SAJAforum

CONV: SAJA TO OFFER TIPS ON SURVIVING THE DOWNTURN

[ See all SAJA@15 Convention & Career Expo coverage ]

SAJA is 15 this year, and is revving up for a special anniversary convention and career fair on July 10-11 in New York City. Buy your tickets today at SAJAconvention.org.

Aparita Bhandari, SAJA's vice president and chairwoman of the 15th Anniversary And International Convention, shared some of the highlights of the event to student blogger Newly Paul.

The SAJA convention is designed to help journalists face the realities of today’s newsroom amidst the economic downturn and job losses, Bhandari said.

One of the main intentions of the convention is to give journalists skills necessary to survive the current environment. It’s no surprise then that new media guru Jeff Jarvis will deliver the opening keynote speech at the convention. Other speakers will discuss reporting for a multimedia platform, using social networking tools to remain competitive and relevant, and the art of creating a blog.

“This (new media) is where the industry is headed, and this is what we should be looking at,” Bhandari said. “At the same time there’s something to be said for storytelling techniques,…you need to know your basics to be a good reporter.”

That’s where discussions about long-form writing come in. For those in broadcast, there’s a workshop by Steven Wadhams, a senior radio producer at CBC/Radio Canada, who will discuss compelling storytelling techniques for radio.   

Freelance writing is another major theme at the convention.

“Given that newsrooms are shrinking, freelancing is something quite a few people are looking at,” Bhandari said. “This is something you could potentially make a life out of, if you know how to go about it the right way.” Attendees can look forward to Voice of America’s South Asian bureau chief Steven Herman’s session on the challenges and opportunities for freelancers in that region.

One of the most interesting things about the convention is the broad range of speakers.

“The one thing we don’t want his convention to be, is old-school or pedantic,” Bhandari said. “A lot of younger journalists are leading the charge today and we like to showcase some of the work they are doing.”

For instance, one of the speakers Anup Kaphle is a recent graduate, who currently is reporting in Afghanistan through a SAJA fellowship.

“The news business is evolving, and while we want to hear from the veterans, we also want to hear from younger people and their techniques for dealing with challenges in the newsroom,” Bhandari said.

Suitably, Dr. Reza Aslan, one of the world’s leading experts on religion and a columnist at the Daily Beast, will offer the closing keynote remarks.

“We’ve tried to strike a balance—you get access to networking opportunities and know what’s happening in the industry,” Bhandari said. “It’s all about advocating nuanced coverage and talking about the realities of today.”

PAKISTAN: The press pushes back against the Zardari gov't (Q&A)

[A guest post by Maha Atal, who works for Forbes and blogs here.]

Once a week, I go to my grandmother's apartment to watch Pakistani TV stations via satellite. Like many Pakistani-American families, we have spent the past two years glued to our screens as lawyers, politicians and citizens agitated for the restoration of the judiciary, disbanded by then-President Pervez Musharraf in 2007. Meanwhile, just as Pakistanis were tuning in, Musharraf and his civilian successors increased regulation of the televised and print media. Journalists ventured onto new media platforms and my mother and I spent many hours following the protests on news websites like GEO.tv, and when these too were restricted, on social media platforms like YouTube. Sometimes, we saw content from activists who used the web to promote their cause; sometimes, we saw journalists wander into the fray to cover it, and occasionally, to insert themselves into the protests. Now that the Chief Justice and the judiciary system have been restored, I asked Ayesha Tammy Haq, host of 24Seven on BusinessPlusTV what the convergence means for Pakistan's Fourth Estate.

SAJAforum: In some sense, there have been two protest movements underway here, one to free the judiciary and one to free the press. But the line between them is pretty thin, since many journalists have been active cheerleaders of and participants in the lawyers' marches and rallies. Can you describe how this happened? 

HAQ: When this started [in November 2007], an independent press was a relatively new phenomenon in Pakistan. We didn’t have a formal code of conduct yet. The journalists and young reporters who went out to cover the movement were sympathetic as they saw it as a force for change. The clampdown on the press brought them in to direct confrontation with the state hence their active role [in the events covered].

So the press became fairly partisan. During the marches, the producers would keep the frame tight so they never showed gaps in the crowd. People were killed in the streets in Karachi, but the media never showed the bad side.

The Daily Times did a whole series about whether the movement should be transitionist or transformationist. They became active participants not because they were marching with the lawyers but by using [their coverage] to shape government policy and saw this as their role. It was a conceptual movement.

