Last week the broadcast students at IIJNM produced a new website called “Bangalore’s CityCast” as a platform for all the broadcast stories to be viewed. The student producers finally focused on meeting deadline to build the site. From my experience at W&L I have found that in some instances the production process is the same at IIJNM. But I have also found some differences.
A) W & L students are undergraduates, meaning they are in the range of 18 to 22. IIJNM students have completed five years of college and have even worked in the field. Most are in their early 20s. However, one IIJNM faculty member expressed to me that American students have more life experience, more maturity and as a result, they are better prepared to report on a story in the field. But with IIJNM students that’s not necessarily the case as some come from a more sheltered home life. As a result, the process of reporting may be harder for some in the beginning, but not impossible to learn.
B) W & L students report about Rockbridge County (Virginia), which is approximately 21,000 people. IIJNM students report on Bangalore, India, a city of at least 10 million people.
C) Both groups of students write, shoot, record and edit their own stories and upload them to YouTube, once they are approved. To edit, W&L students use Final Cut Pro or Avid, while IIJNM students use Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro.
D) While in class or in the lab, students use Facebook, email or text their friends– this is a universal problem. I have had students text their friends in class in the U.S., and I literally have to tell the IIJNM students “don’t open Facebook or email, just concentrate on editing your story” when they are in the lab. I don’t know why, but for some reason I thought Indian students would be more disciplined. Time management is definitely an issue across the globe.
E) At both W & L and IIJNM, students edit their video stories, but don’t always meet deadline, because the technology is not always so reliable.
F) W&L students use WordPress to build The Rockbridge Report. They used to use Dreamweaver. IIJNM students use Dreamweaver to build CityCast.
G) For W & L students, English is their native language. But that doesn’t always mean they can write a sentence that is grammatically correct. With IIJNM, the students’ mother-tongue is not English. But they are expected to report in English. Not all students think in English, they think in Hindi or Bengali or their native language. All the students went to English-medium schools and colleges, talk in English, and consume English media. But not all think in English and as a result it shows in their writing. We actually have an English class here where most students are enrolled. Some try to skip it to go and shoot more b-roll for their stories, but then we ask them “what’s a subjunctive.” Then they say, “I better go to English class.”
H) At W & L we preach to our students to read your script and/or print stories aloud before you submit it. It’s the same at IIJNM. This teaching technique is to ensure students catch their own mistakes like words missing in sentences, etc. At both institutions not all students have understood the benefit of reading stories aloud.
I) All students at both institutions graduate with the hands-on experience they need to report in the field and produce in the newsroom.
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.