 I used to have had one of those friends in school and college who hated math, never wanted to do it and would come to you and say, please explain the two important things that will come in the exam. Please make a PowerPoint presentation for me and they had very neat handwriting. That is me and today everything that I heard in the morning just made me realize how much more cooler all of you are compared to where I was and what I ran away from. So this is thanks to our graphics team who put this together. I can't do any of this on my own. So yeah, the graphics guys put this together and I had to beg them to do it. No, actually I didn't, they were really sweet. So beginning with the talk, I'm going to talk to you about how a TV newsroom works. I'm going to look at this in three parts. First, I'm going to explain to you a basic workflow of how news is produced to what you see on air. Next, I'm going to be looking at some of the kind of errors that can possibly happen in our newsroom and how we fix them. And in the end, I'd like to take some time to talk about what are the takeaways for somebody like you who doesn't work in the newsroom. Now I'd also like to state that this is the only slide JPEG that I have. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use this space of this auditorium to explain this flow chart. So I'm going to begin from right at the back. So first we're going to start with first how the news origins. So now this flow chart here looks exactly like how our newsroom functions, which is a horizontal setup. Everybody's on the same floor, much like you guys. I know you're sitting a little elevated, but everybody's on the same floor. So there are three ways I think broadly in which you can identify how news originates. One, you can either have your reporter on the ground who's tracking a story tell you that, you know, this is happening, please reflect it. The second would be you're tracking it now on social media. Somebody is putting it up on their Twitter handle or their Facebook page. And then you take it from there. And the last one is you have a traditional news agency that's gathering the news and is feeding it into your system. Now through the course of this talk, I'm going to be using some real-time examples and the other are scenarios that we've created to be able to explain this better to you. So for this one, I'm going to use the example of how we looked at the covering of the trial's recent decision on discriminatory pricing. So this is a reporter-based story. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to be the reporter for this example. And the last three rows can be the assignment desk. Okay, the last three rows. So this is how it works. Sometime in the afternoon, I learn from, you know, the press officer at TRAI that the TRAI chairperson is going to have a press conference in the evening regarding discriminatory pricing. So I alert the channel. Now, how do I alert the channel? We typically put it on mail or we have a WhatsApp group. And the thing is, if it is not in writing, then it is not there. So it has to be on text before anything can be done in the channel. So I send a message to the team saying, hey, you know, we're going to have this press conference at about four in the evening today. So the last three rows, the assignment desk, you are responsible for communicating this to the rest of the channel internally. So now what is it that you do? In our language, you would send out an internal flash. In your language, I think it would be sending a pop up notification on every computer that is on the news floor. So what you do is you take that and then you send like a one line information saying, okay, Kamala says, TRAI is going to talk today at four o'clock on discriminatory pricing. Now everybody on the news floor, every single system is going to get that a lot. There is no way you can miss it. It's going to take up 90% of your screen. So if you have to do something, you have to read your alert, close it, and then proceed with whatever else that you're doing. Right, so this is about 12 o'clock in the afternoon at four o'clock. I'm sitting at the TRAI office and then we get a press release, which is the hard copy of the regulation that is not yet on the website. The soft copy is not gone up. So I'm looking at it and I turn the pages and I realize it's a regulation and I look at what are the news points? What is it saying? And then again, I alert my office. So now the office again, the last three rows. It is your job to make sure that what I put on mail and what I put on the WhatsApp group must reach out to everybody in office because you are responsible for that job. So once you put it out, I'm also going to say try chairperson to start speaking shortly. Now it is again, the onus is on the three rows behind to let the office know that guys, now try chairperson is going to be talking. So be ready for it because it's a story we've been tracking. So this is important news. So now once the try chairperson starts talking, so that's the call that comes from assignment, right? So you send in the information and then next three rows, you know, from where I think that I can see a lot of MacBooks. But anyway, from where I can see multiple MacBooks, the three rows behind that, you guys are the assignment desk. Now what is it that you do? You look at this flash and you say, okay, try chairperson, he's speaking at four o'clock. Is this important? Is this not important? What do we have to do? It's important. Okay, so you have a discussion, you take an editorial call and you decide this is important news, we're going to go ahead with it. And then the next three rows, you would be the rundown producers. Now what is it that the rundown producers do? Once the shift editors take an editorial call that we're going to go ahead with the story, every bulletin that we do has only certain number of minutes that we have in a show. So the person in a rundown producer is responsible for timing every news that comes in. So now the three rows there will tell the three rows in