Is there any concern about journalists giving up their objective stance to become newsmakers?

UK: BBC Journalists to Strike Over Proposed "Offshoring" of South Asia Services

Journalists from across all services of the BBC have resolved to hold two one-day strikes next month, prompted in large part by plans to "offshore" operations for the BBC World Service's Hindi, Nepali, and Urdu programming to Delhi, Kathmandu, and Islamabad. From the Guardian:

TV, radio and online news will be disrupted on Friday 3 April and Thursday 9 April after nearly 800 members of the National Union of Journalists chapel at the BBC today voted in favour of industrial action in a national ballot.

More than 1,100 of the union's nearly 4,000 members at the corporation took part in the vote, 77% of whom voted in favour of a strike.

The most urgent threat of compulsory cuts is at the World Service's South Asian section, where up to 20 members are at risk, the union has said. Staff in Scotland are also understood to be under threat.

The NUJ general secretary, Jeremy Dear, said: "Journalists at the South Asian services have been fighting a heroic struggle against the outsourcing of their jobs ... now they have the weight of thousands of NUJ members at the BBC behind them." [link]

In late February, journalists within the South Asia services held their own one-day strike to protest the proposed restructuring. In addition to worrying about lost jobs in London, the journalists fear that shifting operations to the subcontinent would compromise the quality and independence of the BBC's coverage:

Staff are concerned that moving production of these BBC language services abroad will result in poorer output and a loss of independence which is integral to the BBC World Service.

One member commented: “If the BBC’s succeeds in imposing change, the tendency will be for the output to become more and more India-centric, in the case of the India service, as they try to compete with local FM broadcasters.

“This moves away from the World Service’s USP: impartial news with a global perspective. Why should the British taxpayer end up paying for a local Indian radio station?” [link]

The International Federation of Journalists has echoed these concerns, asserting that "the BBC management's off-shoring plans will put at risk seventy years of first-class journalism and expose their journalists to political and commercial pressures beyond their control." On the eve of last month's one-day strike, John McDonnell, a Labour MP for west London, elaborated upon these concerns even further:

OUTSOURCING: SAJA debate on editorial outsourcing to India

EDITOR'S NOTE: In addition to Sabrina's report, please see video here and here (shot by Pracheta Sharma)

 

On January 27, 2009, the South Asian Journalists Association, The Southern Asian Institute and The New York Press Club co-hosted a debate on editorial outsourcing to India. "Outsourcing News: Boon or Boondoggle"  brought together panelists who supported and opposed the growing trend of shifting media jobs to India.

James Macpherson, one of the panelists and publisher of PasadenaNow.com, made headlines for his website’s use of India-based journalists. In November, Maureen Dowd profiled him in an article titled, “A Penny for my thoughts?” and in 2007 over 30 major publications covered his decision to begin hiring journalists in India to cover Pasadena city council meetings via webcast. Macpherson was joined by other panelists Robert Berkeley, CEO of Express KCS and Tony Joseph, CEO of Mindworks Global. Express KCS and Mindworks Global provide editorial production services from India to media companies around the world.

On the opposing side, it was panelist Anthony Ramirez, a 19-year New York Times veteran that was most vocal about his enmity to editorial outsourcing, who referred to Macpherson and the other panelists as, “Lucifer and his minions.” Bruce Lambert, 21-year Times veteran and Phil Pilato, editor and news writer for 1010 WINS radio also sat by side in opposition to the idea.

MEDIA: Q&A with media critic Sevanti Ninan on the Mumbai attacks coverage

[ See SAJA's full coverage of the Mumbai attacks, including our webcasts ]

In the immediate aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, we asked Sevanti Ninan, media columnist and editor of The Hoot, to give us her thoughts on the coverage. At the time, she was too busy, but the uproar over the Indian media's coverage hasn't subsided so we put some questions to her last week.

Some background: There's an ongoing debate in India over whether the government should impose greater controls on the media. Additionally, several prominent journalists are under constant attack from people who felt the media either did a poor job, or even worse, aided the terrorists during the operation by broadcasting sensitive information.

