Points to Poynter: Report on Our India Workshop

In March 2014, Poynter took its teaching on the road to India — three three-day workshops, one each in Chennai, Kochi and Bengaluru, done in partnership with the U.S. Consulate. We covered more than 500 miles in the process. The Kochi workshop was organized with the Kerala Press Academy and ran March 23-25 at the Taj Gateway.

What makes this document historically interesting is that it isn’t ours. It’s a report by Ashok R. Chandran, an independent journalist and researcher in Palakkad, Kerala, who sat through all three days in Kochi and then wrote up the whole thing session by session — with a great deal more style and mischief than any of our own after-action summaries. He describes the workshop as something to zip through, seatbelts fastened, and the reader really does get carried along.

The report opens Day 1 with a detail that tells you exactly what era we were teaching in: a participant tweeting from the room while the inaugural speeches were still going, using a hashtag the faculty had created for the students.

My own session kicked things off with disruption: Clayton Christensen, the collapse of U.S. newspaper advertising revenue, and then findings from The Future of Journalism Education 2013 report and a preview of Core Skills for the Future of Journalism, which was released the following month. The through-line was the gap between what professionals value and what journalism educators value, a gap that looked much the same in an Indian classroom as it did in an American one.

Chandran was kind about the session. Mostly.

It is not every day that one gets to see in this part of the world, an energetic 70+ educator enlightening the audience on “The Exciting, Changing Future of Journalism.”

I’ll happily take “energetic.” The rest of the faculty got sharper portraits: Tom Huang of The Dallas Morning News on credibility, story ideas and finding focus; Casey Frechette on digital tools and how to teach them; Zella Bracy of McClatchy on the business side; Jeffry Couch of the Belleville News-Democrat on transformational newsrooms and watchdog journalism; Sue Burzynski Bullard of the University of Nebraska on Twitter as a teaching tool and on digital ethics. And Vidisha Priyanka on multimedia, whose session Chandran renders as an action movie. I was tweeting from the room too:

@vidisha71 owns the room talking about multimedia at #PoynterIndia workshop. Lots of teaching.

The most valuable passage in the report, and the most uncomfortable, is the Day 2 session on editorial-business collaboration. Our faculty pushed for newsrooms to work across the old firewall; the Indian journalists in the room pushed back hard, describing the phenomenon of paid news and citing what the Times of India’s Vineet Jain had told the New Yorker: “We are not in the newspaper business, we are in the advertising business.” Chandran’s verdict on the exchange is blunt.

The faculty see a storm coming but apparently misread it as part of century-long rivalry between journalists and marketers in media houses.

He also notes that the session then turned genuinely two-directional, ending with what he calls a Gandhian compromise — collaboration for need, but not for greed. That’s the part I keep coming back to. We went to teach and got taught, which is the honest outcome of any cross-border training worth doing.

He closes with the group photo — “It is a Poynter tradition,” I told him — the certificates, and a feedback session that ran hot instead of polite, recorded by a room full of phone and iPad cameras. His last line is the headline of the piece:

The future is in digital, and the Malayali journalist is already there.