Why am I at the Tow-Knight Entrepreneurial Journalism Fellowship?
In 2017, I was ready to transition out of anchoring and reporting television news. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the rush of news alerts coming in on WhatsApp groups. I loved waking up at 3:30am. And really, I loved my first job and almost all the people I met there.
Being comfortable with what I was doing made me question television newsrooms a fair bit—why they work the way they do; how does speed impact the quality of work we produce; what will it take to change processes inside Indian newsrooms?
To find answers to some of these questions, I moved out of TV to understand the process of setting up of data journalism projects across newsrooms in India and then went on to lead operations for a crowdsourced digital social justice platform.
Through this journey, Paul Salopek’s Slow Journalism workshop as part of his Out Of Eden Walk had a deep impact on me. This led me to the Tow-Knight Entrepreneurial Journalism Fellowship.
As part of the EJ19 cohort this year, I plan to examine two sets of questions: one pertaining to the internal working of newsrooms and the other pertaining to the news ecosystem located outside of big cities in India.
Inside newsrooms:
- How can young journalists gain skills to produce in-depth journalistic projects?
- Will training young journalists already in newsrooms help them gain these skills?
- If yes, who will pay for this training?
Outside of newsrooms in big cities:
- What are the new platforms on which journalism can find an audience outside big cities?
- How do we identify communities outside these cities to serve?
- What are the challenges to building these communities?
- Will these communities pay for news? If yes, what kind?
- How can we ensure the safety of journalists in remote locations?
Over the course of the next few months, I’ll keep you’ll posted on the progress I make. Do get in touch if you have any thoughts on these.
