1. Reporting on natural disasters:
How do we report? What is missing from reporting? Whose voices get missed out? These are some of the questions that were addressed.
This session, conducted by NWMI member Ramya Kannan, came on the heels of widespread floods in India, so the context was set and well understood. The focus was on the different kinds of disasters that a journalist encounters, both natural and manmade. Beginning with some ground rules for covering disasters, the workshop moved through examples of actual disasters- how the media covered them, what we did right and what we did wrong, learning from experiences, and eventually coming up with an informal toolkit to avoid making the same mistakes.
Among the issues that came up in the discussions were the challenges of covering the North East at a time of great polarisation; safety issues, the question of access to data in an increasingly closed set-up that is intolerant of criticism, and the power of the RTI Act and how we could harness it.
2. How to report on LGBTQIA+ issues:
This workshop was designed and conducted by InQlusive Newsrooms, a collaboration between The News Minute and Queer Chennai Chronicles, and aimed at making the media more sensitive to LGBTQIA+ issues. NWMI member Ragamalika Karthikeyan conducted the workshop.
3. Visual Content Verification:
This workshop conducted by NWMI member Priyamvada Mangal led participants through the world of visual data research for journalists.
Through concrete examples, this workshop showed how visual data can be misused to promote misinformation — information that is false but that the person who is disseminating it believes to be true. A picture of Muslims at namaaz photoshopped onto a busy street can be misrepresented as a public protest, for example.
Tools like Yandex and Google’s Reverse Image Search enable greater contextual information for images, including if a particular image is being repurposed with a new narrative or used out of context.
Journalists need ways to authenticate visual data especially for time-sensitive news stories, as misinformation and fake news tend to spread faster than real news. Also, visuals tend to have more power to sway than text/data, and misusing/manipulating visual data is a big part of deepfakes to perpetuate confirmation biases, or perpetuate hate.
4. How to Make Visuals Work:
The idea of this workshop was to analyse stories which the editors/reporters think could have been better served with more imaginative photography. Chirodeep Chaudhari advised participants on how to complement their stories with good photographs. The workshop proved to be a masterclass for journalists, many of whom are also expected to contribute pictures for their stories. Chirodeep advised reporters to plan pictures for their stories right from the pitching stage itself and take it forward while researching and as the story develops. He encouraged reporters to look for pictorial opportunities during their field visits. He also dissected stories by the participating journalists and discussed how they could have been better conceptualised with pictures that went with their stories. The session proved to be a mindset shift for reporters to look at their stories from a fresh visual perspective.