Year in Review: How We Built Our Media Presence in 2022
At CSEI, December is a month of reflection. We look back at the achievements of the year. In this blogpost, we revisit our goals and the media articles that helped us achieve those goals.
Small steps: In January, our goal was simply to appear in the media once a month. With connections in our immediate network, we pitched stories to the big publications in Bengaluru. Our stories appeared in:
- Deccan Herald: Not silver-bullet solutions for water supply worries
- Indian Express: At COP27, we must find a better way to reduce our carbon footprint
- Bangalore Mirror: Grey water to make Bangalore greener
- Times of India: Earth Day: The ‘yuck factor’ with wastewater reuse must be addressed to save freshwater, reduce water pollution
Becoming more strategic: Once we met the initial goal of appearing in the media once a month, we began focusing on strategic publications that would help us reach specific audiences. Since then, we have been published in:
- Money Control: Real Estate | Treated wastewater could mitigate rising construction costs
- Hindustan Times: Why open data is key to environmental action
- Mongabay: [Commentary] Is agroecological farming a solution for rainfed degraded land?
Print v/s digital: One of the goals we set ourselves at the beginning of the year was to get published in print as opposed to digital media. Print media’s space constraint makes it much more aspirational. This year we appeared in print thrice:
- Down To Earth: Twist in the Lantana Tale
- The Hindu Business Line: ‘Water credits’ can fund climate needs
Subject matter expert: Another aspiration we had was to be seen as a subject matter expert by journalists covering cities, water and climate. Our researchers have been quoted in the media multiple times this year.
- The Hindu: ATREE to work on using waste water to green parks in Bengaluru
- Deccan Herald: No silver-bullet solutions for water supply worries
- The Hindu: When India’s ‘IT capital’ went under
Media mentions: One of our stretch goals for the year was to have journalists consider the centre and its activities as ‘newsworthy’. We were able to bring media attention to some of our activities and have had 11 reporter copies filed over the year.
- Livemint: How lakes turned layouts causing floods in Bengaluru
- Deccan Herald: Waste to wealth: Bengaluru’s treated water holds new promise
- Bangalore Mirror: The Sunday Read: Flood Analysis
- Financial Times: The triffid’s day has come: designing with invasive plants
Event coverage: Further to activities, we organised two open events this year–Jaltol V1 launch and the wastewater workshop. We were thrilled to get media coverage on both of these events:
- Deccan Herald: Experts see markets emerge for Bengaluru’s wastewater
- The Hindu: ATREE to work on using waste water to green parks in Bengaluru
- EOS: Satellite and on-the-Ground Data Help Monitor Groundwater in India
Shared interests: Having seen our blog posts on the potential of wastewater, Citizen Matters reached out to us to republish our cities-related content on their platform. Similarly, Scroll republished one of our blogs on the Bengaluru floods. We have since had many articles published in Citizen Matters.
- Scroll: As Bengaluru floods again, here’s why it is important to map the flow of water through cities
- Six reasons why Bengaluru apartments are not reusing their wastewater
- How to fix problems with apartment STPs
- Study on cascading lakes in Hebbal explains why so many of them have dried up
Regional languages: Communicating our work in regional languages has always been an exciting prospect.
- In June, IDR Hindi republished our article on water-guzzling arecanut being grown in rural Karnataka.
- Two months later, we were published in Kannada when our field partnerships associate Manjunatha G wrote about the farming technique, Akkadi Saalu in Agriculture India.
Amazing designs: Since we have amazing designers in-house, we were all excited to try a graphic story about one of our areas of work.
It took considerable effort to put this together but The News Minute published it as The beautiful, dangerously invasive weed called Lantana: An illustrated story.
Primetime Television: In September, Shreya Nath, CSEI’s Cities and Towns lead was invited to CNN TV18’s primetime discussion on flooding in Bangalore.
This helped us immensely in getting our foot in the door with television.
As we look ahead, we hope to expand our scope outward to international publications and locally to regional languages. We hope to reach communities that engage with research, innovation, entrepreneurship and on-ground implementation.
One way to achieve this is by getting published in online publications that allow syndication (like this article on crowdmapping we published in IndiaSpend that got picked up by the Global Investigative Journalism Network).