NDTV's Barkha Dutt, who seemed to report nonstop throughout the ordeal, has been taking constant heat since the attacks, from prominent pieces in The Telegraph and the Christian Science Monitor to a Facebook campaign ("Barkha Dutt for worst senior journalist on the planet" has 1,748 members now). She also has lots of fans who have come to her defense, but recently another controversy emerged over Dutt/NDTV's threats of legal action against a blogger who criticized her. As this Hoot article makes clear, the blogger retracted his original post and conceded that it had been "untrue and defamatory." Dutt and NDTV have been accused of trying to stifle free speech.

In that context, we caught up with Sevanti Ninan. We also asked her a couple questions about the state of the Indian media, which is now seeing a downturn after a period of intense growth.

SAJAforum: What do you think are the more constructive criticisms to have emerged of the media, in the wake of the Mumbai attacks?

NINAN: That it should be far more restrained in its live coverage, that it should be aware of the import of the information it is dishing out in an unfolding crisis, that its editorial bosses should be in the studio directing sensitive coverage and not out in the field reporting breaking news, because no one  in the studio is  senior enough to rein them in when they go overboard. That it is neither the place of  TV reporters and anchors  to editorialise constantly while reporting, nor to war monger or promote ridicule of politicians.And that there should restraint in labelling the news, and trying to queer the pitch with slogans like "enough is enough."

SRI LANKA: Lasantha's letter from the grave

A few days ago, we ran an important item on the assassination of Lasantha Wickramatunga, editor of Sri Lanka's Sunday Leader newspaper and a major critic of the government. Like other things Sri Lankan, Lasantha's death may not resonate far beyond the island: to outsiders, this may seem to be a bit verse in yet another epic ethnic conflict. But even if you read nothing else about Sri Lanka, please read the piece below, printed by his paper after his death.

It was, in a sense, Lasantha's final work, an essay he wrote with the understanding that he would be killed for what he did. If, as a journalist, you've fretted about your pay, or job security, or career prospects, read Lasantha's words and remember this: at its finest, its most tenacious, journalism is heroic.

I have read it twice--once at work, and a second time on the subway--and each time, it broke me.

And Then They Came for Me

By Lasantha Wickramatunga

No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories and now especially the last.

I have been in the business of journalism a good long time. Indeed, 2009 will be The Sunday Leader's 15th year. Many things have changed in Sri Lanka during that time, and it does not need me to tell you that the greater part of that change has been for the worse. We find ourselves in the midst of a civil war ruthlessly prosecuted by protagonists whose bloodlust knows no bounds. Terror, whether perpetrated by terrorists or the state, has become the order of the day. Indeed, murder has become the primary tool whereby the state seeks to control the organs of liberty. Today it is the journalists, tomorrow it will be the judges. For neither group have the risks ever been higher or the stakes lower.

Why then do we do it? I often wonder that. After all, I too am a husband, and the father of three wonderful children. I too have responsibilities and obligations that transcend my profession, be it the law or journalism. Is it worth the risk? Many people tell me it is not. Friends tell me to revert to the bar, and goodness knows it offers a better and safer livelihood. Others, including political leaders on both sides, have at various times sought to induce me to take to politics, going so far as to offer me ministries of my choice. Diplomats, recognising the risk journalists face in Sri Lanka, have offered me safe passage and the right of residence in their countries. Whatever else I may have been stuck for, I have not been stuck for choice.

But there is a calling that is yet above high office, fame, lucre and security. It is the call of conscience.

MEDIA: Typepad's Journalist Bailout Program

The very generous folks at Typepad (which SAJA uses for SAJAForum) seem to have a plan for "recently-laid-off or fearful-of-layoffs journalist[s]." They call it the The Typepad Journalist Bailout Program.

From their program website:

Your Tumblr, while clever, will not pay your bills. We want to fix that. So we've made the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program. While we can't promise it's going to replace having a full-time writing gig, it gets you up and running with your own site that you can start to benefit from. Let's outline the details, in true Digg-baiting listicle format:

• You get a free TypePad Pro blog account. That's the real deal, the same service that powers big-name media blogs, and it even includes professional support so we answer any questions you have.
• You get enrolled in the Six Apart Media advertising program. These are real display ads, that pay a lot more than simple Google text ads, and you get to keep the revenue.
• We'll promote your new site on Blogs.com. It's a fast-growing directory of the best in blogs, and Blogs.com will be a very effective way for all of your peers in the Journalist Bailout Program to cross-promote and share traffic for your independent sites.
• Lots more. Getting started with Six Apart opens the door to lots more ways to succeed in the future. We can introduce you to our VIP program to help drive traffic to your site, help you connect your blog to your LinkedIn profile, make it easy to manage your site's comments from an iPhone, and even show you how to automatically promote your posts to your Facebook friends.

