The glowing tributes that poured in after Vinod Mehta passed away on the morning of Sunday, March 8, were truly overwhelming. Virtually every newspaper and magazine across the length and breadth of India devoted considerable space to celebrate a man who was a distinguished editor for four decades of his working life. Those who knew him or worked with him were invited to share their memories. His work style, his commitment to hardnosed journalism and resistance to management pressure as well as his quirks were remembered in great depth and detail. It would not be incorrect to say that no journalist's passing away in recent times – at least in India – attracted so much media attention. In fact, Vinod, being the critical and conscientious editor that he was, might have run his blue pencil through some of the praise showered on him to spare the reader the monotony of repetition and hype.
Indeed, obituary after obituary had one common strand of thought: the last of the great editors had bid us goodbye; it was the end of an era which would perhaps never come back. Luckily, from among the welter of effusive eulogies was what Arundhati Roy wrote in a measured tone about an editor who "played such an important part in my life as a writer":
So, does the demise of Vinod Mehta signal the death of the editor in the traditional mould of objective, bold and independent – someone who stood by his or her reporters and was prepared to cock a snook at the establishment, and not crawl when asked to bend? The great hope is that this endangered species – as Vinod used to jocularly refer to those of his ilk – will not become extinct and that some variants will survive and flourish in a hostile environment dominated by market forces. An environment in which managements are increasingly seeing newspapers, magazines and TV channels as mere products and editors as nameless and subservient news processing machines who can be programmed, upgraded or replaced at will.
The business of news
The predicament and constraints that the modern-day editor in India has to either learn to live with or show the gumption to surmount is best explained by looking at the broader work philosophy of the Times of India, the world's largest English-language newspaper with a circulation of over three million. It is unarguably the trendsetter in the industry with media houses today religiously following the success mantra formulated by the group some three decades ago. It was back in 1984 that Samir Jain, the current vice chairman of Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd (BCCL), the owners of the Times of India, spelt out the redefined and 'realistic' place of news within a newspaper. Jain famously told a meeting attended by senior editors at Times House in Mumbai that "Newspapers are vehicles for carrying advertisements and news is what we fill in the gaps between the ads." This template is still followed in BCCL and many other publishing houses in India. In an October 2012 issue of the New Yorker, Vineet Jain, Samir's brother and the managing director of the company, was quoted by journalist Ken Auletta as saying "We are not in the newspaper business, we are in the advertising business… if ninety per cent of your revenues come from advertising, you're in the advertising business."