News In The Making

About the Book

One day I came to the office after a much-needed weekly break, only to be immediately summoned to the owner-cum-editor’s office. The boss was fuming. “Why was the paper late yesterday?” he roared. I had by then become aware that it was late but could not have done much as I was not on duty. I had been informed of it by the personnel handling the printing press, by which time it was too late to do anything about it. I told the boss this and that I would find out the root cause and deal with it, also promising him that it would not recur.

That did little to soothe his temper. “Do you know that we missed giving a lot of our readers this morning’s paper? The production was delayed so much that we missed the train.”

There was nothing much for me to say or do at the moment, but to vow to myself to not only find the root cause but also give my colleagues a piece of my mind as they clearly had no regard for deadlines. 

Why are deadlines important? 

How should a reporter treat allegations such as those about the government using Pegasus software to spy on citizens? 

What does a desk hand do when faced with a copy that has all the facts but is not interesting? These are just three of the many questions that ‘News in the Making’ answers even as it tells readers about the various aspects of journalism.

About the author

Premangshu Ray is a journalist par excellence with more than 30 years of compelling work with the Fourth Estate. The spark was conspicuous when, just a year after completing a journalism course, Ray wrote an article on the homeless that led to shelters being built overnight for them. A Bengali foodie, Ray also wrote on cinema and, along the way, interviewed eminent authors and personalities from across the spectrum.

Over the years, Ray has donned many hats in a newsroom and worked for a variety of media houses in India and abroad. He is now the Executive Editor of The Free Press Journal and lives in Mumbai.

A graduate of Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, Ray spends much of the little leisure time that he manages tracing the origins of words and phrases. His love for etymology helps him stay a cut above his contemporaries because as Benjamin Franklin put it and Ray agrees, one should “either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”