front that, okay guys, try chairperson, please slot it. It is going to happen at around four o'clock. So the person who's working on that bulletin will know that in the four o'clock bulletin, we are going to have some new elements that are going to come in, stuff that we already don't have. Then it's four o'clock, try chairperson starts speaking. Now it's a long press conference, so he begins by saying why net neutrality, why discriminatory pricing is important for this talk on net neutrality, how that's not the only thing. And then somewhere he's going to say that and then try has decided that we are not going to allow discriminatory pricing. And then he goes on to talk about a whole bunch of other things. You know, what are the emergencies? How are we going to penalize people who are going to violate this regulation? So on and so forth. Now we have a reporter who's sitting there and who's also sending updates to the office that the try chairperson just said no to discriminatory pricing. So now what is going to happen at this point is that now the news is out. The last three rows have communicated to the office, whatever I have sent. The shift editors have taken a call that is important news. They have then alerted the rundown producers who have made time for it in their bulletin that we are going to go to the try chairperson when he's speaking. Now this is all happening at the top of four o'clock. So let's say this is happening between four and four ten. Our next bulletin is going to be at around five o'clock. So now for five o'clock, we have decided that this is going to be the big story that we're going to do at the top of five o'clock. That means somebody will have to give us the key points that Aresh Sharma made in the 40 minutes that he spoke. And for some of you who still watch TV, you know the sound bite would be only 20 seconds. So now what do the rundown producers do? They are going to tell the copy editors which will be the next three rows that, okay listen, try chairperson said that note a discriminatory pricing, he said what are the emergency, what are the exceptions that they have made to that regulation and what will be the kind of penalty if somebody violates it. So now we will need these three points, get somebody to get us exactly that from the 40 minutes that Aresh Sharma spoke. So then the copy editor is going to decide to assign this work. So this is going to be the last three people here. So then the copy editor turns to you and says, okay, Aresh Sharma just spoke, one, two, three. These are the things that we need, please go and cut it. Now when we say cut it, we are referring to a long video chunk being edited to a smaller version that can be played out on TV. Now when it comes to the desk editor, the desk editor has to do two things. One, you will have to go and find that 20 seconds from that 40 minutes but then you also have a text element that you need to fill in. So what is it that you do? You go and you listen to 40 minutes. You find the exact 20 seconds that the channel wanted you to find and then you will give it to a video editor. Say these are the video editors, you're going to take it to them and say, Sir, I have found these 20 elements, 20 seconds. Chances are that he didn't speak all of this one after the other. So you have a couple of cuts, they need to be patched. So you call the video editors and say, please check it. So then they're going to find unit just for technical content. They're going to look at video, they're going to look at audio, they're going to see if it's pixelated, how they can fix it, if there needs to be a color correction that needs to be done. They will do that and then it will go to a producer. So this section here. So once the video editor checks it, the producers will then check it for editorial content. They will hear it and say, is this the 20 seconds that was assigned to you? Is this the alert that you were supposed to pick up? Did you take the person out of context? Is there a question that you needed to have? Is there more to that? So the producers here, all of you will listen to it and once you're convinced that audio is okay, video is okay, the text and content is what you wanted, you will say it's approved and then you send it. So now we all have that 20 seconds that we're looking for that Sharma made, saying no to discriminatory pricing, telling you what the exceptions to the regulation are and lastly what are the kind of penalties that will be levied upon people who are going to violate the regulation. But now your job is not over. You still have more things to do. Now if I'm watching TV for the first time, chances are I don't know who are Sharma is. I don't know where he's speaking from and if you see on TV there is a lot of text, it's not only visual stuff and a lot of people are watching TVs at places where TVs are on mute, airports, railway stations. If you look at now most of our news bulletins also are small clippings on your social media feed which you have an auto play option. So in situations like that it becomes really important that you get your text right too. So then it is your job to give text elements to it. What will be the text elements? So you will have to say name of the person, then you will have to say where he's speaking from, what is the designation, what is the authority in which this person is speaking. You will identify these three things typically and they will play out on the screen next time when you see that you can see the person's name and their designation and their location and you will also have to transcribe the 20 seconds that you have cut. So it could be very different from what the original pop-up that the last, the guys in the last show sent but it's probably the gist. So you will have to type it out verbatim so that the rest of the office knows what is in that particular byte. So then you quickly go and enter your video elements and after that the group there, the red shares to that corner behind the camera. Now you will be responsible for checking the copy of this. So you're going