And while they don't mention if the ad revenue is enough to buy your groceries, this definitely sounds like a cool deal. You save 150 dollars and your blogs will have a professional look with non-google-looking ads. But when it comes to searching your name on Google, your blog will still be a first result.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on this program. Post them below.

JOBS: U.S. newspapers confront outsourcing

U.S. newspapers, which are hemorrhaging readership, ad revenue and staffers, are dealing with the issue of outsourcing various aspects of their operations.

Speaking at a gathering of the Southern Newspapers Publishers Association in October, Dean Singleton, CEO of the MediaNews Group (The Denver Post, The Detroit News and 52 other daily newspaper), suggested publishers should look at outsourcing more closely:

Newspaper publishers should consider consolidating and outsourcing news operations — even overseas — to save money as revenues continue to shrink, the head of a major U.S. newspaper company said Monday. <snip>

"In today's world, whether your desk is down the hall or around the world, from a computer standpoint, it doesn't matter," Singleton said after his speech. <snip>

Singleton said sending copyediting and design jobs overseas may even be called for.

"One thing we're exploring is having one news desk for all of our newspapers in MediaNews ... maybe even offshore," he said during the speech.

Other publishers also have consolidated newsroom functions this year. Two Florida papers owned by The New York Times Co. said in August they were merging news and copy desk functions, design, layout and pagination. The McClatchy Co. papers in Raleigh and Charlotte, are sharing sports and political reporting staff.

But few have sent newsroom functions overseas, limiting off-shoring mostly to ad production and other non-editorial functions, said Ken Doctor, a media analyst with Outsell Inc.

Notable exceptions are Thomson Reuters, which has been using journalists in Bangalore, India, to handle some basic news such as corporate earnings reports, and a website called pasadenanow.com, which has five regular contributors overseas who write about Pasadena, Calif., using webcasts of council meetings and information provided by citizen volunteers.

Meanwhile, Ken Doctor, quoted above, wrote some more about this:

Well, Bay Area News Group (BANG) staffers decided Dean's words needed illustration. They created a new map showing the familiar newspaper titles, including the once-proud San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times, Oakland Tribune and Marin Independent-Journal (with the Santa Cruz Sentinel written in) spread across the western India states of Gujarat and Maharashtra, the latter the state dominated by Mumbai, a major outsourcing center.

Here it is, in all its glory, photographed from one of its postings on a newspaper bulletin board.

At US papers, outsourcing of ad production has reached major proportions. Finance outsourcing is in process, and yes, newspapers are looking at what can't be done by lower-paid, English speakers.

Though farther-flung circulation is still being cut back at the dailies -- that's still publishers' favorite explanation for plummeting circulation -- maybe the move of the nameplates could be a smart counter-intuitive strategy.

After all, in India, newspaper readership keeps going up.

He also ran these stats from the World Association of Newspapers 2008 Trends report: 

  74 of the world’s 100 best selling dailies are published in Asia. China, Japan and India account for 62 of them.

  The five largest markets for newspapers are: China, with 107 million copies sold daily; India, with 99 million copies daily; Japan, with 68 million copies daily; the United States, with nearly 51 million; and Germany, 20.6 million.

  Indian newspaper sales increased 11.22 percent in 2007 and 35.51 percent in the five-year period.

OnJuly  9, 2008, WNYC Radio's "The Takeaway" ran a segment on the topic of outsourcing to India (listen to the segment at that link):

Guests: Brayden Simms, copy editor for the Miami Herald in Miami, Fla., Roy Peter Clark, senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., and Harsh Dutta, co-founder of Content Writing India in New Delhi.

Poynter's Clark wrote a follow-up column, "From Rim Editor to Ram the Editor":

I'm feeling more than a bit xenophobic these days, and I'm blaming it on the movement to outsource newspaper copy editing services to India.

I was interviewed on this topic recently for a public radio program in New York City called "The Takeaway" with John Hockenberry and Adaora Udoji.

The conversation featured a 26-year-old American copy editor, Hayden Simms, whose bright eyes and bushy tail could not protect him from a Miami Herald pink slip. The premise of the program was that Simms lost his copy editing job to India and its pool of cheaper labor.

