While Tombat's ability to put forth persuasive arguments eventually convinced me to accept this task, I was determined not to remain 'stuck' with correspondents for long. There were many reasons for this. Firstly, working with correspondents invariably meant that one would end up merely re-writing their stories and would not have much time to work on my own stories. And with barely two years of journalism under my belt, there was no way I would allow my ambition be condemned to the mere restoration of correspondents' news items.
Secondly, co-ordinating with correspondents involved vast amounts of patience, as each correspondent had to be handled differently. Moreover, since most were part-time correspondents and could devote only a few hours to the profession, I could only expect them to function for a brief part of the day. Then again, these correspondents were based in different parts of the state and my interaction with them was largely dependent on telephones and other means of remote communication.
The correspondents were certainly happy to have me around, as till then their complaints seemed endless. "Our stories don't appear promptly in the newspaper and, sometimes, they don't appear at all. People in our locality then get upset and complain that we are not sending in their stories," was a commonly echoed grievance. "No one attends to our telephone calls and, when they do, they keep transferring our calls from one person to another and they finally disconnect the phone," was another general complaint.
Their complaints certainly had some degree of legitimacy.
It is a common perception — especially among English-language newspapers in the state — that correspondents are third-class passengers, who deserve little or no decent treatment. Let me cite two instances to prove this point. In one English-language newspaper, a correspondent sent me a crime report, which, under normal circumstances, should have been carried the next day. To my surprise, the report was not published for the next two days. The correspondent called me and sought an explanation for the delay. Unable to give him a suitable reply, I transferred the call to the concerned sub-editor, who simply snapped back and insisted that the correspondent need not bother about his report and, that, the report would appear only when there space was available in the paper!
Some time ago, a Vasco-based couple died in a road mishap in Porvorim and the correspondent promptly sent in the report. The next morning, I was taken aback to find the item in a single column, virtually hidden in the section for continued items on Page 4. Incidentally, the distribution of saplings by an MLA not only merited a double-column spread, but also a decent photograph — ironically, just alongside the news item reporting the tragic deaths. The sub-editor's reply, like his news sense, left me baffled. "So what? So many people die almost everyday. What was so special about these deaths?" Unfortunately, the sub-editor failed to acknowledge the fact that the same news item was prominently displayed in the other two English-language newspapers.
A former colleague once aptly described such an attitude as "'news sense' value which gets transformed into 'nuisance value'."
In most cases, those serving on the news desk in English-language papers have never worked as rural correspondents and are, hence, unable, or in some cases unwilling, to understand the intricacies of collecting and sending news items. Confined to the four walls of the newspaper office, some members of the news desk play a role similar to that of a cook in the kitchen; while rural correspondents are the waiters who have to constantly interact either with an unhappy customer or, in some cases, a satisfied customer. The news desk essentially plays a vital role in the making or breaking of a story sent by rural correspondents.
But then, the news desk is faced with pressures of a different kind, which are not always understood by rural correspondents, based as they are in remote corners of Goa, who rarely witnessed the hectic activity at the news desk, moments before the deadline. On numerous occasions, news items placed on the page had to be removed at the last moment to accommodate late advertisements. As such, rural reports, no matter how essential, simply couldn't find the space in newspaper.
Moreover, many correspondents are convinced that their news items are more important than the others, so much so that they cannot bear to find their reports delayed even by a day. Quite often, their unhappiness over the delay in printing their reports would become more vocal with each passing day and, invariably, I became their punching bag. This was largely because some of the rural correspondents are considered important members of the public in their locality and, at times, their prestige and financial gains in journalism would often be at stake with a delayed publication of their reports.