What sort of opportunities exist in Pakistan for freelance journalism? Was reading this article about P. Sainath, a well-respected Indian journalist, and just wondering whether freelance journalism in Pakistan is something that is recently developing, and do they have some sort of support structures from newspapers, orgs., etc.
Sainath was featured in the famous documentary based upon his work, “A tribe of his own”. Some while back, he published his book, “Everybody loves a good drought”.
http://www.cijindia.org/Profiles/sainath
Palagummi Sainath - India’s first alternative journalist
Journalist Palagummi Sainath is showing the mainstream, commercial media how to report accurately about “poor India” by providing new tools such as accurate databases and reference points for other journalists. In getting other journalists to use his tools, he is capitalizing on the success of his well known path breaking work with the Times of India, where he reported on the lives of people from some of India’s poorest districts.
Over the past fifteen years, Sainath has built up an impressive record of path breaking achievements in journalism. Sainath’s preoccupation with social problems and commitment to a political perspective began when he was a history student in college. He is a graduate of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi where he was part of an activist student population. His first job was with United News of India where he received the news agency’s highest individual award. He then worked for Blitz, a weekly paper, first as foreign editor and then as deputy editor.
In 1992, he received a Times of India Fellowship Council award that allowed him to work on the series of articles for which he is now well known. He credits sympathetic editors at the Times with much of his success in getting the articles published in their present form. He has received several awards for his reporting including, the Statesman Award for Rural Reporting and the European Commission’s Journalism Award. In 1984 he was a Distinguished International Scholar at the University of Western Ontario and in 1988 at Moscow University. Further, he has participated in many international initiatives on communications such as the second and third round table on Global Communications sponsored by the UNESCO (1990 and 1991) and in the UNHCR sponsored World Information Campaign on Human Rights (1991).
He has demonstrated through his own writing as a journalist what he means by highlighting the processes that lead to poverty. His stories in the “Village Vox” series in the Times of India in 1993 relayed the state of agriculture, health facilities, rural credit structures, village schools and access to water in eight of the country’s poorest districts to the newspaper’s urban readers. The articles were based on visits of about one or two months in the villages of each district over a period of one year. He wrote mainly about the lives of migrant agricultural workers and marginal farmers who were forced to leave in search of work after the annual harvest, about 200 to 245 days in the year when they had no assured means of livelihood.
The series received an overwhelming response, not only from regular readers and the press but also from senior policy makers, analysts and state governments. His writing has provoked responses that include the revamping of the Drought Management Programs in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, development of a policy on indigenous medical systems in Malkangiri in Orissa, and revamping of the Area Development Program for tribal people in Madhya Pradesh state. The Times of India institutionalized his methods of reporting and sixty other leading newspapers initiated columns on poverty and rural development.
Especially targeting associations of journalists and journalism schools, Sanaith is systematically imparting his example to other journalists. Discovering through his proselytizing that journalists are constrained by inadequate data on poverty, he has embarked on a major project to develop a new statistical and analytical framework to inform both journalism and policy analysis with respect to poverty. His approach goes beyond the prevailing statistical methods used by the government to calculate the poverty line that are limited by certain fixed (income based) criteria, that do not fully reflect all the variables of poverty. His pilot program in the state of Tamil Nadu offers clear statistics on unemployment through independent surveys, citing its approaching catastrophic numbers. Even in its rough form, enabling policy makers to make informed decisions based on their ability to access this more accurate and reliable data. Current efforts focus on building from the survey data a refined “human poverty database” for journalists. One that can quickly and inexpensively be replicated across the sub-continent.
(although that attitude could just because of my whinging about working overtime :p)