On the line with me was Harsh Dutta, a gracious and highly intelligent man from India and co-founder of Content Writing India in New Delhi, which runs a copy editing service for clients across the world, including newspapers in the U.S. of A.
Dutta admitted that Indian copy editors were trained in "the Queen's English" and had to be schooled in the peculiarities of the American idiom. I have no doubt that our copy editing colleagues in India have enough language competence to learn the difference between labor and labour and to put the comma inside quotations marks, thank you. Language, syntax, spelling and idioms are all important, but are beside the point.

Read his full piece here.

Earlier on SAJAforum:

Joe Grimm on outsourcing of journalism jobs

Post your comments below.

MEDIA/POLITICS: Notes from Time Warner Summit Politics 2008

A guest post by Anuradha Herath, a Columbia Journalism School student: anuradha.herath[at]gmail

Notes from Time Warner Summit Politics 2008

By Anuradha K. Herath

      A gathering of leading media organizations, journalists, analysts and political insiders gathered in New York in mid-October for “Politics 2008 – The Media Summit on the Election of the President.” The event, co-hosted by CNN and TIME, took place Oct. 13 and 14, two days before the final presidential debate at Hofstra University (see the full program).

      Two days of presentations and discussion sessions focused on a variety of topics pertaining to the 2008 presidential election and the changing media landscape. The two prominent South Asians that took part as panelists included Fareed Zakaria, host of GPS on CNN and editor of Newsweek International, and deputy managing editor of TIME, Romesh Ratnesar. Other participants included a host of media personalities: 

    * Christiane Amanpour, chief international correspondent, CNN
    * Wolf Blitzer, anchor, CNN
    * Campbell Brown, anchor, CNNc
    * Anderson Cooper, anchor, CNN
    * Candy Crowley, senior political correspondent, CNN
    * Jeff Greenfield, senior political correspondent, CBS News
    * Rome Hartman, executive producer, BBC World News America
    * Jonathan Klein, president, CNN/U.S.
    * Dan Rather, host and global correspondent of “Dan Rather Reports,” former anchor of CBS Evening News
    * Joel Sucherman, executive producer, USAToday
    * Richard Stengel, managing editor, TIME
    * Jeffrey Toobin, senior analyst, CNN Worldwide

       Columbia journalism student Insiyah Saeed attended a panel titled “Defining the American Experience – The State of the Global Superpower – How the World Sees Us – How We See the World.” Panelists included Zakaria, Blitzer, Amanpour and Ratnesar, among others.

      Saeed said she found it useful to hear journalists and commentators talk unscripted about their views.

      “They really do know their stuff,” Saeed said. “It was very useful and insightful, and (there were) a lot of things I did not know. For journalists, it’s great to go to such a panel and hear them in person. It’s not like listening to a sound bite.”

NEW SITE: Tina Brown launches "The Daily Beast"

That's Famous Magazine Editor Tina Brown (former editor of The New Yorker, Talk), sitting with cup in hand, in a staff photo that's part of the launch of The Daily Beast, her latest venture (I swear I am not posting it just because of the South Asian gent on the far right... but anyone know who he is? UPDATE: he's Amish Gandhi, director of product there - helps run the website, mobile and other products).

From the site's first day and a Q&A with her:

What is The Daily Beast? It's a speedy, smart edit of the web from the merciless point of view of what interests the editors. The Daily Beast is the omnivorous friend who hears about the best stuff and forwards it to you with a twist. It allows you to lead the conversation, rather than simply follow it.

Does the world really need another news aggregator? The Daily Beast doesn't aggregate. It sifts, sorts, and curates. We're as much about what's not there as what is. And we freshen the stream with a good helping of our own original content from a wonderfully diverse group of contributors … satirist Christopher Buckley, historian Sean Wilentz, former McCain adviser Mark McKinnon, Project Runway’s Laura Bennett, the former editor of Al-Hayat Salameh Nematt, Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg, Nick Ciarelli who founded Think Secret, and many others.

She addresses head-on the question of her leaving The New Yorker in 1998 (among other things, SAJAforum readers are likely to remember the big special fiction issue that she ran in 1997 commemorating the 50th anniversary of India's independence):

Was quitting The New Yorker the biggest mistake of your life? To every thing (turn turn turn) there is a season. If I'd stayed at The New Yorker I'd never have written a best seller. More important, there'd be no such animal as The Daily Beast. I have the best of both worlds. I can edit The Daily Beast and read The New Yorker.

WHAT DO YOU THINK? Post your comments below.