By P. Kharel

My morning cup of tea just about begins with the arrival of the day’s newspapers, including The Rising Nepal, my professional alma mater since 1973. At 55, Nepal’s first English broadsheet daily that also holds the distinction of being the oldest existing daily, next only to its sister publication Gorkhapatra, The Rising Nepal has many records under its belt and yet more milestones to make. King Mahendra suggested the mast head whereas the then Crown Prince Birendra signed the first three copies of the debutant paper.
An MA in Political Science from Allahabad University and a year junior to Rishikesh Shaha and Hindi movie star Amitabh Bachchan’s mother Teji, Barun Shumsher Rana was an appropriate choice at the helm of TRN. He showed early interest in journalism by bringing out the country’s first English language news publication in 1954, Nepal Guardian. A voracious reader—as were his two immediate successors to the top post in 1975 and 1985 respectively—Rana relished decoding the nuances floating between the lines. He appreciated well-written pieces printed in Nepali or English.

Lively learning
A man of simplicity and with no aristocratic airs, Rana set the tone for the informality and bonhomie that pervaded the editorial room. An avid reader, who discussed some interesting points in analyses or phrases presented in other papers, he was quick to appreciate good hands. In 1968, he invited Kamal Prakash Malla of Tribhuvan University’s English Department, to write a critique of TRN’s performance in its first three years of circulation. Malla blasted the daily from the word go to the last full stop in an article taking up thrice the space an article was normally accorded. Unperturbed, Rana printed it without changing a coma or full stop. In fact, the requested article was remunerated as a special piece. It was a gesture no other news media editor is known to have ventured.
TRN editorial room was a lively intellectual joint and a beehive of activity. As the day progressed, its floor would get strewn with double ply papers churned out by the tickers, also known as tele-printers that ticked out news on the roll paper that was in constant supply for the 24-hour agency services of the French news agency, AFP, and the American agency, Associated Press.
The editorial department was not just of individual journalists but a talent pool, some of whose inspiring figures made an illustrious mark even long after. Six or seven cups of tea would average a day’s work in the editorial room, with one or the other colleague volunteering to foot the bill.
The paper’s advertisement flow fluctuated capriciously with baffling regularity, marked by a glut for a day or two before suffering a semi-drought for several days, at times. But it must have contributed to an average 20-25 per cent of the total space of the 8-page second largest circulating daily, barely managing to keep it afloat. The news desk greeted the ad glut with glee for reducing their share of work while the management basked in the revenue it fetched.

First few
Barun Shumsher Rana was the “editor” but his successors came to be designated as “Editor-in-chief”. Normally, a chief editor denotes that the concerned newspaper has more than one editions or the editor heads more than one news publications of the related organisation. In such conditions, the local editor of an edition is called “editor” or “residential editor” while the coordinating editor of all the editions becomes the “editor-in-chief” or simply “chief editor”. It so happened that Rana later became the “editor-in-chief” of the Gorkhapatra Sansthan’s 16-page Sunday Despatch, of which I was the founder editor.
Mana Ranjan Josse made his way to the top by sheer hard work and overtook some of his colleagues who held senior posts at the time he joined the paper as a sub-editor. Krishna Bhakta Shrestha, who first worked in the Perspective magazine, migrated to the nation’s No. 1 literary monthly Madhupark to become its editor and then to head the Gorkhapatra before serving as the largest media organisation’s general manager.
A noted amiable man, Bharat Dutt Koirala would have succeeded as a public relations hand anywhere. He was appointed the Gorkhapatra editor the very day Josse was given the full charge of TRN editor. Four years later, he was given the executive chairman’s responsibility at the corporation. Koirala introduced the first offset printing press for publishing newspapers in Nepal. He was innovative in launching Nepal Press Institute in 1984 as the country’s premier organisation for journalism training for more than three decades.
Shyam Bahadur KC succeeded Josse in 1985 and became the editor of the first private broadsheet English daily a decade later in 1995. His career included contributions to the Economist, Newsweek, San Francisco Chronicler, and he also served as a retainer for the Statesman (India) while working as a regular local correspondent for the German press agency DPA. In fact, he pioneered sports journalism as editor of the country’s first sports publication, the Sportsman, in the early 1960s, perhaps enthused by he himself being a footballer captaining the Shankata Sports Club.
Kunda Dixit, in the early 1980s, and Akhilesh Upadhyay, Ajay Bhadra Khanal and Prakash Rimal started their journalism in TRN in the early 1990s before progressing to become editors of other news publications. In TRN’s first 27 years, the editorial department recorded a high turnover of staff members. Some 40 pairs of hands quit the paper for greener pastures, thanks to the prevailing market for such talents. Since the mid-1990s, the exodus has dropped to a trickle. Ram Binod Bhattarai and, about a decade later, Madan Kumar Bhattarai, excelled in the civil service, the former as Finance Secretary and the latter as Foreign Secretary. Shrish Shumsher Rana, who served TRN in the 1970s, left an indelible mark as the Gorkhapatra Corporation’s executive chairman in the second half of the 1980s. He went on to become Minister for Information and Communications.

Review afresh
The founding editorial team members deserve due tributes. Most of them are available for sharing ideas. The present TRN team began their career in the 1990s and after. Content being the defining quality in journalism, they should review and make a checklist of what has been achieved and how much more needs to be done. Current times face stiff competition, what with enormous numbers of news and other information and entertainment outlets with easy access catering to varied interest groups amidst dwindling circulation figures and shrinking advertisement revenue.
As a point of note, it pricks my heart not to see any portrait of the founder editor Rana on the premises of TRN department. An oil painting of the Rana Prime Minister Dev Shumsher, who ordered the publication of the first newspaper in 1901, overlooks the general manager’s room while a bust of Jai Prithvi Bahadur Singh, who was officially designated as the first head of Gorkhapatra, gazes from a concrete column in front of the corporation’s five-decade-old building. Rana’s portrait/bust would do TRN proud in upholding a laudable legacy, strengthened by his successors at the helm.

(Professor P Kharel is a former Editor-in-chief of The Rising Nepal.)