Child Survival in India: Reporting Trip With the IRP
By Jose Miguel Calatayud | February 09, 2013 | India
Lea la traducción al español.
A few weeks ago, the International Reporting Project (IRP) announced the names of the participants in its trip to India this month, and I was among them.
Templo Jain en Mumbai, 2007
Dennis Jarvis
The IRP is a non-profit journalism organisation based at Johns Hopkins University, in Washington D.C. It is funded by private donations and the funding for this trip comes from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This program maintains editorial independence.
The idea of the trip is to report about child survival issues in India. There will be 10 of us and the IRP wants us to be very active in the social media.
As well as the trip’s subject, I’ll take advantage of it to reflect on the opportunities and disadvantages of traveling this way as a journalist.
Many media outlets are devoting less and less resources to international reporting. This is becoming especially clear in my own country, Spain. At the same time, more and more freelance journalists like myself are travelling to foreign countries, and even to conflicts, to do reporting on their own. Many do so with little economic and other resources, with little or no experience and without being well prepared or trained. I did it like that at the beginning, too.
Now I have more experience, but I still travel with very few resources and, almost in every case, pay for everything myself. The good thing is that, even if restricted by the lack of money and other resources, you are free to go where you want and to (try to) talk to whom you want. The main risk is that you may lose quite a lot of money if you don’t sell enough stories or none at all.
The IRP is covering all the expenses for this trip and they have also organised the itinerary and the interviews. They are even giving us a lot of background information before the trip itself. This is new for me and I want to take advantage of the experience to discuss the differences this means - for better or worse.
I’ll go on writing about this trip on this Tumblr blog, on Facebook and on Twitter. I’ll be uploading pictures to Flickr and videos to Vimeo. When the texts are longer, I’ll also publish them on my personal blog.
At any point, you can contact me by here or email (contact @ josemcalatayud . net) or Facebook orTwitter. You can’t complain about a lack of options.
Jose Miguel Calatayud, a Spanish freelance journalist, is traveling to India in 2013 with the International Reporting Project. This post originally appeared on Jose's blog.
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