If “jetlag” can prevent a mighty editor from noticing that a tiger has slept with a tornado and their baby has married an earthquake in the “Indian State of Tamil Nadu”, what must it be for lesser editors* in other Indian states?
Pradyuman Maheshwari, the group chief editor of the industry journal Impact (owned by the exchange4media group), describes a day in the life of an editor in Bombay on the day he has to, well, write an editorial:
“A typical Friday: an early-morning alarm to ensure that the daughter gets up on time. Boil the milk, get her dabba ready, drop her off to school, return, look up the notice board in the building to see if there are any important notices, read the papers, see if there have been any misses, check mail, make a few calls, go for a walk, some stretches and crunches, chat with editor over a painful exchange of messages with a media biggie, shower, 90 minutes in traffic, get to work, some people not in, a colleague down with malaria so a story can’t go this week, several calls, pesky PR executives, some friendly ones too, credit-card DSAs, more DSAs, car loan, property sale, meetings, brief colleague on a story, send off important mails, plan Diwali chhutti, make an important call, push a meeting by a day, check on content for a feature… the day goes on.
“And in the midst of all of this, write the edit.
“Wish I could have it ghostwriten… can I get the able assistant editor to do it for me this week? Can I just get something interesting written somewhere, copy-paste here and just add a comment or two? Can I pull out my book of quotes and pepper the edit with these? Or just look at my ten best quotes for the day?
“Life’s a bitch. Home-traffic-meetings-office-meetings-calls-traffic-office-meetings-lunch-coffee-meetings-traffic-dinner-traffic-home-homework-TV-sleep. Well, it’s quite a jetlagged existence to borrow from something I read in another edit recently.
“So how do I write the Impact editorial for this week? Do I pick up stuff about a subject that’s been written about from another source? Well, as the editor of this publication, the least I must do is spend a few minutes and connect with you via a few hundred-odd words. If I had wanted to, I could’ve asked for an edit not to be part of the magazine grid with an excuse of ‘who reads them anyway’ or whatever.
“But no way will my edit be ghostwritten, and if it is written by someone else, then it will bear his or her name….”
*Disclosures apply!
Also read: The editorial
IJR 