Disha Mullick
Disha Mullick lives in Bangalore and is a writer and consultant. Disha is the Co-founder of Chambal Media, a company which hosts the rural news brand, Khabar Lahariya. She is currently a non-executive director on the board at Chambal Media. She has a Masters degree in Gender Studies from the University of Warwick, and is an Acumen Fellow and South Asia Speaks Writing Fellow.
Disha enjoys travelling to far-flung locations, reporting and writing, and imagining how a small and radical media house can change the world. She has worked in publishing and as a journalist before her journey with Khabar Lahariya.
NIF Books
In 2002, a group of women from a rocky, feudal belt in Uttar Pradesh made an unusual provocation: that despite histories of exclusion from education, uneven levels of literacy, training in fields, brick kilns and forests, they would publish a local newspaper. It would be sold on the newsstands of Bundelkhandi towns and villages.
Over the last twenty-five years, this newspaper—Khabar Lahariya—seeped slowly into other districts, states and mediums. It grappled, as media across the country and the world has, with the digital transformation of our lives. It became the first hyperlocal digital news channel entirely run by women.
In The Good Reporter, through a slow and embodied process of history-telling, with layered and contradictory memories, this story is turned inside out.
Ten women take the pen to interrogate, and then shape a portrait-in-progress of complex, flawed, tenacious journalists and the continuing collateral damage of radical acts.
This is a story of an ever-changing rural India, and of the price we pay for chafing against the norms that still hold our worlds in place.
Purchase: Amazon:
English: https://amzn.in/d/022gp5I0
Hindi: https://amzn.in/d/01l6WDsl
Reviews:
“What does it take to build an all-women digital newsroom? The organisation’s collective biography, The Good Reporter: A Memoir of Journalism in the 21st Century, answers that question, with brutal honesty.…Although danger often follows them everywhere, these grassroots journalists clearly enjoy their work and are committed to telling stories well. The Good Reporter: A Memoir of Journalism in the 21st Century deserves a wide readership and a central place on media studies syllabi everywhere." - Hindustan Times
“The Good Reporter answers these unasked queries in this collective biography of reporters of Khabar Lahariya, an all-women Hindi newspaper'....Throughout, The Good Reporter continues to be in dialogue with its readers. But it is not about asking questions only. They are inviting you to sit with them in a pink room on the third floor of a building facing the Hathikhana masjid — Khabar Lahariya’s office — and become one with the soil and the news of Bundelkhhand."- The Telegraph
“In a crowded media world, a women-led newsroom offers a refreshing breather”- Business Standard
“‘The Good Reporter' will have readers reflect on what it means to be a ‘legitimate’ reporter and the extent to which that understanding is shaped by prejudicial ideas about gender, caste, class, education, and geography, as well as how the very notion of ‘legitimacy’ is often shaped by exclusion.” - Feminism in India
Also available in Hindi:
