The stringers did not enjoy the same terms of employment as regular employees, or the social net. Many of them, it is believed, are “contributors” reporting for the local supplements who were paid on a per-story basis. The gossipy Telugu website reports that, with COVID resulting in a severe financial advertising and circulation squeeze for all media houses, Eenadu has let go off nearly a 1,000 employees. Thanks to COVID, the supplements-and the stringers-are gone.
Much of the content for these tabloid supplements was generated by local stringers, for whom “journalism was not the primary avocation”. The supplement-12-16 pages in most centres 32 pages in cities like Hyderabad-came as an add-on to the main broadsheet paper, and covered local events in a manner never before done in Indian journalism. Rama Rao’s Telugu Desam Party, had a tabloid supplement for every district, city, and centre it published from.
The newspaper, which played a stellar role in the emergence of a non-Congress opposition in Andhra Pradesh through its undisguised promotion of N.T. Eenadu, the influential Telugu newspaper which pioneered hyper-local journalism before anybody in the country had even heard of the term, has shut down its local supplements and let go of hundreds of stringers who were reporting for it, as the shadow of COVID grows darker over India’s print media industry.
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