to look at it and say okay this person's name is Arash Sharma. Did somebody get the location wrong? Did they spell his designation correctly? Did they identify him correctly? And then you're also going to look at the text that the person on the desk put to see if it matches what you had originally asked them to cut. So this is a simple way in which things work. So after this is done your text element has been checked and your video element has been checked. So after all of this that 20 seconds that Arash Sharma said that no to discriminatory pricing is ready to go on air. Now this is a simple understanding of how each of these departments work and the roles that I have written here are a description of the major part of what they do but each role obviously has multiple layers to it depending on the situation that they're working in. Now some of you may have this question and I'm asked often is you know when Arash Sharma started speaking did you already know that he's going to say no to discriminatory pricing? And then suddenly you have explainers on TV saying what is discriminatory pricing? How is it going to affect you? If it came in the backdrop of a debate over a particular kind of product or company then you have details of this. Is all of this happening simultaneously? So the answer to that is yes and no. Now in this particular case if you remember the people sitting right at the last three rows I remember telling you at 12 o'clock that Arash Sharma is going to be speaking at 4 which means you had four hours to roughly pull something from your database which is extensive. Now there are two kinds of elements that you would pull out for a story like this. So the copy editors the group that assigned work and said you know go cut this and get me this that group will look at you know the text element of it so they will look at you know what is discriminatory pricing how is it going to work who is it going to affect will it affect you want it affect you what do you need to know about it and then you know the producers the bunch of you where are the producers I think the producers are there so yeah so the bunch of you who looked at the video content y'all are going to pull out any other footage that is relevant to it which is you know there's a team called the Save the Internet campaigners we have some footage of the Save the Internet group we have some footage of the Telcos we have some footage of Facebook Airtel we have all of these things in our system so the producers will then say okay we have four hours and if this is going to be on net neutrality or discriminatory pricing chances are that we will need all of this because it might be related so they are going to dig up things from their archives this is on a day when you have prior notice that something of this sort is going to happen this is exactly also what happens when there is breaking news where you have not prepared for it then the same thing happens but much faster so in your head you're not thinking you know I have four hours to pull out archival footage you're just thinking I have like the next 10 minutes to quickly search and by then you're prioritizing the breaking news so everything else can wait this is typically what happens in this news flow now from here I'm going to move to the second part of what I said I was going to talk about this is looking at the kind of errors there could be in the system and what are the kind of safeguards and checks and balances we have so the first kind of error that I'd like to talk about is a communication error and to explain this I'm going to the example that I'm using is a scenario that we've created to be able to explain the situation better to you now there are two things that I want all of you to imagine the example is of reporting on rescue operations from a disaster site flood earthquake building collapse bridge collapse any kind of tragedy where rescue operations are still on at that point the most important thing for us to know is are they people who need to be brought out alive and what are the agencies on the ground doing so now for this I'd like to like you to imagine two things first is what is it on the ground so there is an an officer who's heading the rescue operations who's coming to give a bite so there are a lot of press people camera people let's take a conservative estimate of this five people from English news channels five people from hindi news channels five people from regional other language news channels then that is 15 reporters and then all of them have 15 camera people and then you have journalists from trained you have news agencies international agencies and you have people who are coming in from magazines basically the point i'm trying to drive home is that there is one officer who's going to speak and there at least 40 people who are trying to get the best audio and best video output from that person who's speaking now what is the environment generally like it's like this hey hey oh red shirt sir sir sir side hojai sir camera angle nahi hai sir hey sir print wale please bed jao hey madam wrong camera mein dekh rahe this wale camera mein dekh ho uswale camera mein mad dekh ho so this is 40 people trying to do their job and one person is trying to speak and is trying to give you information on what is the latest update you have on rescue operations now this is the situation on the ground and if you want to add a little more to the kind of background noises you will hear there could be a sortie that's just brought in relief material so you have vehicle noise if there are cranes that are pulling up rubble or debris then you have that noise and going by some very disturbing trends you probably also are trying to control a mob that's taking selfies at a disaster site so all of this is also simultaneously happening that is adding to the background noise where this one officer is speaking now cut to the second part that i want you to imagine you know the people right at the back the assignment desk that is tracking news for us they are trying to put in the news flash because they're hearing it with their headphones but let's realize that they're not working in isolation they're working in a very excited newsroom everybody's working on a story you know a hard story soft story entertainment story everybody is really passionate about what they're doing so it's not calm at all it's there's a lot of energy and it's tangible the minute you walk into the newsroom you just can't ignore the fact that everybody's really excited about something that's happening or something that's not happening so the people who are listening to this man speaking now what is the environment that they are working in they are listening to this video with their headphones it's typically like listening to a youtube video and then they also have things happening around them chances are their phone is ringing somebody is constantly calling they have news alerts from other systems because they're multiple people tracking the same thing and maybe you have somebody who's just spotted that video of kevin spacey doing lungi dance and then they're like this video this video this video lungi dance lungi dance lungi dance lungi dance so you have all of this happening in the newsroom at the same time so one of the things the reason i'm stressing so much on background noises and how people are working is that people in tv newsrooms have been trained to focus on their job and keep out the distractions so at a time like this you know the person right at you know on the assignment desk who's listening to it is listening to somebody speaking in hindi is translating it to english in their head at the same time and is typing it out so that it can be a pop-up alert for the rest of the people in the office so let's say he sent out a flash saying or she sent out a flash saying 250 people rescued then it goes to this entire channel then you know shift says okay looks like the rescue operations are over can we please you know shift the focus then somebody says okay go and get us that exact 20 seconds where the relief officer is saying 250 people are rescued now all of you go and listen to it but now you're listening to it at a different time you're not transcribing it's real time it's already in the system which means you can go back and forth at that given point of time and then you also are not under the same kind of they are transcribing it real time you don't have to do it exactly at that moment but you're listening to it and then you know the the words 250 people have been rescued is only a couple of seconds it's so small that that can't be an entire sentence in itself so for two reasons you're going to listen to it because you need a bigger portion of what the person is saying so perhaps when you're listening to it you will realize that what this person is saying is not that 250 people have been rescued but 250 people are yet to be rescued so chances are that when assignment heard it with all of the background noise and the fact that you're typing real time the person must have said 200 people are rescued but they must have heard it as 200 people are rescued so when you hear it on the desk you listen to it a little more because you have the luxury of listening to it back and forth and chances are that a little later on he probably then gives like an understanding of you know what is their next plan of action how are they going to bring these 250 people or 200 people who are yet to be rescued and then you go to your producer and say hey you know our alert internally is saying that 250 people have been rescued but my sense from what I get from this bite is that people are yet to be rescued can you please listen to it then a producer will come and listen to it this is anyway part of the process so even before you edit it in terms of video and audio you're just going to the producer first to save time and then when the producer also listens to it and says okay so you know what it's not rescue you know they've not been rescued but they're yet to be rescued and then you all have the system so at this point just a quick check on the kind of numbers that we're looking at all the people who are involved in this chain would I think be a total of maybe 150 people across the country so we are looking at people on each of these desks but we're also looking at your camera persons your video journalists and video editors as well now at any given point of time when we are talking about this newsroom at max you're probably going to have 50 people 50 and the kind of reach that this has on an average is about 13 to 15 million viewers just on tv just on our our channel not on the entire network and not online so the reason this number is important is that since everybody's sitting on the same news floor it's actually just very easy for you to get up and say hey you know I've heard this bite the rescue operations are still on and then they will just re-alert the system and that error before it goes on air is already checked by the producer now the next kind of error that I want to talk about is the kind of error that is technical now this I'm going to divide it into two portions since we've already established that tv has a distinct video element to it and a distinct text element to it that errors will also be text based and video based so let's look at text based errors somebody is typing in a hurry news alert you can you mistake Osama killed and you say Obama killed okay Obama killed then they can be smaller ones where after many many years you still don't know how to spell receive you don't know where the E and I are and you're constantly switching places always to get the wrong one so now a text error like that everybody you have to remember the copy editors here for checking text when you look at when you're working on your system which is a computer you're also looking at a tv screen simultaneously so the second it says Osama killed there is no way nobody is going to notice it people don't know to the area fix karo so that is simply you will just type it again and it gets corrected on air within seconds now this