Lessons in Journalism from Community Journalists After I Turned 60

As I bid goodbye to 2023, and look back at the three years I spent with Gaon Connection, what I want to write in my year-end piece is about its Community Journalists (CJs) and the briefings, heated conversations and hundreds of phone calls with them at all odd hours of the day and night. And of course the thousands of WhatsApp messages that I exchanged with them.

It dawned on me how the CJs wrote with such love and commitment. They are not trained journalists and many of them have not had a college education either. But they have filled in the gaps where no ‘mainstream’ media will ever go .

In the last three years that I have edited for Gaon Connection English (GCE), I have visited nooks and corners of the country that I did not know anything about. While some of the places I travelled to physically in order to report, most others I visited, without ever leaving my study in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. Working with CJs brought home to me how if reporters and the desk work together, the results can be pretty impactful.

They took me along with them on their assignments and bombarded me with photographs, video clippings, audio recordings and WhatsApp messages, all from the field. Their descriptions, their observations, their analyses and understanding of what was happening around them was so astute, honest and crystal clear.

So as Brijendra Dubey, a CJ from Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh, stood knee deep in slush in a village in Haryana that was washed away by flood waters this July and he described the scene to me so evocatively that I could actually hear the thundering silence, see the expressionless faces of the inhabitants who had lost cattle, crops and homes, and feel their despair and fear.

The CJs sent me stories from places I had no wish to be in. But they were there, facing adversity, in rain or sunshine, and having to ask difficult questions.

Like Sumit Yadav who during the COVID second wave reported from the Ganga ghat in Baksar in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh, about how hundreds of people were burying their dead on the banks of the river as they could not afford to cremate them.

He sent images of bodies lined up waiting for their last rites and spoke to me about the anguish of the family members. He had to speak to them in the midst of their grief. He stood there right when the pandemic was at its height, all masked up, gathering news and relaying details to us sitting safely at home.

This was editing like nothing I had done before. The CJs went out into the field and filed their reports from there. The bits and bobs of their stories came to me in Hindi, on WhatsApp and Telegram. I stitched those stories together, translated them from Hindi to English, and then we published them.

While my Hindi improved in leaps and bounds, I was also forced to throw out my preconceived notions of rural journalism, having for the most part before Gaon Connection been involved with writing and editing urban lifestyle stories.

The CJs brought home to me what rural India was all about. They in their simple, straightforward and direct way taught me it was not all hard luck stories. They reported on doughty teachers, women entrepreneurs, progressive farmers, social activists, environmentalists… who were actually making life better at the grassroots.

Like Ramji Mishra, a CJ, who wrote about a wrestler who trained youth free of cost in his village in Sitapur district in Uttar Pradesh.

He also reported on the panchayat elections in Uttar Pradesh during the second wave of the pandemic with nothing more than a face-mask, face and gloves to protect him. His report on the importance of cattle in rural economy was shortlisted for the Red Ink Awards for Excellence in Indian Journalism.

I looked forward to our Jaisalmer CJ, Kuldeep Chagani’s well researched reports on age-old conservation techniques adopted in the dry and arid desert state of Rajasthan. His reports are usually about the indomitable spirit of people who live difficult lives, about water conservation techniques, passionate teachers and innovations.

Manish Dubey from Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh wrote about women mechanics in a man’s world, school teachers working against all odds to deliver education in remote areas and struggling farmers.

I remember his moving piece on a young Taekwondo enthusiast who needed a coach and could not afford one. Reading his report, India Cares reached out to help her, and now that young girl has a coach and is in training.

When I called Virendra Singh, a CJ from Barabanki in Uttar Pradesh, for clarifications, I always hoped he would break into his beautiful Awadhi. It was music to my ears but it often left me high and dry. I waited for him to finish saying what he had to and then asked him apologetically to repeat it to me in Hindi. He always did, sportingly. But it was sheer poetry when he spoke. I loved it.

It has been three years and I have edited hundreds of reports from the CJs. I am struck by their investment in their stories, their willingness to go the extra mile each and every time.

They ALWAYS met the deadline, even though they had just a few hours to file the story. Their eagerness, their unfailing courtesy (even when I was not with my unreasonable demands), and their enthusiasm left me wondering and often shamefaced.

I recalled all the times I did not deliver on deadline, did a shoddy job of adding details to stories just because I could not be bothered and was resentful if I was asked to rewrite something.

The CJs are all less than half my age yet they taught me about gritty, on-the-field reporting. And, how substance ALWAYS won over style when it came to honest, punchy, straight-from-the-heart writing. I wish I could rewrite my journalistic life.

Pankaja Srinivasan is Editorial Consultant with Gaon Connection