Battle for the Byline
- av5615
- Jan 10, 2024
- 9 min read
Updated: Nov 30, 2024
Indian newsrooms are grappling with a diversity problem marked by a culture of selective hiring and mentorship practices, fostering a ‘boys club’ in Indian media. Now, women and queer journalists are breaking the proverbial glass ceiling to tell diverse stories that were otherwise ignored.
For Nidhi Suresh, a 28 year old journalist, female newsmakers during her formative years were confined to the TV screen, featuring the likes of Barkha Dutt and Nidhi Razdan, hosts of popular night-time news programs.
“Journalism was something women did on screen. You come on screen, you look pretty and you read out the news”, she says. “I don’t think I ever grew up reading a woman journalist”.
Excluding women from consuming and discussing news is fairly ubiquitous across Indian households. Growing up, Nidhi rarely discussed news at home until her mother started watching the 9 PM primetime news. “The unsaid thing [in the household] was, men read the news and women watch TV [shows]”, she says.
Reporting for the past five years, Nidhi is one among an up and coming cohort of new-age women journalists who are making their way through a highly volatile profession.
Practising journalism is already a risky business in India, given the increasingly hostile environment that’s been created due to the nation's political and economic conditions. India now sits at 161 out of 180 in the World Press Freedom rankings. Journalists face low wages and risk losing their job over political leanings. With most employment opportunities concentrated in major cities where cost of living is disproportionate to wages, journalism is now a survival act. Since the pandemic, it’s only gotten worse.
Breaking into the boys club
“The opportunities always circle around one group only”, says Manisha Mondal, a Delhi based 29 year old photojournalist.
Manisha’s fight is both as a woman and as a member of the Dalit caste - one of the most socio-economically oppressed communities in India. “You have to break that barrier [of privileged caste men] and bring yourself inside and create opportunity for yourself”, she says.
Nidhi's career began with a small newspaper in Kashmir as the only woman in a newsroom of four men. She earned a salary of ₹8,000 (~75 GBP) in an office without a women’s washroom. “[Initially] the kind of stories they made me do were all feature-ish and they wouldn’t allow me to travel much”, says Nidhi.
This tendency to give ‘soft’ news beats to women journalists is based on a misplaced fear that women journalists cannot be sent to report difficult situations for their own safety.
“When you’re a woman, you’re treated as someone who’s meek, who won’t know how to navigate the field”, says Manisha. “This is the common misconception about a woman photographer. Give her soft assignments, easy assignments and ask her to do things that are not that rough”.
Queer journalists face an even more uphill battle. Relegated to a column titled ‘Others’ in employment statistics, queer representation is largely invisible within newsrooms, leadership and in news coverage.
It took Ankur Paliwal travelling all the way to Columbia University to come out as gay, a privilege which he couldn’t afford in the newsroom he previously worked at.
“I had to act straight because the environment around me didn’t enable any other kind of gender or sexual expression”, says Ankur. “I just didn’t feel that I could be out amongst most progressive colleagues. And that says something about the culture we are in”.
He admits things are ever so slowly improving for younger queer journalists and only in major cities. Journalists in smaller towns however, still cannot be open.
Ankur Paliwal: "I had to act straight"
“They actually even fear suggesting stories of the queer community in their own small towns. Because the moment you do that, the perception would be, are you also [queer]? And they just want to stay away from it”.
Women and queer journalists are not in this fight on an equal footing. While women's representation is just gaining momentum, queer representation is just starting out.
“If [women] have walked 20 steps, we are on the second step”, says Ankur.
Nidhi Suresh on her solutions, dealing with social media abuse and a message to her younger journalist self.
The ‘Diversity Gap’ in Leadership
Lack of diversity in leadership can lead to missing significant nuances and perspective that could be crucial to the stories that need to be told. It also builds a safer environment for younger, upcoming women and queer journalists to learn and thrive.
Many journalists believe diversity hiring on the lower rung helps little since they lack power to make decisions around stories or gender issues inside newsrooms. Diversity needs to be at the top too.
“I do think it is difficult sometimes, what you know as a woman intuitively to pitch to a male editor”, says Nidhi as she recounts her early struggles to include crucial elements of reportage, usually dismissed by male editors.
“You know for a fact that certain descriptions of an event or violence or rape are important to include because they are part of the woman’s story”, she says. “It’s not like you have a woman editor, who’s sitting and looking at it. The final thing still mostly gets edited by men.”
Globally, India’s performance on gender parity is poor, with only 24% of women participating in the workforce as per the World Bank. Despite being one of the largest media markets globally, this gap exists within newsrooms too, with DEI (Diversity, Equality, and Inclusivity) hiring practices yet to pick up pace in Indian newsrooms.
A 2023 global survey conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University revealed a stark gender imbalance in newsroom leadership. Women constituted only 22% of the top editors compared to working women journalists which stood at 40%. In India, the story is worse, with the share of women editors and proprietors across English and Hindi news media at 5%. This gap impacts how issues around women and queer people are reported on.
Recognising this void of diverse queer narratives missing in the mainstream media space, Ankur started Queerbeat, a digital publication focused on queer storytelling by queer people.
“There were so many stories that were sitting with me and we as queer people talk about that were just not there”, says Ankur. A glance at Queerbeat’s website will show stories about queer people struggling to find support in old-age or the relationship between queer Christians and their churches.
Ankur Paliwal on Queerbeat
His publication is also intended to be an alternative to the tragic, comical and often, actively harmful coverage of queer narratives in mainstream media, which he grew up reading in his small city of Aligarh. Back then these narratives shaped the public perception within his neighbourhood and his family, giving Ankur the impression of not wanting to be this [queer] person because they’re getting laughed at and are unwanted, affecting his self-identity.