is what I call a real-time error so this can be fixed real time now let's look at the other kind of error that we are talking about which is a video error now the scenario that I'd like to use here is let's say we're all dealing with footage of a blast aftermath of a blast it's coming in from an agency which means that it is likely that you're going to find dead bodies you're going to find blood and then you will have to blur this footage because you cannot have severed limbs going on air unless of course there is a situation where you have taken an editorial call that this is so bad that we have to show this to our viewers so now what typically happens is that you know again the same people on the desk who've been working on this you will pick up that footage and maybe you can see blood maybe you can see a couple of dead bodies you take it to your video editors and say please is pay blur effect dal deejay so they put the blur effect and if you're somebody like me where you've always been scared of systems the fault is always the computers it's never your fault like it's always something is going to go wrong when you're editing this kind of footage so now when you enter say the video editors put the blur effect the producer has checked it and then you have sent the footage but something happens your servers crash there is a minor error something happens I can't explain it I'm not a tech person so I don't know basically things go wrong when that happens when this video plays on air and you're talking about this blast the first couple of seconds you see that that blur effect that you put didn't actually get rendered so for the first couple of seconds you can see that there are perhaps dead bodies or there's blood on air now this is very serious and because this involves this long chain it's an error that cannot be fixed real time from your system like there is no way where you can sit on your system and say blur effect enter and it is going to automatically become blur that's not going to happen so now what is the safeguard we have against things like this the first thing that you would do is if you're talking about a story like this chances are like I said you know in the beginning we said when we spoke about that R.S. Sharma example I said that people will pull out some more relevant visuals telcos save the internet chances are that maybe there's some other visuals of this blast or maybe there is a graphic map that we're using so within seconds you pull this and then you go to alternative footage if you don't have alternative footage then you go to text you know the kind of text where you have the anchor in one window and there's text on the side where they're telling you where the blast took place when the blast took place how many people have been killed what are the kind of rescue operations who's claim responsibility for it so that is going to happen on the side let's say you don't even have text and your visuals are the only thing that you had and now there's no blur effect on this now in a situation like that you will just simply go to your anchor so on the entire screen you will have your anchor speaking and there is probably going to be text at the bottom that says you know reporting on this particular blast so many people have been killed so even in a situation like that it takes only a couple of seconds for the system to realize that this is wrong and this needs to be taken off air now the last kind of challenge that I would talk in the newsroom would be one of systems bias and the example that I'd like to use for this is you know let's say there is a building collapse in Delhi because our bureau is largely concentrated in Delhi we have enough people to respond to it a lot quicker in terms of being on the ground so somebody can go to the site somebody can go to the disaster management office somebody can go to the government to find out what have they done somebody can go and you know talk about the helplines they can get in touch with you basically have more number of people but if the same thing happened in another city let's say column you do not have the entire structure that our office has in column but because we realize that this is a systems issue the system is very quick to act so the minute we get the first flash of the day saying something of this sort has happened in another place within the next couple of minutes you have already picked up your senior editors your video journalists your reporters who probably speak the language you have booked their tickets and you know in the next one hour they're all on their way to take the next flight or you know they take the next bus train whatever is the quickest means available to them to go to that particular place you're going to travel so the systems bias is again you know if our office were in another place then that place would have a greater advantage over any other place simply in terms of travel time so column is a great example we got that alert early morning on Sunday but by evening we have had you know six people from our office three reporters three video journalists on the ground and we also roped in local agencies to help us report on that so that was very very it was it was a quick decision that was put in place so now with this i move to the third part of the talk is what is it that you can take away from our newsroom so i think the first is that if offices and i know that everybody works in different kinds of systems and offices but i think if people can identify what are real time errors and what are not real time errors it will help you prepare for a contingency plan you have a backup because you know if it's real time then we have this solution but if it is not real time then how else can we proceed from that point the second thing that you can look at and this is something we're actually looking at in terms of your text based errors is now you know we have a system where we're going to relaunch in a couple of days and now in our new systems we have auto correct so we can be sure that receive will always be