Media: may the force be with you

The roles of interviewer and interviewee often get diffused when one unknowingly creeps into the other's shoes. Kinjal Dagli tells us.

When the different careers for this series were auctioned before us reporters, I wasn't present. I guess everyone picked the choicest ones, and I was assigned Media. Now, we journalists anyway have an opinion on everything under and above the sun. A feature on an industry that we at HT are part of will be an open forum for opinions from everyone - the big bosses right down to the lowliest intern. Sigh.

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But deep down, I was excited. Media is a force that pervades our daily existence - newspapers, TV, the Internet, hoardings… in academic lingo, the sub-sectors are print/TV/Web journalism, advertising, corporate communication/PR, communication research. To find a young and rising journalist on TV who'd tell the story of his/her sector was a tough call - just look at the number of TV channels, and the new faces speaking into their microphones every day. I did an informal polling and asked friends, colleagues and educators to nominate people they thought deserved to be featured. I found Tanvir Gill, now a good friend.

However, before I could start with my questions for Tanvir, I had to answer a several hundred from her - right from "Why have I been chosen?" to "When will it be published". It was fun - and insightful - as we went along, did interview after interview over chai and sandwiches, sat through voice recordings and re-recordings… I've always been a print journalist, although I have many friends in television. Exchanging views on and experiences of the print and TV medium helped us both, I like to think. Being a journalist and interviewing another is quite a task. The roles of interviewer and interviewee often get diffused when one unknowingly creeps into the other's shoes. I hoped that would come through in the story so that young men and women aspiring for a media career would benefit.

As it turned out, it was a learning experience for me as well. To distance yourself from something you're part of, look at it from the outside and make sense of it for a layperson (you, the reader) indeed changes your own perspective too. An ex-boss of mine used to say, "Every story you write changes a little bit of the person you are." I like to think this story changed a little bit of me.