Till now, most of our TV news assignments in college have been inside the college campus. Today, we were sent for an outdoors shoot. We took the tripod and camera on bikes & got to the venue. Now here's what the story was about: the Mundhwa-Keshavnagar gram panchayat put up flexes overnight in public chowks with the names of tax defaulters given in big bold letters. In other words, they used public defamation as a means to an end. On the part of the non-payers, their justification for not paying up was that they were not getting what they were paying for: functional roads, drainage and water. Fair enough. Our point was to go find out what was happening.
Now, ignore how the story fared out; I want to get to the point of this post. What I realized was that people are willing to talk in the most dramatic ways possible to get on television. I saw the crowds gathering around the guy whose byte we needed and just posing. I've only seen that happen on TV till now and today, I saw it happen in front of me because we said that we're from an online news portal and not college students (that's a tactic used, apparently or else they don't take you seriously). I am aspiring to be a print journalist and I know that it's not at all this easy to get quotes; you really have to work hard to extract the information you need.
It's just a scary realization since I haven't really seen TV for the last 7 years (no TV in boarding school, couldn't afford it in college). If the day comes when there's no need for newspaper reporters, I'm stranded. I love writing news stories. I just don't want to imagine having to go in front of the camera and pretend.
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