How Deepayan Chatterjee Transformed The Telegraph And Us

Deepayan Chatterjee, who transformed The Telegraph in the late 1990s and produced some of the most breathtaking news pages in India from 1997 to 2006 as the deputy editor in charge of news and played a key advisory role until 2016 when he retired, passed on March 3, 2025.

Among the several journalists Deepayan mentored were R. Rajagopal, who trained under him for 24 years before becoming the editor of The Telegraph, and Harshita Kalyan, who headed the newsroom as deputy editor of The Telegraph. Harshita shares a rare coincidence in English media with Chatterjee: both started out their careers as trainees in the ABP Group, which publishes The Telegraph, and rose to leadership positions without breaking their ties with the newspaper in spite of offers from elsewhere.

The following is a four-part series on an exchange between Rajagopal and Harshita on what they learnt from Chatterjee and the relevance of the lessons for journalism now.

For the sake of convenience, the tribute has been split it into multiple sections such as The Transformation, Rewriting, Headlines, Layout, A Wrong Call, Our Home, Apology, Rut of History, DC, The Review, Biscuit Girl, The Mentor and Big Lessons. The first part deals with the transformation and rewriting.

The Transformation

Rajagopal: Harshita, I think I will skip the parts about Deepayanda being tall and handsome, my personal relationship with him and the numerous ways in which he helped my family and ensured that I love Calcutta more than my hometown. I would like to focus on his role as a journalist. In deference to one of his first decisions in The Telegraph to drop colonial titles and honorifics before names (Mr and Mrs etc), I would like to refer to him as Deepayan in the rest of our conversation.

My earliest memory of him is his elegance, which he managed to transfer to his craft too. In hindsight, I think many of the pages he produced were a reflection, if not an extension, of his persona. You will recall the Biscuit Girl page that marked the New Year after the tsunami. I think it still stands as the most elegant page I have seen in Indian journalism in my time. We will discuss this page in detail later.

I think Deepayan imperceptibly brought in fundamental changes to the newsroom. Harshita, who had already spent two years in The Telegraph when I joined the newspaper in 1996, is better qualified to underscore the contrast and discuss the changes, which were not enforced through decree but which rubbed off on the newsroom because of the way Deepayan conducted himself and treated his colleagues.

Harshita: Thank you, Raja. I had joined The Telegraph as a trainee at the same time as three other women. Our contracts mentioned a two-year apprenticeship, but it was common for trainees to be confirmed as sub-editors in a year. A couple of weeks short of a year, I was confirmed. The senior colleague who handed me the confirmation letter told me not to mention it to the others because they were not getting theirs just yet. They found out anyway, and confronted him. He feigned ignorance, said he was surprised by the “slip” and promised the letters would come soon. This was days after he had delivered a small speech to me on how I had been picked for early confirmation because of my work, and how the others would have to wait the stipulated two years.

The following year, when a raise was announced, I learnt on the night drop home that I had got a smaller increase than a colleague whose edited copy I was often asked to re-sub. I came back the next day, pointed this out to my chief sub-editor and said I would resign. He spoke to the same senior colleague who had given me the confirmation letter, who once again feigned ignorance and insisted this was a “mistake” that would be corrected.

Both times, the “correction” was made. An early lesson The Telegraph newsroom taught you was: Don’t trust.

Last year, the death of the Mumbai journalist and our former colleague Satish Nandgaonkar briefly brought attention to toxicity in the workplace. It also took me back in time. Among the four of us who had joined The Telegraph together, one had taught in a college before she made the shift to journalism. One day, we watched in shock as she had her edited copy flung back at her by the news editor who told her she needed to go back to nursery to learn English. Our seniors said this was nothing, and that in the past sub-editors would break down in the newsroom regularly. Expletives were thrown around casually and the logbook could be used to name and shame people for small mistakes.

The newsroom was also a deeply divided place, with chief sub-editors who tried to pull each other down, a senior who played favourites among them, and a deputy editor who was a decent man but who appeared to keep his hands off. The deputy editor would leave in the evening after drawing the Page 1 dummy. The news editor would follow soon after. I don’t know what happened before I joined the newspaper but the editing I witnessed only meant correcting grammar and spellings and basic fact-checking, so even the junior-most sub-editors got to handle front page copy, which went into the paper almost as we had submitted it. It was into this mess that Rajagopal arrived as joint news editor in 1996.

By this time, I had already had enough and wanted out. On a visit to Delhi, I went to The Telegraph office to meet colleagues there. I was early and among the few people present was Sankarshan Thakur, whom I knew because he had been based in Calcutta earlier and who is now the paper’s editor. As we talked, I told him I was thinking of leaving. His response was: “Hang in there for some time. The new guy is good.” He meant Rajagopal.

