UPHOLD DEMOCRACY. SUPPORT JOURNALISTS.

On a warm October afternoon, as Marty Baron, the venerated editor of The Washington Post, spoke with our fellowship class, I felt admiration, and envy.

Baron outlined how his legacy newsroom was embracing technological changes and had garnered over a million digital-only subscribers earlier this year. The paper’s willingness to adapt, he stressed, was underpinned by its foundational mission of striving for the truth.

Over the past year, The Post has published an impressive stream of stories investigating President Donald Trump’s election campaign, his family members, his business interests and his administration. Earlier that afternoon, as we toured the Post’s newsroom, the outer glass walls of Baron’s office, plastered with grateful letters from readers, captivated me. One note read, “Dear Mr Baron, [… ] Without the hard work of your reporters, our situation today would be so much more dire.” Another said, “Keep asking the important questions. And print the answers.”

Later, as Baron spoke to us, I wondered if in India, an editor like him could survive the political and economic powers that stifle journalism’s core function – “ask the important questions, print the answers.”

Like President Trump, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi loathes the press. Unlike Trump, Modi chooses complete disengagement. He has not held a single press conference in 40 months of holding office. A senior minister in his cabinet coined the term “presstitutes” for journalists asking inconvenient questions. Most legacy newsrooms in India are fearful and self-censor. Last month, the exit of the editor-in-chief of The Hindustan Times, my former newspaper and a leading national daily, was preceded by a meeting between Modi and the paper’s proprietor. The editor lasted in the job for little over a year. Among the paper’s projects, which reportedly upset the government, was “Hate Tracker” – a digital database documenting India’s rising hate[A1]  crimes, including the lynching of religious minorities.

Newsrooms – mostly small, alternative media, and nascent, digital outlets – that are putting up a fight are especially under threat. On October 5, while we were in D.C., Gauri Lankesh, a Bangalore-based editor of a small newspaper, was posthumously given the Anna Politkovskaya Award, established in memory of the slain Russian journalist to honor a female human rights defender. A month ago, assailants had fatally shot Lankesh outside her home as she returned from work.

The day our trip ended, The Wire, a fledgling, resource-strapped website in India, reported how the turnover of a firm headed by Jay Amit Shah, the son of the President of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had increased 16,000 times over since the BJP took power in 2014. The BJP and Shah did not challenge a single fact in the story. Instead, they have filed a criminal defamation suit of 100 crore Rupees (over $15 million) against The Wire’s editors and the reporter.  

I did not need dispatches from home to remind me of the powerful forces against which Indian journalists persevere. On our trip’s penultimate day, I wandered through the floors of the Newseum, lingering at the Journalists Memorial – a tribute to over 2,000 journalists, killed in the line of duty. Its centerpiece was a towering panel with hundreds of photographs of slain reporters. The collage of faces from around the world was heartbreaking, yet deeply inspiring.

In the memorial’s section titled “Stories of the Fallen – 2016”, the profiles included Karun Misra. The exhibit recorded that Misra, the 32-year-old bureau chief of a Hindi daily in north India, “had received death threats, and refused bribes, designed to deter him from reporting on illegal mining” before being gunned down last February.

I recalled a quote displayed prominently at The Washington Post newsroom: “There is only one good reason to enter journalism. When we do our job, we can make a difference.” The fellowship trip was a powerful reminder of why we must persist.

Chitrangada Choudhury is a 2018 Knight-Wallace Fellow and an independent multimedia journalist based in the eastern Indian state of Orissa.

Walking down the street on my way to the Online News Association’s annual conference at the Marriott Wardman Park hotel in Washington, D.C., a recognizable man with short gray hair and neon shorts ran past me. He looked like John Podesta.

If it was Podesta, it made sense that he would be running away from wherever reporters were gathering. As manager of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, Podesta led the post-election hand wringing about Russians stealing his emails, media fascination with the email saga and the need for a more intelligent way to report on politics. Broadly, I agreed with him. That’s why, after 14 years covering politics in New York City, with a popular newsletter under my belt and enough appearances on cable news shows to justify carrying a blazer and tie in my backpack, I decided to apply for a Knight-Wallace Fellowship.

I was so steeped in daily political coverage that when I heard my class of Fellows was coming to D.C., it seemed incomprehensible that we would do anything other than talk about the 2016 presidential election the entire time. I was surprised when the conversations unfolded differently.

Our group met with Marty Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post, and top editors at NPR and The Atlantic. All were adapting a digital-dominant approach to news and figuring out how to deliver more content to their core constituencies and paying customers. I wondered about the unseen costs of this faster, customer-focused approach.

I hoped to get answers at the conference. When ONA started in 1999, it was like a support group. Digital reporters were interlopers in the newsroom, afterthoughts sitting at the kids’ table, far away from the adults. Today, across the street from the conference hotel, an old Washington Post newspaper box sat empty, spray-painted black and locked. The conference, by contrast, was crammed with over 3,000 digitally-focused attendees. Surely this would be the place to offer direction on the issues nagging at me. How should we use the internet to better cover politics? How are smart reporters using Facebook and Twitter? Can I make a podcast about politics as popular as a cat video?

There was plenty on offer about the latest digital trends. Left hanging, though, remained the thorniest questions raised by the 2016 presidential election. For instance, can reporters clustered on the East Coast reliably cover Red State America? This topic was front and center in ONA’s first session, led by CNN’s Brian Stelter: “Trust, Truth and Questions for the Media.” Panelist Nikole Hannah-Jones, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, said the public is losing trust in the media because newsrooms aren’t diverse enough. Cenk Uygur, co-founder and host of The Young Turks, said it was less about race and more about poverty, an issue “corporate media” and well-paid reporters are not good at covering.

Both of those seemed correct, and yet, incomplete. I found myself nodding along when public radio reporter Asma Khalid said the primary problem was a dearth of reporters in the majority of American communities. She noted a disturbing trend during the presidential race. Reporters – often from the East or West Coasts – tracked down voters – often in the middle of the country – grabbed their quotes, then left. Practically nobody stuck around, let alone made return trips. Khalid did. “I never thought I’d see you again,” one voter told her. The anecdote reminded me of the “left-behind” places ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis spoke about weeks earlier at the annual Graham Hovey Lecture back in Ann Arbor.

On the final day of the conference, I entered the main ballroom minutes before the start of a session called “When Satire is the Most Effective Political Coverage.” I sat down next to a man conspicuously older than most at the convention. It was Jeff Jarvis, director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism and a professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. We talked about the fact that the American Society of News Editors was slated to hold their annual meeting in the same hotel a week later. The ASNE conference, Jarvis speculated, would be much smaller. He was drawing a direct correlation between conference size and industry potency.

Jarvis looked out at the amorphous ONA crowd in the ballroom – many still ambling to their seats with tote bags full of CNN water bottles and Facebook notebooks – and said, “They don’t realize they won.”

I left Washington and ONA with more questions than answers. That’s similar to how I started my career at the Queens Tribune, often returning from press conferences with pages full of quotes and a head full of questions. Now in Ann Arbor, that confusion feels comforting. The questions wouldn’t be worth studying if the answers were easy.

Azi Paybarah is a 2018 Knight-Wallace Fellow and a senior reporter at Politico New York covering City Hall, politics, crime and the New York Police Department.