Editing Like a Woman
by Lucinda Nelson Dhavan
When I started working at a daily newspaper here in India, they didn't even have a toilet for women. This seemed particularly odd, since they had a few female employees. Of course, they probably expected the women on the cleaning staff to use some dim facilities out back that we didn't know about—or, as is distressingly common in small-city India, the roadside.
I never did find out how the woman in the advertising department handled this dilemma, but another woman on the editorial staff told me she took over Market News mainly because it gave her a chance to leave the office and go.
Does "Market News" sound very high-profile and expert? It wasn't in those days. The section included the weekly update on the price of a dozen kinds of lentils, rice, and a basketful of vegetables in the local bazaars. She couldn't tell one lentil from another, to say nothing of the numerous types of rice. She was unmarried, lived at home, and never cooked. She barely even ate. The management, however, decided that this was something that a female journalist could do.
The men in management were extremely slow learners in this matter because there were already outstanding women reporters in Delhi and other metropolitan news centers. This was in Allahabad, a quiet town where things changed more slowly. There was still a feeling that women couldn't really report since they would be afraid of moving around alone and going out after dark.
Besides, the male reporters had a good thing going for themselves. They were the face of the paper. Officials who kept the common man waiting agreed to meet male reporters promptly. Policemen and shopkeepers recognized them. They knew politicians and other "important" people who could help them with railway reservations or school admissions or a cooking gas cylinder, even when these things were in short supply.
Such connections would have been very helpful in writing investigative stories, but the reporters seldom used these valuable sources for such dull work. The mainstay of their reporting efforts was the press conference. They'd go, eat snacks, drink tea, and collect the press kit. They would then edit the press statement, and that was their report for the day.
They covered public meetings if an important politician came to town, especially during an election campaign, to get a little face time with the VIP, and sometimes they brought back photographs to prove it.
Small time politicians didn't expect reporters to actually attend. They brought handouts to the office, where the reporter would cut the matter down or let it go, depending on how he felt about the person and how much space needed to be filled. Of course, the public never had a clue if the reported "Public Meeting" really happened, whether five hundred people had attended or two guys sat around a table at the coffee house and wrote a report of a speech that had been delivered only in their imaginations.
Social workers, artists, drama clubs, and musicians usually got short shrift, unless a reporter's cousin was in a play, or his aunt was putting on an evening of devotional music. Reporters considered Rotary and Lions clubs a dead bore, unless a reporter's dog won first prize in the Rotary-sponsored dog show.
On a day-to-day basis, the reporters considered such reports faltu—a lovely Hindi word meaning "useless," "superfluous," or "unlikely to lead to benefit." They were happy to turn the faltu subjects over to a woman.
They didn't hire me to cover faltu material but to correct the English. Since the staff was hired largely on a who-you-know rather than a what-you-know basis, the grammar was a little shaky. At first, I marked the mistakes in the paper as an experiment. The staff hated my red scrawls across the pages. I hated myself, but it took a long time to persuade the editor that writers were not purposefully making mistakes. When this realization dawned, he sent me to the desk to remove obvious errors from the copy before it went to press.
The management decided, without even asking, that it was time to install a Women's restroom. As the guys at the desk saw the sign go up, they began to wonder if I might be there to stay.
Do women have a particularly inclusive style of working? I don't think the business gurus have made up their mind on this. When I began editing reports, I found great stories lurking between the lines. The editorial desk gentlemen had always kept junior reporters at a distance—after all, the editorial staff had to assert their authority to cut or throw away stories that weren't good enough. I found some reporters responded well to suggestions—they weren't averse to asking more questions or collecting more information. No one had ever volunteered to translate even the most interesting stories filed by the reporters on our sister paper, in Hindi—after all, the English edition was the paper of record, the respectable one. The Hindi paper was, well, spicier.
I didn't mind translating. I didn't mind talking with other editorial staff or proofreaders or whomever else about stories they might want to develop. Members of the public even began tracking down female staff members to give us ideas—civic complaints, interesting personalities, endangered local heritage, groundbreaking research at the university, malpractices in a local hospital. Ideas kept flowing and we welcomed them all.
Other women joined the team, and when the family that managed the paper gave some editorial authority to female family members in the head office, it felt like a golden age. It had become the kind of local newspaper where any member of the public could bring a story idea and expect to be heard. Reports were honest and double-checked, and reporters could look forward to seeing their byline on solid work. The arts and other "soft" subjects found a place.
We edited like women. We edited like the professional journalists that we were.
It couldn't last. At heart, it was a family business. The patriarch, a fine gentleman who headed a large family with its own financial problems, occasionally visited the office. We'd hear his cane tapping along the hallway and his voice piping snatches of poetic song in the chief editor's room. Day-to-day management changed hands once, then again, and payment of salaries faltered. Even women who had benefited from the generous gift of front page bylines began thinking of how to move onward and upward to a paper offering better pay. They began thinking about career, not just a job. It was a sad experience, in the end, to see the team unravel. It was the same old story, in a way: if work was given to women, the work got done. But unless the power was in the right hands, work alone was not enough.
Does this idea translate from one small newspaper office to the wider world? I'm not sure. I'm watching with hope the many places in India where elected women now run village councils and civic bodies to see if maybe there's even such a thing as governing like a woman—honestly, kindly, with a maternal affection. Wouldn't it be nice?
BIO: Lucinda Nelson Dhavan first went to India on a Fulbright Foundation grant, immediately after graduating from College. She's still there. After several years on the staff of a regional newspaper, she feels she may have learned enough to write fiction. She is polishing a collection of short stories and working on a novel. Contact Lucinda at: ldhavan@yahoo.co.in