Ever since the Coronavirus epidemic has gripped the entire world, forcing several countries to impose lockdown for several weeks, all the economic activity has come to a standstill and millions of people were rendered jobless.
One of the fields that had a huge impact of this lockdown on account of Coronavirus is journalism.
Many newspapers sacked their employees in hundreds to bring down the overhead costs, slashed the salaries of many other employees, reduced the number of pages and cut down the circulation to overcome the losses.
So is the case with the electronic media channels who also resorted to ruthless sacking of employees and slashing of salaries.
In the Telugu media industry, too, local correspondents and contributors were thrown on the roads, as the newspapers removed their tabloid pull-outs and special pages.
Every day, we have been seeing the government agencies and non-government organisations (NGOs) arranging cooked food or packets of essential commodities to the poor people, migrant labourers, beggars and even those who were held up in shelters and hostels.
Now, journalists, too, are forced to stand in queues or beg for food packets to survive, as they lost their jobs.
The other day, when Media Academy of Telangana distributed packets of essential commodities like 5 kg of rice, 1 kg dal, 1 kg oil packet and 1 kg of salt at the information department office, more than 2,000 journalists turned up to get the packets, as they are not able to feed their families.
On Wednesday, when Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee president and Nalgonda MP N Uttam Kumar Reddy distributed food grains and essential commodities to journalists in Huzurnagar constituency in Suryapet, scribes turned up in hundreds. He could distribute packets only to 157 print and electronic media journalists.
Reddy said that the media persons have been risking their health and lives to report the latest happenings related to Coronavirus.
He expressed concern over dozens of journalists in Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and other parts of the country getting affected with Covid-19.
He appealed to all the journalists to take precautions while venturing out for reporting and to their offices.
"We perfectly understand the stress and strain of print and electronic media organisations now. With most manufacturing and service companies closing down their operations and the resultant loss of advertising revenue to the media, most of newspapers have reduced the number of pages, which is perfectly understandable in these trying times.
“However, because of loss of private advertising revenues, media organisations depending on government revenue, they should not allow themselves to be browbeaten into not reporting shortcomings or lapses in Corona relief measures," he said.
