As India becomes a big story, Indian editors take centre stage

New Delhi: For large and influential Western publications, which have sometimes been charged with reducing India into clichés and generalizations, the country seems to have become more of a priority in their international coverage.

A steadily rising number of foreign correspondents are landing in India every year, even as their publications, limited by tighter budgets, are cutting staff and closing bureaus in erstwhile hot spots of international interest.

Coincidentally, at four important American publications, the foreign editor is now a journalist of Indian origin.

Newsweek named Nisid Hajari foreign editor in December 2006, while rival Time magazine named Aparisim Bobby Ghosh as world editor in September 2007. At Fortune, published by Time Inc., Stephanie Mehta became global editor in January, while The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) named Nikhil Deogun as the international editor in June. WSJ has an exclusive content partnership in India with Mint.

Fareed Zakaria, the high-profile international affairs commentator, has been the editor of Newsweek’s international editions since 2000.

At one level, these appointments represent increasing diversity in the top echelons of American journalism. At Time, Ghosh is the first non-American foreign editor in 85 years. That is the case at the 119-year old Journal as well, though technically, the India-born Deogun has been an American citizen for a few years now.

“I think it’s a wonderful sign of how much has changed in the world of American journalism. The idea of opening up the foreign editor to folks with actual foreign connections is just what the media needs,” said Sreenath Sreenivasan, a professor of new media at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He also co-founded the South Asian Journalists Association, a resource centre and networking platform. For these publications, a rising Indian audience on the Web and a rising interest about India from their home audience mean they have to invest in content from India. “In the paper you are going to see more coverage of India, which will entirely be in line with our increased international content. But on WSJ.com, you are going to see a lot more of India coverage than the past,” said Robert Thomson, who was recently named managing editor at the Journal.

When he was editing The Times in London, in many months, the largest numbers of visitors to that newspaper’s website, country-wise, would come from India, he said. “That’s going to be the case for WSJ.com as well. So we have to provide more India-relevant content,” Thomson added. The Journal recently added four pages mostly dedicated to international coverage.

“We put aside $6 million (Rs25.8 crore) to produce these four pages annually. Earlier, in our news section, there would be maybe two international stories. We thought that didn’t do justice to our readers’ appetite for international news,” he said.