6 am: Editor hands you your newspaper

For this story, Sitaraman Shankar sets out on a scooter to drop off copies of Deccan Herald, the daily he edits. The experience brings him fresh insights into the 24/7 news cycle, which begins on the field and segues to the newsroom.

It's 4 o'clock on a nippy Bengaluru morning and the last thing you would expect outdoors is a flurry of activity. But at Shoolay Circle, in the centre of the city, a busy but oddly silent scene unfolds on a pavement every morning at around the same time, a key step in bringing the news of the world to your drawing room.

I've shadowed our newspapers as they made the one-hour trip from the printing press 22 km away at Kumbalgodu in southwest Bengaluru, and watch as they’re readied for the next stage of their journey. On the Shoolay pavement, Prasad, one of our main dealers, looks on as nearly 40 hawkers organise copies of the newspapers — ours and others — for lineboys (the men who bring the paper to your doorstep). Between the dealers, there are 24 brands of newspapers here and some 12,000 copies being sorted. By 5.30 am, everyone melts away, leaving the footpath to the odd stray to enjoy until the hustle of the city claims it.

The editor witnesses hawkers organising copies of newspapers on the Shoolay pavement

A little further afield, another dealer, Anbu, tells me that some hawkers have memorised up to 2,000 locations and organise the papers accordingly for lineboys to drop off. It's a hard business. Hawkers live in constant fear of losing line boys to other industries. The boys themselves have a bruisingly early start to the day and risk burn-out.

I'm treated gently by Anbu — he takes me pillion on his scooter while some deliveries are made, and even gives me a paper to throw on a doorstep, which I accomplish clumsily. Later I deliver a handful of copies on foot and meet 73-year-old Prasad Gupta, who has been reading the paper for 55 years. He is waiting on the kerb for his paper, and while he is delighted to see us, complains mildly about some of his letters to the editor not being carried.

Editor loads freshly printed copies in a dispatch van

Meeting readers is like gold dust to editors, and we're tempted to linger. But we're holding Anbu up. And the morning editorial meeting, which I must attend, is just four hours away.

In drawing rooms across India, over steaming cups of coffee or tea, newspapers are consumed with a mixture of trust, affection, and, if our standards fall, outrage. It is a strange compact between consumer and producer, unique in combining emotion and intellect, and strangely durable when all around it is changing.

"Newspapers will be dead in five years," my editor at the Delhi-based newspaper where I then worked, intoned in 2012. Sure enough, over the next decade, digital media took eyeballs away from print media. And a pandemic ripped the guts out of the industry for the period it lasted.

Check out the editor’s TEDx Talk on why you should pay for news

But to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of our impending demise were greatly exaggerated. Circulation of newspapers across India is still robust, and media groups are finding ways to stay relevant, their credibility a welcome contrast to the dubious sources on social media and outright fake news websites.

So, despite all the challenges, the romance of a newspaper endures to this day. Even now, 30 years since I started out, I marvel at how media organisations turn what are ideas in someone's head of one morning into what is essentially a small book full of news, analysis, editorials and features and deliver it to your doorstep the next day.

Having seen the evolution of media from the 1990s, I've realised that the fundamentals on the print newspaper side haven't changed much, but Digital, which wasn't around when I started, has enriched our interaction with readers immeasurably. Transformation has been continuous and more awaits — both print and digital could be upended by artificial intelligence. But some things don't change: Most people who work in the media are still in it for the thrill of it all.

Reporting anxieties

Many teams, like the one working on features here, race the clock

Take the life of a reporter: Boredom is next to impossible. At one level, this is the only profession in which you get paid just for telling the truth; less loftily, it is about trading information with sources to build trust, always trying to be in the right place at the right time and carefully building in context. I can recollect few agonies worse than working through the day chasing a lead, getting 80% of the story and deciding to hold it back for that one last confirmation, only to see the same news plastered across a rival paper's front page. 

Similarly, there are few bigger highs than beating the competition to a big story everyone is chasing. As a cub reporter in Mumbai in the 1990s, I remember eavesdropping on two commuters discussing my story on a packed suburban train, my face never far from someone's armpit. A good day was one where you crawled home at midnight, completely wrung out but knowing that ecstasy awaited when the papers landed the next day, your byline at the top. And then you ran up the office steps, three at a time, dying to do it all over again.

