AMONG what could perhaps be called the traditionalists of journalism, one frequently hears the complaint that today’s mediamen are no longer what they used to be. They hasten to add, fairly enough, that there are excellent journalists among the younger lot, hardworking, savvy and insightful. But as one old reporter put it, they lack an indefinable something in terms of the spirit of journalism.

The gripe, as far as I have been able to pin it down, refers to what is rightly or wrongly called the Murdoch-isation of the press, and I’ve heard it voiced by old-school journalists in Pakistan as well as abroad. The criticism refers to people’s attitude towards the profession, their religio / political preferences and even their manners of dress and deportment. There was a time, say the greybeards, when journalists were canny old chameleons, equally at home among politicians, policemen or criminals. They were irreverent towards authority, unimpressed by power and as a bonus, had vast reserves of energy, curiosity and tenaciousness.

The problem with the younger generation, I’ve been told by a number of commanding old hacks as they fix me with their beady eye, is that they remain at a distance from their work, reporting on the news but not being emotionally involved. I’ve been told that “today’s youngsters are too conservative” and that from the way they look, they may as well be bankers! Suffering from the same malaise, I too have quoted in this column British journalist Francis Wheen, complaining that many of the newest entrants in the field may as well be on an ice-floe in Antarctica.

The emotion behind this complaint is fuelled by a number of fairly self-evident factors, not the least of which is nostalgia for an arguably romanticised notion of journalism in times past, particularly as epitomised by Fleet Street (where, by the way, one of the most popular watering-holes was called A Stab in the Back). Part of it could simply be the rose-tinted spectacles through which one tends to view the past and one’s own role.

However, it is possible that the very tools now used in journalism are to some extent responsible for changing it. After all, times have changed since a cut and paste job required scissors and one of the talents honed to perfection by good editors was the ability to look at a space and calculate almost exactly how many words were required to fill it.

Where once the average reporter had to leg it to the spot, for many decades he has had the option of using the telephone for subsidiary information. Back in the days, newspaper offices were hardly the air-conditioned, clean environs we are familiar with today; as a newsman who worked during the sixties and seventies described it, in his time such offices featured tottering piles of paper everywhere, towering bookcases containing reference files and documents, and a plethora of typewriters, ribbons, cartridges, paper and pens. A far cry from the tidy machine that today contains almost everything we ordinarily need to file a story, including access to encyclopaedias. An editor was once a production technician as well, no stranger to ink stains and paper cuts. Today, a keyboard command is all it takes to send everything to production and printing.

As technology changed the process of production, so it changed the nature of the beast running the show – not in essence but in appearance. Perhaps journalism has not changed all that much, which is evident from the quality work being produced by a large number of younger people. All that has changed is that it has been cleaned up and sanitised – which is, after all, irrelevant to the scoop.

hmumtaz@dawn.com