Deepayan joined The Telegraph months later. He never moved into the deputy editor’s cabin that was at one end of the floor and sat instead in the middle of the newsroom, where he could see everyone and everyone could approach him. As if by magic, the newsroom changed. Deepayan and Raja worked as one, their harmony reassuring and infectious. The ground rules were laid down quickly, by example: you had to work hard and keep trying till you got the copy or the headline right; if you made a mistake, you owned up; you never passed the buck; you never tattled about a colleague; you treated everyone with respect; and you worked as one team, stepping in for each other when needed. Deepayan was fair, transparent and no-nonsense. In the newsroom that he forged, hard work, honesty and integrity counted for more than anything else. He never raised his voice, never ordered us around, did not even tell us what he wanted. By simply doing the right thing himself, he got us to become better journalists and better colleagues.

Rajagopal: Deepayan was the most consummate journalist I have known. He could write, edit, appreciate a delightful turn of phrase, proof copies and design pages, and he knew typefaces, how to lay pages out and give headlines – all at a breakneck pace.

This is not an attempt to belittle the achievements of other great editors: there have been brilliant writers, outstanding analysts and skilled line editors – other masters of the craft in each of the segments mentioned. But I have not worked with any other editor in India who could think up story ideas, commission stories, organize guest columns, write a news copy, be at equal ease with handling business, political and sports stories, rewrite the copies submitted by others, design the page (and make the page if need be), write captions, crop pictures, conceive graphics, lay the page out and write standout headlines. Unbelievably, Deepayan used to do this almost every day during the nine years he led The Telegraph from the front.

He was the master of almost all trades in journalism. One misconception such a sweeping statement could generate is that he did everything himself and did not build a team, which is not correct. His idea of team-building may not have met the corporate standards of bonding over drinks and dinner, birthday parties and picnics with the family. Every day spent with Deepayan was a learning process. From close quarters, I was incredibly fortunate to witness how he rewrote stories and conceived, crafted and produced pages. No university could have taught me what I learned from that priceless experience. I am sure that is the case with Harshita too.

Harshita: Absolutely. When Deepayan was thinking of a headline, he would often think aloud, trying out options till he got the right one. Watching him, we learnt that you needed to write the keywords first and then work with them. When he was editing copy and there was a mention of a large figure – it could be a height, an area or a sum of money – he would try to help the reader visualize it. If it was a very large amount of money, he might say it was the size of the economy of this or that country, or if it was a height we were talking about, he might express it in terms of the number of Mount Everests that would fit in. All the time, he was trying to reach the reader.

When Raj Thackeray and Manohar Joshi’s son bought the Kohinoor Mills land for Rs 421 crore, Deepayan’s headline said: “MUMBAI LAND FOR 420 PLUS 1″ (Section 420 of the then prevalent Indian Penal Code (IPC) dealt with “Cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property”).

You could say that Deepayan translated the news for the reader, explaining the import without preaching, and that is what we learnt to do watching him. He always saw the big picture, and made sure we showed it to the reader.

He also made it all look easy, working the fastest that I have seen anyone work and the calmest. He must have felt the pressure but did not pass it on. There were no copies flying about, no screaming or shouting. Around him, there was no tension.

Rewriting

Rajagopal: Deepayan opened the desk to the limitless possibilities of rewriting. From the early 1990s, rewrites largely involved changing the language and making it racier. One-time ice-breakers that had decayed into clichés would masquerade as intros: “First the good news, then the bad news” or “Call it xxxxx” or “In a major development” or “In a landmark/significant ruling” or “A day after or two days after xxx said something, yyyy did something else” etc.

Of course, there have been honourable exceptions, and I am not suggesting that Deepayan invented the rewrite wheel for journalism. But by the mid-1990s, computerization had reduced most sub-editors into glorified page-makers who did not have the time to rewrite because of their preoccupation with page-making. The rise of bureau chiefs with oversized egos, who claimed direct access to the movers and shakers and who wrote for their sources rather than their readers, also made rewriting by the desk an occupational hazard.

Deepayan brought in a breath of fresh air by rewriting many copies himself, transforming not just the language but also the structure and the texture of the reports. Most forms of intros – the direct, the acid-dripping, the staccato and the delayed – came to him easily. The focus of the desk began to shift subtly from recording events to telling stories.

Sadly, I have not kept any copies to cite actual examples, which can be cited now only by referencing the archives in the ABP library. Deepayan’s thrust was to work the story out in his mind first – a radical shift from the line editing that many desks focused on – and then recast the report. This worked well while handling stories whose significance was not readily apparent, such as those dealing with economics, law and political intrigue.

One drawback of such a method is that it can distort the character of mood pieces filed by reporters from the field, unless the reporter is articulate enough and the rewrite editor patient enough to have a conversation with the reporter. Trust and respect are key, which Deepayan could inspire in most of his team through his grace, erudition and keen interest in a wide range of topics, including everyday matters that some of us used to gloss over. If someone told him they saw an unusual ad in the paper that day, his first response would be: “Is there a story there?” He did generate countless story ideas from stray comments.

