On the road. In Nellore, coastal Andhra Pradesh

On Friday, March 29 we drive down from Chennai northwards. Our intention was to cover coastal Andhra Pradesh where the TDP party led by Chandra Babu Naidu runs the government.

Our first destination was Nellore.

I have been to Nellore in recent times, accompanying a researcher, D. Hemchandra Rao who studies the Buckingham Canal.

Dusk has fallen as we drive off the busy highway and into the edge of the city.

The correspondent of Deccan Chronicle English newspaper Pathiri Rajasekhar promises to meet me after 8 p.m. He has a couple of stories to file and a deadline to keep.

So we drive to the local Editorial office and printing press centre of a widely circulated Telugu newspaper, Andhra Jyothi.

All around this office are roadside carpenters who make stools, stands and altar stands from ordinary wood. There were some one dozen of them and clearly was a market for these products.

Andhra Jyothi's local manager Harikrishna was friendly. He was keen to talk to us though I asked him if we could meet one of his senior sub-editors. In Andhra Pradesh, the managerial and editorial staff at district levels seem to work closely with the local operations manager being the boss for all things.

Harikrishna, after much coaxing called for Ramakrishna, the Nellore edition in charge and we stood in the drive way to converse. 

Clearly, there was no way I would be allowed to walk up to the Newsroom even for a 15-minute conversation. Ramakrishna held his handphone all the time and often stuck his earphones to take calls. He spoke little and allowed the manager to do all the talking.

Newspapers in this state and in Telangana, the state which was carved out of the larger Andhra Pradesh after a long, fiery agitation and campaign have followed a system which one assumed was rolled out by the Big Daddy, the Eenadu newspaper.

First, cover the news at the village zone level upwards. Pack such news and visuals into tabloid pullouts. Insert those tabloids into district level editions - anywhere between 22 to 26 in all.

With Eenadu being hugely successful with this strategy, other newspapers followed this quickly.

The new form of journalism and production called for new methods of news coverage. 

That is how part-timer reporters came into being with each newspaper having over 1000 / 2000 part timers who fed the multi-editions news of deaths, accidents, water shortages and political fallouts from a cluster of villages or from different zones of a small town.

"If you want to understand how this system works and how the staff use technology you must meet our PC head," suggested manager Harikrishna, realising he had given me close to 30 minutes and his Edition Head was being kept away from the busy desk that night!