But there will never be any substitute for excellence and imagination in content. For independent journalists, it provides an opportunity to compete with the biggest newsrooms at a fraction of the cost, provided you are a compelling storyteller and are able to engage your audiences. I was able to build my brand - Mojo Story - at the height of the pandemic with old fashioned reporting amplified through modern, inexpensive tech, using things like livestreams, WeTransfer and phone filming units. Technology has been a great enabler in these COVID times. What big steps do you think the media landscape in India will have to take to adapt to feeding so many curious minds? India is on its way to having the world's largest population there might be as many as 273 million people living in India by 2050. Read more: COVID: Pandemic anxiety on the rise in India In the first wave, we would sometimes sleep in the car and sometimes at the homes of friends of friends as the lockdown meant everything was shut, including hotels and food shops. In 2021, I traveled just as extensively but since flights were now operational, I was able to get around more easily. I ended up spending 120 days reporting from 14 states in India across 30,000 kilometers by road during the first wave in 2020. It was a humanitarian crisis bigger than the pandemic, and I knew the only way to tell it was to be out there. To walk with them and tell their stories became my giant obsession. And because there were no trains, planes or buses running, these people walked hundreds of kilometers, often barefoot, in the scorching heat. This was the largest exodus of human beings in India since the partition in 1947. The added skills of understanding technology and production have helped me marry form and content.įor Barkha Dutt, reporting from the frontlines of COVID was the only way to get the real news out But when I reported my first story I was hooked.
BARKHA DUTT MARRIED TV
I had originally wanted to make movies and trained to be a film and TV producer. Like my mother, I too had to fight to get the go-ahead to be a female reporter at the front. Several decades later, I followed in my mother's footsteps by reporting the Kargil war between India and Pakistan in 1999.
She was also India's first woman war correspondent, having to take leave from the paper, which refused to send a woman to the frontline. As a child I was brought up on stories of how she had to fight to get her first job at the newspaper, The Hindustan Times, where the editor told her that women were only deployed to cover soft stories like the city's flower shows. My mother was one of the first women journalists of her generation in India.
BARKHA DUTT MARRIED PROFESSIONAL
Deutsche Welle: What major milestones did you witness along your professional path - especially as a female journalist? What role did your family background play in your career choice?īarkha Dutt: I grew up as the daughter of a journalist mother. My father was with Air India, the national airline carrier.
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