The topic is a tricky terrain. Whatever I discuss here runs the risk of being misconstrued as pitting the original Telegraph versus the recast Telegraph under Deepayan. That is not my intention. In my experience, no newspaper editor encouraged the desk to rewrite copies as much as Deepayan did. I think Deepayan created the first formal rewrite designation – rewrite editor – in The Telegraph when Arijit Dasgupta joined the newspaper and specialized in rewriting. As I mentioned, rewriting itself was not a new craft – Arijit was already a master of the craft (as were several others, especially the journalists who made the India Today and Sunday magazines the powerhouses that they were in the 1980s.) But Deepayan restored the pre-eminence of rewriting and merciless editing in a daily newspaper when the craft was being devoured by technology and dumbed-down journalism.

Deepayan furnished a reason when he said not to begin a copy (newsroom jargon for a report) with “In a significant development”. Do not insult the intelligence of the reader, you must always respect the reader, he used to say. When we begin a copy with “In a significant development”, unwittingly we are assuming that the reader is not intelligent enough to figure out that the development is “significant”. We are talking down to the reader.

Your reporting and writing should be so sharp that the reader should be able to understand from the content that it deals with a significant development. If the news is strong enough, its possible impact should be evident through the craft. Or, if the news is complex and its repercussions not readily apparent, it should be explained instead of treating the reader like a child and declaring to them that it is significant. For instance, what is the point in saying “In a major development, the Supreme Court sentenced X to death”? Even if we remove the first four words, the meaning is the same – and the effect possibly more because the news itself is arresting. You don’t need any gimmicks.

The same with “A-day-after” intros. You are again making unreasonable demands of the reader who has been kind enough to invest their time in our work – by telling them first what happened a day ago before telling them what happened today, Deepayan used to say.

For him, rewrite meant engaging with the reader and persuading the reader to stay with the copy and navigate it as long as possible. Still, the intro and the rest of the first few paragraphs had to tell the story upfront because we cannot expect the reader to admire the language and keep searching for the news. This balance – telling the story without killing relevance – was difficult to achieve unless the rewrite editor figured out the soul of the story and kept that as the focal point.

Some reporters have confided in me that they felt relieved when they heard that Deepayan had handled their copy. I know at least one reporter who landed a job in a foreign news agency on the basis of the reports that appeared under his byline but were actually written by Deepayan. The reporter later moved to a leadership position in an Indian newspaper that continues to find nirvana in “a day after…”. (When some shoddy copies were filed, a legendary editor of Business Standard used to bellow across the newsroom: “Let it go without any change, give the reporter a byline and expose him.”)

Like all good editors, Deepayan excelled in nitpicking and set standards for doing so. A frequent source of angst among families who lost their relatives was the age of the deceased. Some newspapers used to take into consideration only the year of birth, ignoring the date of birth, possibly because of laziness in finding out the facts. But the date makes a big difference: if a person passed on before his birthday, calculating the age on the basis of the year alone can make that person a year older. Some journalists used to chafe at such precision but it mattered for the families. (As we have seen with VK Singh, the date of birth can affect the fortunes of potential army chiefs too.)

When a newspaper gets the age and other details right, it shows the publication’s respect for the person who passed on. Deepayan reminded us that news of death should be handled with extreme care because in most cases, that would be the last time ever the newspaper would publish that person’s age. When a newspaper gets the age wrong, it shows indifference that is worse than callousness – this was the message Deepayan tried to hammer home.

Harshita has a favourite lesson to recount on why Deepayan insisted on 100 per cent and nothing less.

Harshita: It was a year when ABP introduced an annual assessment system, where we had to fill out a form rating ourselves on certain parameters. We also needed to write what we thought our achievements over the past year were. In my form I had written that I had tried my best to produce pages that were almost error-free. When it was time for the discussion, Deepayan looked up from the form and said gravely: “Almost error-free is not good enough. It has to be error-free.” He was unhappy that I appeared to be content with less than 100 per cent.

At least some of that nitpicking has rubbed off on us. Reading the four-paragraph report on Deepayan’s death, I was angry the paper had got his age wrong. All it would have taken to get it right was one phone call.

Lazy and shoddy work made Deepayan furious. You could not go to him with a headline that said Opp. instead of Opposition. He would send you right back to rework it, no matter how late it was. Think and you will find an alternative word, he would say. And we did. I understand now why a man who easily forgave a mistake would get so upset with an abbreviation. “Opp”, “Prez”, “secy” and other ghastly coinages littering news pages betray a lack of pride that is killing journalism. You can correct a mistake, you can’t correct indifference.

The upcoming second part of the series covers layout, headlines and a wrong call