- Pallavi Ghosh
What Do Sociologists Do? Series
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| Photo by Markus Winkler from Pexels |
The reason that had made me opt for the MA programme in Sociology at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), back in 2014, as it turns out, was very ‘sociological’. Like every other middle-class Bengali family, mine too was committed to the cause of what is often known as a ‘stable career’. And without a Masters degree, it was unthinkable.
After completing a one-year diploma in journalism from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC) I had developed a fair sense of how journalists look at journalism. The lingo was pretty simple: the litmus test of any news report or its newsworthiness, the 5Ws (who, what, when, where and why) and 1 H (how) principle, the romanticisation of sans serif, the principle of the inverted pyramid, the aversion to present continuous tense and the no-article thumb rule for headlines; the non-use of passive sentences and so on. These and many others were part of our training. Otherwise a heavily practical-oriented course, the PG diploma course in Journalism nevertheless had communications theories and organisational hierarchy acting as the conceptual/theoretical foundation. And therefore, I chose to try my hand in Sociology.
During my academic sojourn at JNU, I got the opportunity to look at what I aspired would become my profession someday from a different disciplinary lens. Typically, from my limited reading of Sociology of media, I recall reading a lot about technologies. In other words, the sociological analysis was tech-centric. It is true that without the technological leaps associated with the Industrial Revolution, the boom of the media, the industry of which journalism is only a part, would not have been possible.
But the way they have manifested for different industries like news, movies, video platforms like Snapchat or social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp is a different story. Yes, they all communicate but they do so differently. To elaborate, the primary function of a news report is to communicate, but it also is a specific kind of communication. This form of communication is very different from the movies and the league of social media behemoths (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp). While these can act as platforms for news dissemination and sometimes even as the source of news, the production process is always with the so-called ‘news people’.
So, can Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp be news creators? As it turns out, yes they can. Social media giants have already ventured into the business of news writing and dissemination by creating a separate news wing/department (in reality, it can also be a more general ‘media wing’). The fact is that the media industry, in general, derives its relevance from the existing technologies of our times. But there are differences at a micro-level. For example, it will be interesting to note how softwares like the Pagemaker, Quark, and InDesign have impacted print journalism. These may or may not be relevant from the perspective of TV or radio journalism.
In other words, technology is an important factor determining news content but there are many others. For example, there is an entire process of decision making, an editorial process involving the pitching of ideas, approval, and subsequent chasing where the basic tone of the story is already decided. There is also a division of labour: the reporters (the visible force) are the ears and eyes on the ground, and the desk (the invisible force) responsible for giving the story its final form by adding and cutting out information according to a stylesheet. My training in Sociology has helped me understand these things from a different perspective.
A lot of sociological research and training deals with policy documents, also the bread and butter for journalists who spend their lives churning stories from reports, studies, and government documents. A certain familiarity with the documents has certainly acted as a boon. If journalism is all about asking questions, sociology has helped me ask more questions. To illustrate, while working on one of my first stories on an all-girl team of engineers who were to participate in a competition, I was naturally led to explore how gender impacted the careers of engineers. From funding problems to career decisions, the responses of my sources laid bare a gender divide that became the peg of the story.
I often asked myself the question: Is the job of a journalist that different from a researcher? The most notable among the differences, however, is the time constraint. The deadline for a news story is mostly shorter than that of a report or a book. Stories are churned in a day, also a few hours and sometimes in minutes in case of breaking news. The other major difference is the final product itself. A news story is any day shorter than a book or a report.
And then again, there are overlaps. Aren’t ethnographic accounts the basis of many new stories? And isn’t participant observation a method of research for journalists as well. How would you describe those countless undercover investigative news stories otherwise?
Writing for a 1-minute news capsule is very different from writing a 700-800 news report for the newspaper. The rules of the game change again when it is for the online medium - the word limit is less stringent and as the editor-in-chief of one the media organizations I worked with said, ‘speed is of essence’. It is the arena of breaking news after all. The fastest gets the credit here. However, detailed coverage manages to deliver on the promise of in-depth analysis.
Brevity and simplicity being the two celebrated concepts of news writing, the use of jargon is not the ideal. Conceptual/technical terms that are the heart and soul of academic writing are avoided mostly. When they are used, knowledge is not taken for granted. Instead, the term is broken down and a definition is provided to the reader. And Sociology has helped me in doing that.
The sociological gaze involves looking at the society and events from a certain perspective. A lens if you may like. As a student of Sociology, it had meant looking at social realities from the lens of caste, gender, ethnicity, race, religion, economies, etc. And each perspective offers a story. Take the example of the ongoing COVID -19 pandemic. News reports about the plight of the migrant workers are reflections of the class divide, while the rise in domestic violence cases around the world pertains to gender.
Despite the differences, many issues fall on the common terrain of sociology and journalism. For instance, fake news is as much a sociological problem as it is journalistic. So is the phenomenon of ‘anonymous’ sources in our age. Reportage is usually a symptom of current times. It would be interesting to explore its connection with conflict area reporting or countries where there are questions around press freedom. Since anonymity is usually a standard response when one reacts out of fear.
The journalist has been called many things - a historian, a biographer, and so on. But in many ways being a journalist has meant being a mass-friendly researcher whose job is to break down the complexity of lived realities in the form of news reports. And Sociology helps one in doing that.
𝠛𝠛𝠛𝠛𝠛𝠛𝠛𝠛𝠛𝠛
Pallavi Ghosh is a journalist who is currently working with Down To Earth as a reporter-cum-subeditor for its children supplement Gobar Times. She has previously worked with the Economic Times and Business Standard.
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