“Most reporters who do not handle a health beat or civic stories have been advised to work from home. But, I am a sub-editor also apart from being a feature writer. I have to edit the everyday incoming stories and I prefer working from the office too. Initially, I was not much bothered about the situation around me because, firstly, I have my private transportation, so I knew that was quite safe. Unlike all the reporters, I have to go from home to office and vice versa. The only thing that concerned me was to work alongside a lot of people in the office. Eventually, the crowd wasn’t there. A lot of them were asked to work from home,” she said.
“Working from home is very hard for me and I always prefer working from the office because when at home, the scenario and the timings are different. We would usually have a set routine while at work but this changes when at home. There are multiple distractions and concentration is a challenge. So as a part of the edit team, I was glad to go to office. The company also took all the necessary steps to disinfect the place and made sanitizers available. Also, an awareness about social distancing prevailed. The number of people coming in reduced, so we didn’t feel like we were crammed in a place,” she added.
“What got difficult for the reporters was that the churning out of stories got quite hard. They were getting their stories but they ultimately reached their saturation. We also utilised this time in our edit room to discuss different concepts, ideologies, how we could make our page and our stories different, what change could be brought, so on and so forth. Considering the current situation, we started exploring new story ideas. Most of our stories surround the COVID-19 but we wanted to bring out stories of hope amid all the rise in the death toll numbers and active cases increasing. Our aim was to brim with positivity as a paper. People are going through a lot of negativity so we took the initiative to keep up the positivity in our readers and us,” she stated.
“I have been quite anxious considering all the news that surrounds me. But as a journalist, more than me, the health beat reporters are going through a lot. But even for me, my work comes under the essential services category and that puts me in a place of responsibility. But it makes me feel good about myself, that responsibility given to me. People may or may not read the papers, vendors may or may not distribute the papers but the production will go on and that makes me glad,” concludes the confident journalist.
