Reporting and Editing II: Editing and Presentation for Print, Television and Digital Media; Journalism as a Profession; Reportage of Contemporary Issues and the Ethics of Reporting; the Critique of Western News Values and New Technology in Global Flows; and Niche Reporting

A television newsroom divides into input, the assignment desk that plans coverage and dispatches reporters and camera crews, and output, where producers build bulletins. The rundown is the running order of a bulletin, with each item's format and duration. Formats include the anchor read or reader (the presenter alone), the voice-over (VO, the anchor reads over pictures), VO-SOT (voice-over followed by sound on tape, a sound bite), the package (a reporter's self-contained edited story with narration, interviews and a PTC), the live or outside broadcast, and the phono (a reporter on the telephone). The production control room (PCR) switches cameras, graphics and sources; the teleprompter displays the script; lower-third captions (astons) identify speakers and tickers carry headlines along the bottom of the screen.

Digital editing happens in a content management system and never quite ends. The editor writes a headline that works for readers and search engines, adds metadata, tags, a summary and links, embeds video, documents and social posts, schedules push alerts, and updates the story as facts develop, noting substantial changes. Many sites test two headlines against each other (A/B testing) and watch analytics, which creates a pressure towards clickbait that ethical desks resist. Verification is now a core editing skill: checking whether a photograph or video is old or from elsewhere by reverse image search, reading metadata, geolocating images against maps, and confirming claims with more than one independent source before publishing. A clear corrections policy, with corrections visible and dated, is part of presentation.

Journalism has some marks of a profession, a body of skills, codes of ethics, training and an ideal of public service, but lacks others: there is no licence to practise and no body that can bar a person from it, which in a democracy is deliberate, since licensing journalists would let the state decide who may report. In India working journalists are protected by the labour law discussed in Chapter 13, are organised in unions such as the Indian Federation of Working Journalists (1950), and increasingly work on contracts; the rise of freelancing and digital start-ups has made pay and security uneven.

Reporting contemporary issues calls for special care. On communal violence the Press Council's norms caution against identifying the communities involved in a way that can inflame, and against unverified casualty figures. On terrorism and security operations, live coverage that reveals positions can endanger lives, a lesson Indian broadcasters drew after the Mumbai attacks of November 2008. On sexual offences, the law forbids disclosing the identity of the victim: section 72 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023, which replaced section 228A of the Indian Penal Code, punishes it. On children, the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2015 and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act 2012 forbid disclosing the identity of the children they protect. On suicide, responsible-reporting guidelines based on WHO recommendations discourage detailing the method. On elections, the Press Council's 2010 report on paid news documented the sale of news coverage to candidates, and the Election Commission monitors it through media certification and monitoring committees.

The ethics of reporting rest on a few principles found in every code: seek and report the truth accurately; be fair, giving people criticised a chance to respond; attribute information and protect confidential sources; respect privacy unless a genuine public interest outweighs it; avoid conflicts of interest and refuse gifts that buy coverage; minimise harm, especially to the vulnerable; distinguish news from opinion and advertising; and correct errors promptly. Hidden cameras and sting operations are defensible only when the information is of serious public interest and cannot be obtained openly. Chapter 14 sets out the formal codes of the Press Council and the broadcasters' self-regulatory bodies.

The critique of Western news values holds that the factors Galtung and Ruge identified, elite nations, elite persons, negativity and unexpectedness, systematically distort the picture of the developing world. The global South appeared in Western media mainly through disasters, wars and coups, a pattern the American correspondent Mort Rosenblum named in the title of his book Coups and Earthquakes (1979). The Non-Aligned countries argued that because four Western agencies, AP, UPI, Reuters and AFP, supplied most international news, the South saw even itself through Northern eyes. The responses were the call for a New World Information and Communication Order and the MacBride report (1980), the Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool (1976), regional agencies, and development journalism as promoted by the Press Foundation of Asia and its Depthnews service from the late 1960s, which reported processes of change rather than isolated events.

New technology changed the flows without ending the imbalance. Satellite television made live global coverage possible; CNN's reporting of the Gulf War in 1991 gave rise to talk of a "CNN effect", the claim that real-time images push governments into foreign-policy responses. New non-Western broadcasters, such as Al Jazeera (1996), and international channels from China, Russia and India, produced contra-flows. The internet and social media let citizens report directly and let diasporas follow home news, but they also concentrated distribution in a few platform companies whose algorithms now decide much of what the world sees, and they carried misinformation across borders at speed. The critique of news values therefore now extends to algorithmic values: engagement, virality and personalisation.

Niche or specialised reporting covers a subject area in depth for a general or specialist audience, and each niche has its own knowledge, sources, vocabulary and legal traps. The niche reporter's value is judgement: knowing which press release is routine and which is significant, and explaining a technical subject accurately without either jargon or distortion. Specialist media, from business dailies to science websites, are also called niche media.