For people on the outside, a reporter's career evokes reactions ranging from admiration to contempt. But few people in the profession really care. For those who believe, there is nothing in the world quite like it for the adrenaline rush it gives and for the occasional impact it has in changing lives. For everyone else, it is a job to be done, like an accountant balances books, or a plumber unblocks a drain.

As I spent most of my reporting life doing financial stories — with some political and a tiny but enjoyable sliver of cricket reportage thrown in — I rely on one of our crime reporters, Prajwal D'Souza, to bring me up to speed with how the trade is plied nowadays. At one level, things haven't changed much: Just replace company sources with cops and annual reports with FIRs. Build lower-rung contacts and have people in key places that are happy to talk to you because they respect what you write. Soak in tips like a sponge; never empty your notebook.

 "I loved the variety, which is why I took up journalism after studying commerce," says the 27-year-old. "My work has some routine, like going through the FIR database, but you never know what you will find and where it will lead." Prajwal sees his fair share of dead bodies and blood but is careful to not get inured to it. "I don't let myself get attached to a story, but I don't want myself to get used to it, as that would lead to a loss of empathy," he says.

In the old days, good newsrooms were noisy, with reporters working the phones, shouting for everyone else to keep quiet. Tempers frayed as demanding editors practiced the fine art of keeping reporters in a state of insecurity: "You are only as good as your last story. Haven't had anything from you in a while — have you been on leave?"

The pressure is still intense, even if, with so many sources of information, it is easier not to miss routine stories. Exclusives, the media's lifeblood, are harder to get. Regulators don't like exclusive interviews that contain market-moving material; any deep throat in the finance ministry — common two decades ago -- is probably terrified that he is being watched. Besides, newsmakers now use social media to 'break' their own stories. Newsrooms are also quieter because so much research is done online.

Other DH reporters are hard at work across Karnataka and the rest of India, at sports stadiums, at companies interviewing CEOs, tracking policymakers and seeking the odd incriminating document. Feature writers are busy crafting the longer-form stories that are a differentiator as news gets commoditised. Editorials are written and rewritten. Video is a key part of our product offering now. The digital team curates quickly and trawls the 'wires' — Reuters, PTI and others — and television. The website is a newspaper published continuously.

Digital journalists often give their Print colleagues a prod based on what they are picking up from their monitoring and make sure that many routine stories are substantially 'cooked' by the time Print takes over. Gone are the days when reporters would start working on a story from scratch after a liquid lunch and finish in time for a second innings at the Press Club.

At the end of the spectrum is the Desk. Here is where stories are kicked into shape, checked for veracity, headlines given and laid out on to a page. Deskers often think of themselves as a different, exalted species: The quality gurus, the ayatollahs who enforce style and discipline. Some of the best newspapers are desk-driven, and obsessive about quality.

Deskers often reach home after work at 3 am, and are fast asleep when their spouses leave for office. Not everyone's cup of tea, but a supportive spouse and the love of novelty is enough to keep some going. "Every day is new — there is no template," says Angel Rani, who has been on the desk for 18 years. "The idea of a daily deadline, which is peculiar to this profession, creates some pressure, but I enjoy it. And often we are the first to know a piece of breaking news, which is thrilling."

Page 1 meeting 

Seniors working in DH's Bengaluru office assembled for the evening pg1 meeting while others from different locations join in online

It's 5.30 pm, and reporting heads are bidding for space on the newspaper’s front page at the page 1 meeting. To the uninitiated, the conversation can be bewildering: Why should story A be the lead (main story) and not the equally worthy story B? How many columns? What are the elements that should go into it? Should we take a picture or a graphic? If the latter, what should it contain? Surely, that design with so many single columns doesn't work. Neither does one that makes the page look too vertical, or made of neat horizontal stacks, like a layered cake. Is there enough white space? Is the picture coming on to the fold? Do we have the right mix of local and national stories? 

'Making a compelling page 1 is partly art, partly science and partly magic,' says Deepak Harichandan, DH's design chief, who has worked across major brands for over three decades. He is passionate about telling a story visually; editors joke that he needs to be reined in, otherwise text stories will shrink to accommodate graphics.

