Today, a television report can move from a phone or camera to an editor, a newsroom system and a viewer within minutes. In the early 1990s, the problem was more basic. We could produce a strong story, record it on videotape and then face the question that now sounds almost unbelievable: how would the programme reach its audience?

I was then a budding journalist at Eyewitness, a video newsmagazine. The programme was produced at a high standard, but India did not have the distribution choices that later became normal. The original version was recorded on tapes and distributed. The story could be ready. The physical programme still had to travel.

Karan Thapar's profile on the ITV website supplies the public outline of that history. It says he returned to India in 1991 and helped establish H.T. Vision Limited. Its flagship, Eyewitness, began as a video magazine and later moved to Doordarshan as a weekly programme. The profile lists interviews with leading political figures, war-front reporting from Afghanistan and reports from Kashmir among the programme's work.

For those of us inside it, the history did not arrive with a label. We were trying to make the next programme.

The discipline of a programme that had to be finished

A physical format imposed a particular discipline. A story could not be endlessly updated after distribution. The script, pictures, sound and edit had to work together as a finished piece. A weak sequence could not be rescued by a stream of updates on a website. A missing fact could not be quietly inserted for the next viewer.

The reporter still had to find the right angle. The cameraman still had to make every frame count. The producer still had to ask whether the sound bite advanced the story. Names, captions and facts had to be correct. If a mistake went out, the mistake travelled with the programme.

A twenty-minute assignment I never forgot

One assignment from that period has remained with me. I was asked to escort Dr Manmohan Singh, then the Finance Minister, from his residence to the studio for an interview with Karan Thapar.

I took the office car to Dr Singh's residence with a mental script prepared. I had not met anybody as important until then and expected, at best, a short formal exchange. Instead, Dr Singh suggested that I travel in his car. A security person was already in the back seat, but he made room for me.

The journey took about twenty minutes. I was unprepared to be sitting beside one of the most important men in the country. Dr Singh made the situation easier by asking about my background. We moved on to the economy and some of the political conundrums of the time. There was serious conversation and there was laughter.

What stayed with me was the manner in which he explained the economy. He spoke like a professional explaining a difficult problem, not like a politician delivering a slogan. I remember him waving as he entered the studio.

The public record confirms the setting. The Prime Minister's Office biography records that Dr Singh was Finance Minister from 1991 to 1996. It credits those years with a major programme of economic reforms. My memory is smaller: a car, limited space in the back seat, a nervous young journalist and a senior minister who chose to put him at ease.

Small memories often tell us something that official biographies cannot.

What changed, and what did not

The route from camera to viewer has been transformed. A story no longer needs to wait for a tape to be distributed or a weekly slot to open. A reporter can go live from almost anywhere. Archive pictures can be found without walking into a physical library. The audience can respond before the bulletin has ended.

Speed has solved many old problems and created new ones. When a programme was a finished object, there was a natural point at which the newsroom had to stop and check it. A continuous news operation has no such comfortable pause. The pressure is to publish now and correct later.

That is why the old disciplines still matter. Follow video grammar. Check names. Know what the pictures prove. Do not use speed to excuse inaccuracy. A new tool can change production; it cannot take responsibility for the story.

There is another lesson in the journey of Eyewitness. Journalism grows when somebody works within the limits of the available medium instead of waiting for perfect conditions. The original distribution problem was real. The response was to make the programme, put it on videotape and find a way to take it to viewers. Later, it found a weekly place on Doordarshan.

I look back at that period with pride, but also with perspective. We were not thinking each morning about laying the foundation of Indian television journalism. We were thinking about the next story and how to get it right.

That is usually how a new chapter in journalism begins.

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