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By Kaitlin Bender-Thomas

In her new book, “Disrupting Mainstream Journalism in India,” Medill Professor Kalyani Chadha sheds light on the communities that the country’s growing media industry has long overlooked and the digital journalists working against the odds to change that.

Chadha, originally from India, has spent much of her academic career studying the country’s evolving media landscape. She had been thinking about how marginalized communities were beginning to use the Internet to push back against their exclusion from mainstream coverage when the editor of Routledge’s “Disrupting Journalism” series reached out with a timely proposal: Would she consider writing a book on India?

“I was thinking about these things already, and then this opportunity came along,” Chadha said. “And so then I was like, okay, so this is what I’m going to do it on.”

India’s media industry has undergone tremendous growth since the country liberalized its economy in the 1990s. Today, India has nearly 15,000 registered newspapers and 392 television news channels.

One might think this kind of expansion would lead to more inclusive or representative journalism. But, according to Chadha, the reality is quite the opposite.

“It didn’t necessarily mean that we were getting better journalism,” Chadha said. “There was a lot of infotainment. There was a lot of focus on crime, celebrities, and sports. Public interest journalism really wasn’t happening.”

What troubled her even more was the continued exclusion and misrepresentation of India’s most marginalized communities. Much like in the United States, these groups face deep-rooted structural discrimination. However, she notes that in India, the primary line of division is caste, as opposed to race.

From Chadha’s relatively brief time working in Indian newsrooms, she observed firsthand that those institutions were not representative of the country’s diversity.

“Newsrooms in India are incredibly undiverse — both in terms of caste and in terms of religion,” she said.

The impact of this lack of representation is evident in the stories being told — or more often, not told at all. Groups like Dalits (historically referred to as “untouchables”) and Muslims are rarely given a voice in the mainstream media, and when they are, they’re often covered in a negative context.

“You see this in the United States, too,” she said. “Either you get no coverage, or the coverage you get, you’re sort of the source of problems.”

In her book, Chadha draws on the concept of “epistemic injustice,” a term coined by philosopher Miranda Fricker. It refers to the idea that some communities are denied the opportunity to narrate their own experiences and to be seen as credible sources of knowledge about their own lives.

But her book also explores how marginalized communities are responding to this injustice. Many are launching their own digital media platforms and telling their stories on their own terms. She found that this form of alternative journalism doesn’t subscribe to the traditional notions of objectivity or neutrality. Instead, it prioritizes advocacy, transparency, and community-based sourcing. By shifting the focus, these journalists are actively challenging who gets to decide what is “newsworthy.”

“What these communities try to do is give a much more holistic picture of the lives of these groups, both the negatives and the positives. They try to create a sense of perspective on what’s going on,” Chadha said.

One example she highlights is the work of Dalit-run news organizations that produce counternarratives on caste-based violence. She recalls a particularly harrowing case from 2020, in which a lower-caste woman was gang-raped and murdered by upper-caste men in a rural part of northern India. While mainstream media downplayed the role of caste and framed the incident as a “love affair gone wrong,” Dalit-run news platforms confronted it as a source of ongoing oppression.

There was a real effort to push the caste angle aside,” Chadha said, “Very often, mainstream narratives will say, ‘Well, this really wasn’t about caste,’ just like sometimes they will say, ‘This really wasn’t about race.’”

Muslims face similar misrepresentation. Chadha found that mainstream coverage in India rarely portrays Muslims in an everyday context. Instead, they’re often depicted as extremists, fundamentalists, or jihadists. Alternative media outlets counter this bias by showing Muslims as professionals and individuals who lead normal lives.

Despite operating on tight budgets funded through donations and personal savings, Chadha says the journalists she interviewed were filled with hope.

“I was really awestruck by the journalists that I spoke with, and the outlets, and the work that they produce,” she said. “Because it just takes so much to keep these outlets going. Sort of a wing and a prayer, a lot of the time.”

While these alternative media outlets do not solve every problem, Chadha emphasizes that their presence matters because they give marginalized groups a sense of agency, provide holistic counternarratives, and challenge the agenda-setting power of mainstream media.

At Medill, Chadha incorporates her research into the classroom by encouraging students to confront their own biases, look beyond official sources, and strive for what she calls “empathetic journalism.”

“It’s very easy to do journalism and to feel empathetic and to focus on people like yourselves,” she said. “It’s infinitely harder when it’s people who are different from you.”

At a time when journalism around the world is facing political pressure and economic uncertainty, she hopes her work serves as a reminder of what’s at stake and to give a voice to those too often left out.

The Robert R. McCormick Foundation has awarded a $3.6 million, three-year grant to the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern to expand the University’s work to strengthen local news and scholastic journalism in Illinois.

