Don't colour your news reports!

Journalism schools- mass communication in today’s parlance- add ‘c’ in addition to 5 Ws and 1H that form the building blocks of a news story while teaching ‘news reporting and writing’. There is need to add ‘colour’ to the news story after getting the basics i.e. who, what, where, when, why and how.

One of the crisis that today’s mass media faces is because of this ‘c’. Excess use of ‘colour’- bordering on blatant lies- that is making the ‘news’ today mostly murky and toxic, like the highly polluted air of Delhi.

One of the often asked quizzes used to be what is in black and white but is always re(a)d. News always used to be a simple black and white matter, like the good old b and w photographs still in our albums. No manipulation, no plying around with the emotions of the readers. Simple, plain projection of facts in a readable format, hence called a news ‘story’.

Sensational journalism is not recent invention but its dose never was toxic and pervasive.

The term ‘yellow’ journalism originated in the US. The term was coined in the mid-1890s to characterize the sensational journalism that used some yellow ink in the circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer's (the Pulitzer prize is named after him) New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal.

There is no yellow ink in the print media today but lots of sensationalism. Colours have their own role to play in mass media. ‘Blue’ would denote porn. Everybody knows pink papers.

Life is full of colours. One only has to be careful using colours that are harmful and blinding.