Being a journalist is not everyone’s cup of tea. It pushes you out of your comfort zone and forces oneself to look at the bigger picture because of its rapidly changing profession as a result of a emergence of new technologies.
I had not even embarked on a journalistic path but i was impressed with the inner world of this profession as described by my father. It was truth, credibility and respect that I strive to pursue in my career.
On November 6, 2021, I was at home watching tv when father sent me a text about a Data journalism workshop which was to be held at Press Club in Chandigarh (Punjab). I realized this was a unique opportunity for me to spend a day professionals and to find out how news media works in gathering data. On the other hand, completely new to this field, I had apprehensions about attending my journalism workshop all alone.
The workshop was conducted in association with Indian Data Portal (IDB) on “Using data for creating and presenting news stories”, where in over 50 club members along with top journalists from various media organizations’ participated. During the workshop, the journalist got the opportunity to learn about new techniques to acquire data in order to improve their reporting. Today, journalists face a number of challenges in maintaining credibility of their news.
As the clock was ticking, so was my anxiety. The workshop started at 12.15 pm with a lecture from Dr Aarushi Jain, Associate Director, Bharti Institute of Public Policy. After giving us a quick run through about her background and her career, in a very enthusiastic tone she highlighted the importance of data-driven news based stories. It reduces the chance of spreading fake news with the media fraternity is grappling with a lot in today’s world, she said.
Her words struck me. I agree if journalists master these skills- less looking for quotes, less guessing instead can build strong ground based on his news article purely on the data and this can affect the role of journalism greatly.
We all have seen during the pandemic across the globe, where famous media organizations like ‘The Tribune’, ‘Hindustan Times’ laid out their staff members especially reporters. Most of them switched to Public Relations or were forced to work as freelancer with minimal wages.
The second workshop in print journalism focused on writing styles and sub-editing process was delivered by Rajinder Nagarkoti, Principal Correspondent with Times of India. He also talked about how he learned new skills while performing his job. He gave plenty of advice how to edit news copies as- editing is the most challenging fact of journalism. He encouraged us to look out for internship wherever we can find them.
The workshop ended with a fun exercise where we put into different groups and were asked to sub copies for practice. Everyone seemed concerned with their time limit and was equally enthusiastic about what we were doing. That time I actually realized that subbing is not a piece of cake. It actually requires skills, good command over language and makes news relevant for the readers to understand.
It helped me to gain insight into the whole process of sub-editing, previously I knew nothing about how news is made and then edited, before it gets printed. Full day of workshop, talks, lunch and coffee later with professionals, I couldn’t have asked anything for. I believe this workshop not only gave me but all the new participants a chance to learn journalistic lessons to boost their knowledge and pursue their career in journalism.