Like for most queer people, especially outside major cities, until a few decades ago, there existed no resource or media narratives that would help them make sense of their identities. Even today, these are restricted to big protests or Pride marches or when crucial court cases gain traction.
“Inaccurate media narratives harm everyone, not just queer people”, he says, which hasn’t changed across his journey as a journalist. The quality of misrepresentation differs across markets too. “It’s true across even mainstream English, it’s worse in regional newspapers.”
Ankur suggests the way forward is having more conversations about queer issues in edit meetings, intentionally hiring queer people for top roles and including queer voices in stories that don’t necessarily have to do with them.
Queer leadership in particular can transform a young queer journalist’s growth. “What that visibility does is just magic, when you see senior people from your community at higher positions, them taking decisions”, he says. “That person will get the confusions, the apprehensions, of the younger journalists.”
A diverse leadership begets diverse storytelling. The lack of nuance and substance in storytelling is often because cisgender-heterosexual men often miss out on what they cannot understand, a sentiment shared by Nidhi, Manisha and Ankur.
Nidhi recalls a story where she went on ground with a male reporter for the same story but came back with a starkly different report compared to him. “Because I was a woman, I could actually speak to women. He couldn’t because he ends up talking to men”, she says.
For Ankur, lived experience also is key. “If [a queer person] has told me something, I would get the story. While cis-het journalists would just keep on questioning and it’s too much labour”, he says. “Any kind of marginalised space you come from, you reduce the labour on the surface”.
Manisha Mondal on her solutions, dealing with social media abuse and a message to her younger journalist self
Abuse, harassment and dismissal at work
The #MeToo movement in 2018, which highlighted widespread sexual misconduct at media organisations, rocked Indian newsrooms too. That same year, 20 women journalists came out against veteran news editor M. J. Akbar, the Minister of State for External Affairs at the time, with allegations of sexual harassment. Several other stories of harassment and abuse have come up since then.
Nidhi illustrated an incident where a senior editor she worked with, repeatedly asked her to meet him outside the office under the pretext of meeting for a story. She was “badgered” and “constantly pushed to a point which was very uncomfortable”.
“I’ve heard multiple stories from so many women journalists about their colleagues and friends here [in Delhi]”, she says.
Nidhi Suresh: "I was constantly pushed to a point which was very uncomfortable."
Being taken seriously is also a challenge. Whether it’s by male sources or colleagues and supervisors.
“There would be 10 male photographers and you will see one female photographer among them”, says Manisha. “You have to make your space between all these male photographers”. She says it took her getting viral due to her work on the hathras gangrape story to be taken seriously by the male photojournalist fraternity.
The first time Nidhi was made conscious of her gender was while discussing a video interview she was preparing for, with the editor. Without even looking at her questions he told her, “You know it’s fine, you have a TV face. It doesn't matter, you’ll be fine”.
“I have also been reminded by my own editors that I should be lucky that they are still sending me out because it would be easier for them to send two men on a story because then you only spend on one hotel room”, she says. “But you are obviously sending me because I am good at what I do”.
The boys club culture still goes strong. However, both Manisha and Nidhi believe women journalists tend to look out for each other. “There is a line of solidarity that seems to transcend politics and religion among women reporters, which is good”, says Nidhi.
Online, women journalists frequently face trolling, death and rape threats for their work. For Nidhi, there have been times when her work has gained some virality resulting in rape threats directed at both her and her mother.
“It just makes you cautious in ways that you don’t need to be. Especially with how you present yourself online”, Nidhi says. “I definitely had a phase where I was really contemplating whether I wanted to be on social media anymore”.
While she’s managed to tame the impact social media has on her, what happens offline is still a challenge. “There was a phase where I got groped multiple times [on field] or a phase where you end up feeling it in the newsroom or among your colleagues. That kind of stuff becomes more difficult to navigate”, she says.
In the field, gender bias towards women journalists shows up in subtle but impactful ways. They have to navigate public spaces such as courts, hospitals, government officers, and police stations, which are usually male dominated. Male sources tend to be hesitant and dismissive while speaking to them.
Nidhi has also observed a quid-pro-quo rapport based on mutual exchange of information between a reporter and source, both men. For women, this dynamic takes a sinister form.
“If I ask for information, they’ll say ‘But first you come for tea, first you come to meet us’. My exchange becomes my body or my time or making them feel nice”, Nidhi says. “I don’t know why I have to have tea with someone for the same information that [a male reporter] would get without drinking tea”.
Manisha says she hasn’t received too much online abuse apart from some comments about her body and being called a ‘jihadist supporter’, usually when any of her work gains some popularity.
Manisha Mondal: "They will show you that you are not a part of us."
Though on ground, facing caste discrimination is not uncommon for her. If they learn of her Dalit identity, she’d be treated differently compared to, say, a privileged caste colleague she’d be travelling with. “They will show you that you are not a part of us”, she says.
Both Manisha and Nidhi have covered issues filled with violence and death that have taken a toll on their mental health too. Yet, they've toughed it out.
“There’s this perception of women reporters having a lot of complaints. Whether it’s your physicality like when you have your period, you’re tired or in general, the stamina. The perception is that men have more stamina to be on ground and rough it out and things. I know for a fact that I’ve been on ground many times and just been in pain.”, says Nidhi.
For Manisha, risk has always been part of the job. Having covered protests, riots, the Covid-19 pandemic, and several violent incidents, she says, “I don’t think any of these assignments were risk free. There was always a risk something would have happened”.
When asked whether she’s ever considered leaving the job, Manisha says, “It’s just a love-hate relationship. I can’t live without it and live with it also.”
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