The role of journalism is changing, whether it be a crackdown on media, like India is experiencing, or an expansion of its role with the internet, as in the West.

Sumi Somaskanda, an American journalist who works for the German public broadcasting company Deustche Welle in Berlin, spoke to students in two separate presentations on Friday about the roles of media.

A native of Rochester, New York, Somaskanda said she was inspired to become a journalist by watching Peter Jennings, the host of NBC World News Tonight until 2005. She began taking internships in high school, working for the local news station, WHEC News 10 for Rochester in her senior year.

Somaskanda gave an afternoon interview with Michael Riecke, a broadcasting and journalism professor at Oswego State, about her experiences as a journalist and reporter.

Somaskanda said she attended Northwestern University, in the Medill School of Journalism, where she learned the broadcasting and journalism skills that fit in with the traditional way journalism is expected to perform. She said she learned the method of “old school journalism” which is not as commonly found anymore.

“Students now are not necessarily studying the traditional broadcast or print path,” Somaskanda said. “Medill itself has joined with the marketing program, so it’s much more focused on the business of media.”

Somaskanda said that the school still works on basic media and journalism skills, but students are no longer graduating and going to small newspapers or TV stations. Rather they are going directly to big media networks or to social media.

Somaskanda also briefly spoke about the issues she faced as a fledgling sports reporter. As a student at Medill, she covered games for the Chicago Cubs baseball team and the Chicago Bulls basketball team. Somaskanda said that, as a woman in the sports media world, she felt that she was not taken seriously and would not be able to achieve the respect, even after years of work, that her male counterparts enjoyed.

Somaskanda also had words of advice for those aspiring to work in news media.

“It’s important to remember, never take yourself so seriously,” Somaskanda said. “The other thing that I found really important was to establish a bond, a relationship with senior reporters in the station.”

Somaskanda said that having a relationship where the older reporters could give her feedback on what she was doing helped her to improve her work.

Somaskanda brought up one of her favorite stories that she has worked on, a story about a man that had escaped a massacre by hiding in the forest. She said that she had discovered the story through a photograph where she recognized the man.

“It’s an incredible experience because you’re diving into a world you’ve never been into before and soaking up all these new experiences,” Somaskanda said.

Riecke brought up the issue many students of journalism had on interviewing and sharing messages from groups with hateful ideologies.

“So many of our students have raised this question in classes, talking about how do we give a voice to those whose message might be hateful,” Riecke said.

Somaskanda responded by saying the basics of media ethics focus on the subject, that while you do not want to be a sounding board or an amplifier for their ideologies, you also want to share their place and views as they are, in balance to the other side’s views.

Somaskanda said that she took the problem on a case-by-case basis. Her advice to those reporting on a specific group and sharing the information about the movement and what they are doing in the political sphere is to take note of messages from the group on the internet, in literature and quotes from leaders and back it up against the quoted claims from the group members.

“I don’t myself interject by saying that I don’t believe what this man is telling me, but rather point to the language that’s on their own website, or talk to an expert that can place that all in some sort of historical or national context,” Somaskanda said.

Somaskanda attended Oswego State as part of the Institute for Global Engagement’s “Year of India” program, in which the IGE programming focuses on the culture and society within India. On Friday morning, as part of the “Year of India” program, she spoke about the role of media in India as it experiences a surge in Hindu nationalism under the Bharatiya Janata Party.

“The space for media, where it can act and move and openly report [in India] is shrinking,” Somaskanda said.

As the nation experiences increased nationalism by its Hindu majority, Somaskanda said that the media within India is experiencing pushback from the people who voted for the BJP as well as members of the party itself.

“Many Indian governments have been difficult on journalists in the past,” Somaskanda said. “The difference now is that they say that they [journalists] fear for their lives and that the tone has changed.”

Somaskanda said the change in tone toward the media nationally follows a trend set by many different countries in the past, but the access to the internet has changed the path it follows.

An Oswego State student who attended her talk in the morning about media in India, Shamus Lobene said that he found what she had to say interesting.

“I don’t know much about India, of course, because being American we don’t learn much about international news,” Lobene said. “It’s just really interesting to hear about how there’s a lot of parallels betwteen the two [countries].”

Riecke said that Somaskanda was contacted for the program because of her family’s ties to India and that she was asked to speak about media because of her expert view on the subject.

Photo: Taylor Woods | The Oswegonian