The grant provides funding for Medill to create a shared services hub that offers expert help and infrastructure support to news outlets in the Chicago region. The grant also will allow Medill to continue its efforts to bolster coverage of state government, propel the practice of solutions journalism and improve high school media programs.

The new hub, which will expand the Medill Local News Accelerator, will work directly with local news organizations in the Chicago area on critical needs like consumer research, audience strategy, product development, revenue diversification and legal services.

The hub is an outgrowth of Medill’s Metro Media Lab and Local News Accelerator programs, also funded by McCormick. Under those programs, Medill has been working with Chicago-area news outlets since 2020 on projects to help fortify the region’s local news ecosystem and improve coverage of matters relevant to its residents. Those programs have supported more than two dozen news organizations in the region serving more than 5 million Illinoisians.

“We’re grateful to the McCormick Foundation for its continued investment, and for its confidence in us to help grow original, reliable local news and information at this critical moment,” said Charles Whitaker, dean of Medill. “This new shared services hub will help us provide much-needed resources to Chicago area news outlets. And it will allow them to spend more time focusing on what they do best — providing valuable journalism that helps residents be more informed about local matters that affect their daily lives.”

Timothy P. Knight, president and CEO of the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, said this grant supports a core mission of the foundation’s grant making.

“We invest in journalism to promote informed civic engagement and ensure government accountability,” he said. “We are enthusiastic that our continuing partnership with Medill advances this goal by strengthening local coverage of city and state government and improving newsroom sustainability.”

The new grant will support the ongoing work of the Medill Illinois News Bureau, which was launched last fall in partnership with the nonprofit outlet Capitol News Illinois. Under this program, Medill students provide coverage of state government news from Springfield and Chicago in collaboration with CNI, and their stories are distributed to 700 news outlets in Illinois and surrounding states. Since its launch, more than 20 graduate and undergraduate Statehouse Fellows have generated dozens of stories.

The Medill Midwest Solutions Journalism Hub, one of five universities nationwide affiliated with the Solutions Journalism Network, is providing training for newsrooms and colleges on the practice of solutions journalism. The Hub includes more than 50 partner news organizations and colleges across the Midwest. As part of building a community of practice, the Hub works directly with Chicago-area newsrooms on specific projects in solutions journalism, which explores reporting of responses to communities’ most vexing systemic problems.

McCormick’s grant also supports the ongoing work of Medill’s Teach for Chicago Journalism Program, which for the past five years has been helping Chicago-area high schools to bolster scholastic journalism through educational programs for students and teachers. Medill also has created a module for the College Board’s Advance Placement seminar course that incorporates journalism and media literacy. The module is being used in more than dozen high schools around the country.

All these programs are intended to help improve a local news ecosystem that is undergoing historic changes.

The Medill State of Local News Project has found that about 2.5 newspapers close in the U.S. every week and more than 50 million people live in counties with little to no access to local news. Medill research shows that Illinois has lost 45% of its newspapers in the last 20 years and 54% of its newspaper jobs in just the last decade. The state has five news desert counties and 40 others with only one remaining local news source. Combined, that equals 44% of all Illinois counties with limited access to local news.

The Chicago news landscape is healthier than many others around the country. The region counts well more than 100 local newspapers, digital-only sites, ethnic media and broadcast news outlets. Many of those outlets, however, are relatively small operations that need expertise and audience research to thrive over the long term, Whitaker said.

Medill launched its Local News Initiative in April 2018 as a research and development program to provide new insights about trends in local news and to work directly with news organizations to bolster sustainability. It’s supported by grants from major foundations, corporate contributors and individual donors.

Ten writers have been accepted into this year’s George R.R. Martin Summer Intensive Writing Workshop Medill.

Medill received almost 200 workshop applications from accomplished journalists around the world. The group of fellows includes veteran journalists covering a variety of topics such as entertainment, immigration, business, health, and fashion. They hail from all across the United States, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Israel.

“We are delighted to have these immensely talented writers in our second workshop,” said Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, George R.R. Martin Chair in Storytelling and senior lecturer. “Many have been working on these first novels for years. We look forward to helping them bring these vital stories out into the literary world.”

Over the course of the seven-day workshop, fellows will attend craft-focused classes on the various aspects of writing a novel, workshop their book chapters with instructors who are award-winning novelists themselves, attend firesides with visiting authors, have the opportunity to meet literary agents, and also have concentrated writing time.

“We are very grateful for the vision of George R.R. Martin,” Tan said. “His generosity has enabled us to create this workshop which will have an impact on literature.”

Visit the Medill website for bios on this year’s fellows.