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My first day at IIJNM (the Indian Institute of Journalism and New Media) was Monday, Aug. 29. I’ve got my own office. The students are in class Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but are reporting in the field Tuesdays and Thursdays. The Institute has asked me to help create a site for all the broadcast stories. It’s not quite Rockbridge Report, because the lead producer for that site is creating a multimedia site with both print and broadcast stories. This site will just have broadcast stories, but will also include slide shows and polls. I also have to show them how to come with links that relate to their stories. To create this site, we will be using stories that were already produced for the newscast. But I will be working with a team of students. Producer’s duties: Each team has a lead producer to decide the main stories to lead the site. That lead producer will a sketch out of how he/she wants to layout the stories. The media lab and studio are high-end. They’ve got macs in their video editing suites. Reporter’s duties: Each reporter should have each of their broadcast stories transferred into a You tube format. Each reporter should write their anchor lead-in as they would for broadcast, so this can be converted into a blurb for the site. Each reporter should come up with a headline for their story. Each reporter should come up with links that relate to their story as well as a poll question. Once the reporter has completed each of these tasks, he/she should relay the information to the producer. We are working on this process, the broadcast site, over a period of four weeks. Once students grasp this concept it will become part of a daily operation. Right now they are getting used to coming up with stories ideas and reporting in the field with their camera equipment. All this starts next week. Meanwhile, we have the next two days (Aug. 31 and Sept. 1) off because of Eid and Ganesh Chaturthi.Indira S. Somani, Ph.D. is an Independent Documentary Filmmaker. After a 26-year-career as a television newscast producer and broadcast journalism professor, Somani moved to LA and enrolled in the MFA in Directing/Production, Documentary film program at UCLA. Currently in production is a personal documentary about her role as a caregiver for her Mom who battles depression. The film reveals how much Somani and her mother rely on each other for emotional support. Other films Somani has directed and produced include Life on the Ganges (2017), a 10- minute documentary directed, produced and filmed in Varanasi, India, during Dev Diwali, when people from all over India travel there to bathe in the Ganges River. The film screened in film festivals in the U.S., India and Europe and won Best Short Documentary at the Berlin Independent Film Festival, and the Cannes Short Film Festival. Another film Somani directed, produced and wrote was, Crossing Lines (2007), a 30-minute personal essay documentary about her struggle to stay connected to India after the loss of her father and to maintain and preserve her Indian cultural identity. The film won numerous awards, screened in film festivals nationally and internationally, aired on PBS affiliates through NETA from 2008-2011, and has been used by more than 100 universities as a tool to teach intercultural communication in the classroom. Both films are in distribution through New Day films.
Somani’s doctoral research studied the media habits and effects of satellite television on the Indian diaspora, specifically the generation of the Asian Indians in the Washington, DC metro area, who migrated to the U.S. between 1960 and 1972. She expanded her research to study the media habits, acculturation, and social identity of the same generation in the New York-New Jersey area, San Francisco, Houston and Chicago. For the fall of 2011, Somani was awarded a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellowship to study the Western influence of Indian programming in India.
While teaching at Howard University’s School of Communications from 2012-2021, Somani’s research shifted to study Black Broadcast Journalists and how race had an impact on their success in the newsroom. She has been published in several academic journals and has also co-authored two book chapters.
Somani’s academic career was preceded by 10 years as a television news producer, most notably with CNBC and WJLA-TV, the ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C. Somani has also been a leader of the South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA), where she has also won several “Outstanding” awards for her coverage of South Asians in North America. Prior to teaching at Howard, Somani taught journalism at Washington and Lee University (Lexington, VA) and American University’s School of Communication (Washington, DC). Somani earned her Master’s in Journalism from the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University in 1993, and her Ph.D. from the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland, College Park in 2008. Somani is expected to earn her MFA in Directing/Production from UCLA by Dec. of 2022.