“Balu sir!” and “Hari sir!” were common refrains at The Hindu’s Chennai reporting section those days. The two senior colleagues, who were office aides in the department and took turns in alternating shifts, effectively ran the section.
From reminding us to sign in the attendance register (yes, we used to physically sign in a thick, leather-bound ledger everyday before punching became a thing!), to filing the previous day’s edition of the paper, using strings that held them firmly to a huge cardboard — as if it were one giant book of news — to keeping track of our night shift cycles to handing over the press releases marked to us by the city editor, we relied on them for several of our daily tasks. When it was time to change the film in the fax machine, we needed their help more than ever. Few of us had the dexterity for replacing that cylindrical roll to get the machine to start beeping and spewing messages in dull black ink again.
We got a variety of fax messages. Organisers of religious discourses sent us announcements via fax, with a request for inclusion in our daily engagements’ column on page 4. Private engineering colleges that competed with each other in seeking publicity — whether a Rotaract club inauguration or a tree-planting drive on campus — sent us invitations via fax, requesting coverage for what they thought was compelling content for a daily. More importantly, political parties and government departments commonly used fax to send official announcements, information and speeches of politicians.
Some of my senior colleagues who had covered Tamil Nadu’s two main Dravidian parties for decades could tell from the sound of the machine and the duration of the beep, what the fax message was about. “Must be Karunanidhi’s clarification to Delhi”, or, “This is Jayalalithaa’s announcement — all her special announcements are released late, close to our deadline,” I can remember them say, as they walked towards the fax machine kept at a desk near our side of the large reporting section. They were usually spot on. They would begin reading the pages as they walked back to their desks, to translate and file the report that would, at times, even displace the story slotted for the front page.
Seal of confirmation
Hearing about these announcements was one thing, but actually seeing them in those glossy sheets twirled in the fax machine was like getting a seal of confirmation. It was now “authentic” news.
A decade and a half later, reporters are having to look elsewhere, for political leaders’ statements and confirmations. Whether it is U.S. President Donald Trump who recently threatened White House protesters with ‘vicious dogs’ and ‘ominous weapons’, or Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent phone call with Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, offering support to combat COVID-19, Twitter is where we get the updates first.
Given that these are “official” handles, with a little blue tick beside them indicating they are verified accounts, we treat the tweets — ranging from the mundane to cordial and dramatic to appalling — as the official word, credible enough to report. We even cite these tweets in our news copy, with those hashtags intact, at times quietly wondering why some leaders couldn’t tweet less.