A blueprint for being a good deskie
Are you a deskie? Or in more formal parlance, do you burst your bum in midnight slogging on the thankless desk job in a newsroom back office? Thanks to the perennial, nerve-raking experience of meeting deadlines and frenetic hullabaloo, you must then have a rolodex of interesting stories on the nuances of news-making, amid all the dramatic animations of punctilious editors in the office backrooms.
Robin Roy is one of such individuals who has mastered the art of story-telling in the crucible of the newsroom churning. Open his new book, Between the Lines, and you will be regaled by a tickling narrative of first-hand account in a challenging world of news amid a battery of handicaps thrown at you.
How to weave a Page 1 story from nuggets of scanty information minutes before the sacrosanct deadline with just one sub-editor in the office? How to prod a reporter and find a new peg of an otherwise invisible story and make it the mostread one the next morning? How to redraw page design and play up a story at the death, beating the competition by contriving some ingenious way that the world outside would never know, or how the play of words in the headline changes the whole tack of a story? Roy has dealt with all that and can guide a novice through the quagmire of right and wrong in the profession and equally entertain an insider who has lived through the daily struggle of bringing out a newspaper.
The wit, the tenacity, the command over language, the nerves of steel, the patience, perseverance, a tinge of humour with a pinch of salt and above all, objectivity — all that go into the making of a good journalist have been touched upon and their value in journalism expatiated in Between the Lines. Written in terse caustic wit, the book can be called an ultimate handbook for all journalists, especially people who are on the desk. Perhaps there is no relevant book near at hand which describes the ordeals and adventures of an editorial job in such brevity as Between the Lines does. Any youngster who wants to make a mark in journalism and if he/she is especially aiming to take the editorial job a notch higher, this has to be on his/her must-read list.
Yes, a desk job is a boring graveyard shift through the mill, with little professional interaction with the outer world. The glamour that has come to be associated with journalism these days is washed away in the sweat and grime of intellectual churning that goes into the backroom cubbyholes. The struggle to produce the best for the reader is a little known story which Roy has brought to the fore. He has driven home the point of how vital the desk role is in delivering a good product that stands out and rewards its readers for their trust reposed on it. I can’t remember reading a book that deals in such empathetic details the littlest nuances of newsmaking. Between the Lines is an interesting read also for the fact that Robin Roy has intercepted his tale of boardroom secrets with anecdotes from his experiences as a handler of the editorial responsibilities. The book is not a ‘story’ of stories, it is the hardcore truth of the game straight from the mouth of the bruised soldier manning the frontier in the cold, away from the glare of the world.
It is also a tribute to those millions of journalists, especially the desk nerds around the globe, who spend their lives painstakingly curating news poring into the words to read Between the Lines and spread the light of knowledge.