China, which many sense has been ultra-economical with the truth on the origins of the virus. And it would also be useful for those -- and they know who they are -- who spew venom at our profession to remember that many of our journalists have been out there reporting and shooting images and video at a time when it would have been safer to be at home.

As we unlock, our responsibility shifts: We need to help keep at bay the sort of euphoria that comes from a huge cloud lifting. We intend to keep a beady eye on developing case clusters, the pace of vaccination and government policy on Covid-19.

Sometime in the future, when the pandemic is gone, we will go back to only deciding which political slugfest deserves pride of place on page 1, which funny story makes it to the ‘anchor’ (the bottom of the page), how we report on the perfidy of our regional rivals, and which glamorous sportsman’s peccadilloes can journey from the back of the book all the way to the front. For now, though, we are gingerly making our way back, yearning for a normal newsroom, with all its flaws. For a year, we have lived in times that have been a bit too interesting.