At the time of writing, “people editors,” ordinary folks like us who create a “trend” on Twitter, have forced Fareed Zakaria to the top of the India feed. Curiously, and not-so-curiously as well, Zakaria is no longer on Twitter’s US trending list. He isn’t even on the city-specific list for Washington, presumably Yankee-land’s most politically-literate city. Zakaria is missing from the UK list too.
Lesson 1: Beware! We, the Indian tweeps, are just as wiredto a global story. If we were quick to rejoice, claiming this former Mumbaikarjust for being this year’s commencement day speaker at Harvard; we’ll now shredhim just as quickly, now that he’s caught with his hand in the cookie jar.Sure, we would have let a lesser journalist get away with worse. But Zakaria!No way. [Or you, for that matter, our desi suspects, spoiling our week nightswith the cocktail of Manish Tewari and Suhel Seth].
Lesson 2: Beware! With twitter under our thumbs, it’s hardnow to deny ourselves the pleasure of writing your professional epitaph in 120characters. And, btw, this imposter called “balance” doesn’t fit in this sortof space count. Zakaria is, without doubt, India’s best known journalisticexport (Hopefully, Raju Narisetti of the Washington Post is happy to make wayhere). Zakaria certainly is the only one who has a Harvard PhD, a Yale degree,and editorships at Foreign Affairs, Newsweek and Time in his CV.
Lesson 3: We like journalistic jealousy. It’s confirms whatwe suspected all this while. That the only difference between you and us isn’tintellect. It’s just about who has the platform! NB: Our’s, ie, twitter, potentially at least,is a hundred times bigger.
Lesson 4: We don’t like holy cows any way. If we can bringdown Obama and Oprah; Anna or Sonia. Can Zakaria (or Orknob Goswami or ShriSardesai) expect any better?
Lesson 5: Beware, also, the editor spreading himself alittle thin. Zakaria was! Even for a supremely talented writer, we thought hewas writing too many columns, speaking at too many public functions, engagingtoo much in the social media, giving too much gyan to Presidents and Popes (notto mention Columbia Journalism Review’s input that what really kept him busywere cheques of $75,000 apiece for speaking to Baker Capital, CattertonPartners, Driehaus Capital Management, ING, Merrill Lynch, Oak InvestmentPartners, Charles Schwab, and T. Rowe Price.)
This to us leaves very little doubt that some very talentedseconds were doing the donkey’s work. Just this time, they used the ^C^V optionmuch too blatantly. We doubt, therefore, if Zakaria any longer read every wordof what went under his name. And even if he did read every word, he was far toooften on television.
Lesson 6: Whoever is pontificating to us via TV, needs to bebrought back to earth. This dishonest juggle, we know, is true for some Indianeditors. Here’s how it did for good old Dr Zakaria.
The good doctor reads The New Yorker, and (perhaps)cut-pastes it in a file. Some days or weeks later, he sits down to write hiscolumn in Time on the same topic, ie, gun control. Amidst a dozen $75-kdistractions in between, he forgets that what’s showing up on his screen isn’this own writing, but Harvard professor Jill Lepore's lengthy piece from The NewYorker’s April edition! Minus the social media this might have passed. Butmedia watchdog group Newsbusters (alerted by media blogger Jim Romenesko)aren’t nice guys at all! They x-ray the paragraph from Zakaria's "The Casefor Gun Control," from Time's August 20 issue. To their delight, this is a^C^V of Prof Lepore's "Battleground America," which ran in The NewYorker.
Lesson 7: Straight lifts like the one above are suicidal.Nothing should have stopped Zakaria from attributing to two sources. Only inthe pre-internet days would a reporter or columnist try to write an “exclusive”quoting nobody, generate mystery where none existed and get away! Silly, ifZakaria was trying such a dated trick, when he could have simply used hisprodigious talents to say Winkler’s facts differently.
Lesson 8: Cite every source you have touched. It won’t makeyou look very clever, but besides not being shreded on Twitter, curation siteslike storify.com might even get you automatic traction from the originalauthor’s twitter!
Lesson 9: Finally, welcome to global benchmarks where folkslike Time expect you not even to quote yourself. So does The New Yorker itself.They just fired columnist Jonah Lehrer for it. The way to stay on tracktherefore is never to copy paste. With “rogues” like us, ably assisted by spoilsports like Romenesko and Newsbusters, Indian writers including one with 1.4million follows are vulnerable as never before.
Lesson 10: This is more of a tip, a decent technique sharedby Rajesh Kalra, The Times of India’s man for digital content. Rajesh reads andlistens and thinks, but writes his “Random Access” only at the eleventh hour,basically when it just can’t be postponed. That’s when he sits down and writesin, say, 5-10 minutes, whatever his brain has organised, processed andremembered. It apparently works. If only Zakaria knew. Or at least his secondsand those ghost-writing for our own Zakaria-wannabe’s did.
Rohit Bansal is CEO of India Strategy Group,Hammurabi and Solomon Consulting, an HBS alum, and a student of Indiangovernance
