Report of NWMI’s 12th National Meet: Introduction

They came by train, they came by air, and they zipped in on their scooters. They walked, they hopped into auto-rickshaws and buses. They even came by boat. Almost 50 women journalists from outside Hyderabad converged on the historic Osmania University (OU), the venue of the 12th national meeting of the Network of Women in Media, India (NWMI), in November 2016. Journalists from the Hyderabad chapter of the NWMI and journalism students made up the rest of the participants.

The approximately 150 participants who attended the three-day meeting came from Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Haryana, Gujarat, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Meghalaya, Odisha, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. The student volunteers from the Department of Communication and Journalism at OU were also a diverse lot – in addition to enthusiastic local students, young women and men from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Mauritius and Uzbekistan played host and attended to every need, from arranging hot water at the guest house to setting up interviews, video documenting and photographing the entire meeting.

FRIDAY, 11 November 2016

As soon as participants filled the ICSSR conference hall in the library building of Osmania University on Friday afternoon, introductions followed. Prof K Stevenson, Head of the Department of Communication and Journalism, formally welcomed the participants and gave a brief background to the 62-year-old department, which boasts leading media personalities and ministers as its alumni. After ice-breakers conducted by Padmaja Shaw and C Vanaja from the Hyderabad chapter, the stage was set for a substantive discussion on a pressing issue confronting the media today: lack of diversity and inclusiveness….