This slideshow requires JavaScript.
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 Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Media, Journalism and Film at Howard University, Washington, D.C. Somani studies effects of satellite television on the Indian diaspora, specifically the generation of the Asian Indians who migrated to the U.S. between 1960 and 1972, and their media habits.
She has been published in the Howard Journal of Communication, Journal of Communication Inquiry, International Communication Research Journal, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, and the Asian Journal of Communication.
For the fall of 2011, Somani was awarded a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellowship to study the Western influence of Indian programming in India.
Somani is also an award winning independent producer and director of documentaries. Her most recent production, Life on the Ganges (2016), is a 10- minute documentary short about the life of one boatman, who rows tourists along the Ganges River in Varanasi, India, particularly around Dev Diwali when people from all over India travel there to bathe in the Ganges to wash away their sins and purify their souls. The film has been screening in film festivals all over the U.S.
Another production, Crossing Lines (2007), is a personal essay 30-minute documentary about her struggle to stay connected to India after the loss of her father, and about how Asian Indians maintain and preserve their cultural identity. The film has won numerous awards, screened in film festivals nationally and internationally, screened on PBS affiliates, and has also been distributed to more than 100 university libraries in the U.S. through New Day films.
Somani brings 10 years of broadcast journalism experience as a television news producer to the classroom, most notably with CNBC and WJLA-TV, the ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C. She has been a leader of the South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA), where she has also won several “Outstanding” awards on her coverage of South Asians in North America.
Prior to joining Howard University, Somani was an Assistant Professor of 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 Phillip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland, College Park in May 2008.