The Good Reporter: A Memoir of Journalism in the 21st Century
In 2002, a group of women from the rocky, feudal heartland of Uttar Pradesh made a bold and unlikely claim: that they would publish a local newspaper. This was not a small ambition. These were women historically shut out of formal education, whose knowledge had been forged in fields, brick kilns, and forests rather than classrooms. Yet their paper, Khabar Lahariya, found its way onto newsstands across Bundelkhandi towns and villages. Over the following twenty-five years, it spread into new districts, new states, new formats, and eventually became the first hyperlocal digital news outlet run entirely by women. It wrestled, as all media has, with the upheaval that digital life has brought to the business of storytelling. In The Good Reporter, that history is told from the inside, turned over slowly, and examined with honesty. Ten women pick up the pen to interrogate their own story, producing a portrait that is unfinished by design, full of contradiction and layered memory. The journalists it depicts are complicated, stubborn, imperfect, and thoroughly alive. What emerges is also a portrait of a rural India in constant flux, and a quiet reckoning with what it costs to push back against the norms that quietly govern how lives are permitted to unfold.
- Author: Disha Mullick
- Publisher: Simon and Schuster India
- Genre: Industry-Specific Business
- ISBN: 978-9390343522
- Pages: 320 pages