spelled correctly but the Osama Obama will still depend on the person who is operating that system so chances are that if you spell receive incorrectly somebody might get irritated with you and say hey like please fix it don't be irresponsible but if you do an Osama Obama chances are that it is going to be bigger and nobody is just going to be like achha fix kardo so they want to come and they're like you know please tell us what happened and why did you confuse Osama with Obama how could this error go on air but the minute this conversation is over you will still go out with the same person and have chai so this is one of the things that we were told in the newsroom is that you're always going to disagree with people here but when you step out nothing is personal what you do in the newsroom is in the newsroom and then you go out and then you still have your chai you party with them you do whatever it is that you do with them but things remain the same and you come back into the newsroom so you don't punish people for mistakes forever you hold them accountable and then you tell them that you know you can make mistakes please go ahead and make them but don't make the same mistake again and again and the thing is because the system is so huge and complicated we'll always keep making mistakes but the thing is we learn from those mistakes and the last takeaway that i think you can take from our news channel is that you know this oh this is gone so the desk editors that we were talking about are people who maybe joined our newsroom they've just passed out of college and they have the freedom to walk up to the senior most person who's on that shift and say hey you know i know you want to blur this footage but i think we shouldn't blur it and we should show it the way it is and the thing is the senior editor will entertain that conversation nobody is going to scream at you shout at you but they're going to have a conversation if they agree with you great if they disagree with you they will tell you why they disagree with you and then that's that so i think new people who come into the system should be encouraged to talk about the kind of observations they make because somebody who's just come into a workflow is in a better place to understand how the system works because they have fresh perspective on it so with this i'd like to conclude this talk and thank you kiran and zenab for having me here hello it's not directly related to your talk it's not totally related to my talk okay directly related to your talk okay but this whole process seems very elaborate have you seen it change over the last few years to compete better with alternate sources of news so i've been with cnn ibn for four years now and i started off right at the bottom i passed out of college and joined the team and no i do do not think much has changed at all in fact i think that this is a system that works really well because it has multiple checks and balances so there is never a time when somebody is going to tell you it's okay if it is not checked just send it send it send it that is not going to happen they will be like okay you don't it is not checked we are not going to put it on air till it's not checked i can give you an example of this um you know let's take a scenario where uh there's a report that's coming in from say andhra pradesh where we know that a local mla made some misogynist statements against at a particular function and the reporter from the ground sends us the entire clipping of that particular function which is two hours long it's a different language and then we get a transcript in english that you know this is what the person said so our newsroom is again extremely multilingual so chances are you will always have somebody from that region who can translate that for you and find that bit and but at this point it's outrageous and we want to reflect that story but then suddenly you realize the person who can translate this is gone out for chai is not there maybe off that day so you don't blindly take any portion from say telugu or tamil any language Bengali marathi that you don't understand and just put an english translation on it and say this is what the person said you will then call your local reporter and say hey you know we don't have anybody to pick this from here so from that two hour function can you find the exact 20 seconds where the person said what your transcript says and resend it to us so till when it doesn't come into the system nothing is going to go on it so to answer your question no it is an elaborate process but i believe it's a process that we do with a great deal of efficiency i think it needs to stay in place i going with how our channel works i think it will remain in place the the motivation for the question is like news becomes stale very quickly and you're now competing with a larger crowd on the internet which is surfacing that news faster than you are able to do it no you know again nothing can be more important for news if it is not checked so we always take time to check our news and if that means that it was going to take a couple of more minutes there is no hesitation in doing that and then there are times when we do get it wrong i was just talking to our managing editor about this when we get it wrong there are no two ways about it no making excuses no having a hidden agenda just come out apologize and say you know we're really sorry this happened not going to happen again and take full responsibility for it hello hey let's suppose as you gave the example that uh at four o'clock for example news is planned right bulletin's plan let's suppose at 3 30 you get two breaking news so how could you prioritize that which news should be excellent question i'm really glad you asked that you know in the chart there was a team that looks at that takes editorial calls so it's not like there's one particular person who decides on this it's an extremely democratic space as i mentioned so as the news comes in you know the editorial team you know the shift editors there are multiple shift editors so they have a conversation at that point to see you know what are the kind of implications this news coming in has and based on that they're going to take a call so it is a collective decision it is a democratic this decision but we've been doing this for so long that the the process of having these discussions is inbuilt into the system so it depends really on story to story and how they're taking it forward okay so what's your role in it i have i started off as a desk editor then i worked as a copy editor and then i moved to being a reporter which is right like the origin of the news and in the process we've also worked with producers closely so i mean we interact with this entire system every day but my roles have been i've been on the desk i've done some copy and then i've done reporting okay so all right thank you i just want to ask maybe if you can explain a little bit for this audience like who are dealing with the more technical stuff like you are dealing with a lot of data like a video data especially so what is your normal way to actually transmit from a ground to the centralized location right it may go into a gbs of the data and right video how you deal with those kind of like how much time do you think or do you see like the as a it system we should provide you some more tools to improve your processes excellent question and i that's a question that i'm asked often so again i i think it's best if i explain it with an example uh let's say when the rf shatma press conference happened we did not cut to it live which means it wasn't already in the system and we recorded the whole thing so that is 40 minutes now they're typically about i would say three ways in which we send information into our system one is you know you have those big vans with like a satellite on it it's called an ob van so one is we go there and then we connect it to the camera in which we recorded stuff and then it transfers stuff real time which means you will need 40 minutes for this entire thing to go into the system it's not like uh you know copy paste it doesn't work that quickly the second thing would again be uh using what we call a live view which is which uses 3g or 4g it basically uses data to transmit stuff uh unlike the big van the constraints with this would be you need good data signal and the quality is definitely better when you send it from that big van so again when you're sending it even using this 3g 4g technology you will still have to send it real time it's it doesn't happen like copy paste doesn't work like that and then the last way of doing it is you come to office and then you give them your memory chip which is essentially like an sd card that you put it in but there's a different kind of adapter you give it to office and based on who what is available you can there when you put it on the system you can copy it and transfer it so to answer your question uh how is this transmitted these are the ways in which it's transmitted and usually when you're on the ground if it is not going live you will need real time to transfer whatever you have shot and recorded thanks a lot for the talk come light it was a really nice perspective um so my question was i'm always thinking from a programming perspective how does this scale um so or or rather let me put it under the how many people do you have in the newsroom to to keep going 24 7 live yeah so um our newsroom works broadly i think in three shifts there's a morning shift there's a evening shift and there's a night shift so typically we you're 7 to 4 3 to 11 11 to 8 and then in between you have people who come in based on their shifts uh so to answer your question i think i mentioned if you just look at this chain which is the news floor i think you probably have 50 people at a time maybe actually even lesser so that is the numbers that you're looking at you have people on assignment you have producers so even if you take say 10 10 each which is a lot of people sometimes sometimes it's a lot less than that so it wouldn't go beyond 50 so it's that many people are working to you know cater to an audience of an average of about 13 to 15 million viewers just on the channel not on the network so that's the number so if i understood correctly your answer to the one question before yes if you have a clip of 30 minutes it will take 30 minutes for you to transfer from the location to your setup correct so my question is like how big a constraint is that for you and second is does it matter let's say if the video quality is a bit less but you will get it in two minutes uh we actually don't have a situation where the video quality is really good and we get it in two seconds no no my question even if it's really bad i'm i'm trying to say that right now we don't have a situation where we can get lesser quality at a faster pace that's what you're saying that but does it help if you have it that way well see tv is a visual medium so again depending on the story firstly that option doesn't it's not available to us but you know there are some cases where maybe it is say i'm a reporter and i'm here and say something happens maybe there's a building collapse or there's a fire or there's an earthquake what i have at this point is just my phone and i'm going to shoot it on my phone but because it's coming from a reporter and depending you know then the office is going to decide on you know whether we want to use it not want to use it at that point if you have nothing else that you can use then you will use that phone footage but only and only if it is verified we do not run videos that are not verified so it really depends again on a case-to-case basis for things to uh get transferred real time is it a constraint it depends now if there is an if something happens if it's on your camera they need it urgently if it is somebody speaking then instead of sending all the 30 minutes you will send only the say one minute 40 seconds 20 seconds whatever it is that they need so that is one way in which we fix it but in another case you will just have to wait for it to go