News: from issues to stories

The sole purpose of TERI Newswire is to supply news on energy and the environment, focusing on India. We do this by selecting news items from all the main dailies published from 11 cities in India. As we have been doing this for nearly 8 years, it might not be out of place to reflect broadly on what is news beyond the old chestnuts about a man biting a dog being news (but not a dog biting a man) and about the word representing the four directions, namely the north, the east, the west, and the south. Despite their claims to objectivity, newspapers are far from objective-they cannot be, in as much as they are forced to select what they publish given the constraints of time and space. And most of the time, they select out of what is available from the stories filed by their correspondents, who are in turn constrained by the limits of their resources of time, access, contacts, language, prior knowledge, and so on. A correspondent cannot be at two places at the same time; may well have better contacts in one place than in another; may know one subject better than another; and so on-and the stories he files, therefore, are likely to be different from what she files. If correspondents are directed to cover certain stories, then it again represents the choices made by their superiors, for whatever reasons. The argument so far is that there are potential news items 'out there' and that selecting some out of many of these brings in an element of subjectivity. But news is not just so many pebbles on a beach: rather, it is castles built in sand to stretch the analogy a little-the act of writing up a news story creates one. This, then, is the origin of the sort of stories that go on to make up TERI Newswire, and the mixture that we come up with each fortnight is what our readers seem to like-at least they are not complaining.