Art is only part of the craft of news, and craft is only part of the process. There is the rigour of vetting stories by a senior on the team. Are they factually thorough? Do they have comment from all sides? Are they legally safe? Sometimes, an in-house lawyer is consulted. 

By 10 pm, the desks are buzzing, and an hour later, the first pages are getting completed. There is constant fear of making an error, and the deadline pressure is intense — what use is a newspaper if readers don't get it on time? It has the lowest shelf life of most consumables, after all. Today's newspaper is tomorrow's cover for your textbook or kitchen shelf.

On to Kumbalgodu

At the printing press in Kumbalgodu at 2.30 am.

By half an hour past midnight, a queue of pages has lined up for final approvals, and then they are 'fired' to the state-of-the-art printing press in Kumbalgodu. The Print desk slowly disappears; left alone in the office is a forlorn Digital desker manning the 'graveyard' shift.

Staff at the printing press have cleaned the machines well before the first City edition’s electronic pages arrive. In fact, rolls of newsprint — many of them a tonne in weight and imported from Canada, a whole world away, have been slotted into reel stands, from where the paper is fed into printing towers. 

In the CTP (Computer to Plate) room, electronic pages are laser etched onto aluminium plates. The plates are fixed onto cylinders in the printing 'tower'. The images get transferred onto a metal 'blanket', and the paper from the huge rolls below passes between the blankets, resulting in the image being transferred onto the paper. Each tower has four levels, that print, in turn, the four colours — cyan, magenta, yellow and black — resulting in a colour page. The technology has steadily improved over the decades.

"Printing is deep science, whether it's about the ink to water ratio, the pH, the structure of the paper, the mechanics of the machine," says our production head, Gururaj Shastry. He should know; as he has been printing various newspapers for 44 years. "Every day is a new challenge but when you see a paper the next day and the quality and colours are good, you feel a deep satisfaction that everything is in the right place."

Last year, newsprint prices, the single biggest item of cost for a newspaper company, soared. Publishers kept newspapers slender to control costs. It is an industry buffeted by an unforgiving trifecta of cost pressures, changing reading habits and fickle advertising markets. The last is critical thanks to the lopsided Indian media revenue model that depends more on print ads than on circulation revenue. That, of course, needs to change.

The advanced printing machines push out a few lakh copies in three hours. Executives in a control room keep a beady eye on several screens and are able to adjust the ink-to-water mix at the flick of a switch. Workers pull out printed newspapers at random from the assembly line and check for flaws. 'Bad' copies are condemned to rebirth as they land on the scrap pile. Good copies make their automated journey to the mail room, to be bundled and cellophane-wrapped by machine.

After this hi-tech existence begins an altogether more plebeian journey, at 1 am to the airport, or 3 am to Prasad, Anbu and others in town. Packers load a few thousand copies into each of two dozen mini-trucks and off they go. The same story plays itself out from six other presses across Karnataka and features as its cast some 4,500 agents, 10,000 hawkers, and 40,000 lineboys. 

In the United States, one third of newspapers have closed down over the past 20 years. India is one of the last bastions of the industry, where media groups are rightly building digital at top speed while trying to protect their more lucrative print franchises. The way ahead would be to charge a premium for high-quality content and to convince readers of the permanence and trustworthiness of the printed word, while getting people to pay for rich digital content.

Artificial Intelligence is coming to newsrooms, and it could be a friend if harnessed properly with adequate safeguards. Reporters could use it for primary research and ideation and for fact-checking. Desks could harness it to translate copy between languages, and to lay copy out on a page, even cut it sensibly. Decent-quality videos and podcasts could be made in a fraction of the time it takes a human. The future is breathtakingly exciting. 

Hawkers organise copies of newspapers

Papers across the world have taglines that tell you what their owners see as their raison d'etre — from The Washington Post's Democracy Dies in Darkness to The Indian Express' Journalism of Courage and DH's own The Power of Good. This is an industry — flaws, conflicts, and all — genuinely driven by idealism. The past 30 years have been exhilarating despite the struggles; for the next three decades and beyond, we need to find a way to keep making that well-meaning trip to your doorstep and your screens.

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