Author: Sara Shipley Hiles

My visit with (perhaps) the next Prime Minister of India

Sara Shipley Hiles

Earlier during our tour of India, we visited the massive campus and training center of Infosys, the IT giant.

Yesterday, we met the man behind the company. Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys and the inspiration behind “The World is Flat,” now runs a massive government effort to create online identity cards for all 1.2 billion people in India, allowing the disenfranchised poor in cities and remote villages to have an official identity for the first time.

When completed, the Aadhaar system will be the largest biometric database in the world. Forbes India has called it “the most transformative project modern India has seen.”

We met Nilekani in the New Delhi offices of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), of which he is chairman. Nilekani was relaxed and gracious with our group as we chatted over coffee and cookies.

The tech titan clearly relished the challenge of using innovative technology to address a pressing social need. Half of births in India are unrecorded, and more than 700 million Indians lack bank accounts, living on subsistence income and having no way to save or transfer money. Without an official ID, such as a driver’s license or passport, many poor Indians cannot get a mobile phone, reserve a train ticket, or sign up for government benefits such as food assistance or scholarships. This can lead to corruption and unnecessary costs – a “poverty premium” – as people sometimes resort to paying bribes to create needed IDs, said Shrikant Karwa, UIDAI manager of process and operations.

“Here we are solving a societal problem: How to get millions of people into the formal economy,” Nilekani said.“There is no other system in the world like this.”

The system works this way: Aadhaar enrollment agents set up shop in a city or village. Individuals register by giving a name,address, gender and date of birth, plus biometric scans of all 10 fingerprints and both irises. Exceptions have to be made for people such as lepers who don’t have all their digits, or for laborers who have worn off their fingerprints. The registrant receives a print-out with his or her new Aadhaar number, which is verifiable online.

Enrollment costs have been $2 per person, and in just three and a half years, the program has issued 550 million IDs.

Nilekani explained that Aadhaar was designed using open source technology so it could be used as a platform for innovation. Not only can banks use the system, but many other public and private agencies can take advantage of the authenticated ID.

“Just like with the Internet, we can’t foresee all the future applications, but we foresee benefits,” Nilekani said. “Like Facebook Connect or Google Connect, it’s a platform.”

News reports say that Nilekani, who recently announced his intent to run for office in the Congress party, may be a candidate for Prime Minister. He told our group that “politics is more difficult than technology,” but he sounded ready to use Aadhaar as a platform of his own.

“My belief is that India needs to fix a lot of things quickly if it wants to realize the aspirations of its people,” he said. “This is a way to do that.”

Doing a lot with a little

Sara Shipley Hiles

India’s unofficial motto could be “Doing a lot with a little.”

A coconut isn’t harvested just for its sweet flesh. The fibrous husk is woven into rope. The shells are made into cups.

Even cow dung patties – ubiquitous on the narrow, dusty streets – are collected, dried, stacked and used for fuel.

The School of Film and Mass Communication runs Radio Adan 90.4, a community radio station.
The School of Film and Mass Communication runs Radio Adan 90.4, a community radio station.

We noticed a similar resourcefulness at SHIATS, a university we visited in Allahabad, a city in the populous and poor northern state of Uttar Pradesh. The university’s School of Film and Mass Communication squeezes an impressive amount of work from a small amount of resources.

My journalism colleague, Randy Smith, and I visited with three faculty members in the department. Its offices reside on the fourth floor of a large, concrete building with a central open-air atrium. The rooms are unheated, despite cool winter nights averaging just over 50 degrees. During our visit, people simply went about in wool hats, jackets and scarves. Even the dining hall was not heated.

The Film and Mass Comm department, just 7 years old, exemplifies a trend in India. Print and electronic media are rapidly expanding as the society becomes more urban and literate. Many universities are opening schools of journalism and communication. The SHIATS faculty asked what they could learn from us, the oldest journalism school in the world.

Randy explained the Missouri School of Journalism’s famous “Missouri Method,” in which our students learn through working at the school’s newspaper, magazine, TV and radio stations and other outlets.

SHIATS assistant professor Nishant Singh responded, “We must be using the Missouri Method then.” The department publishes a daily newspaper and runs a 24-hour community radio station, in addition to producing programming for cable TV. He gave me a copy of the newspaper, an eight-page broadsheet that had color photos inside.

Randy and I were amazed. We know how much work it takes to put out these publications. The Missouri School of Journalism has about 90 full-time faculty and more than 2,000 students.

The SHIATS mass comm department has just 200 students and eight regular faculty members. In addition to journalism, the department teaches film, animation and business communication.

We toured the department’s film shooting floor, recording studio, radio station, library and computer labs equipped with FinalCut Pro, the same editing software we use at home. The facilities were modest but adequate.

We felt the school could use help with online and social media training (none of the publications has a website) as well as courses in journalism law and ethics and specialties such as business and environmental journalism.

Randy and I told our new friends we’d be happy to help in any way we can, and we promised to Skype. I have a feeling we would learn as much as we would teach.

India’s environmental consciousness

Sara Shipley Hiles

India is a complex place. With more than 1.2 billion people here, it’s impossible to say that Indians have a single way of doing anything.

The same applies to environmental issues. We’ve witnessed many contrasts and contradictions in the past week. The developed world could learn from India’s smart use of resources in some areas. Yet in other ways, India has far to go.

A traditional Indian standing toilet - hold the toilet paper.
A traditional Indian standing toilet – hold the toilet paper.

Let’s take trash as an example. As any foreign visitor knows, Indians traditionally don’t use toilet paper. (A trip to the ladies’ room means bringing your own TP. If you forget, let’s just say you’ll understand why Indians use only the right hand for eating food, as the left hand is reserved for dirty work.)

While most Westerners would consider toilet paper a necessity, it’s an absolute waste from an environmental perspective. Paper flushed into the sewer system must be strained out and processed at the sewage treatment plant. Yes, paper is biodegradable, but why throw something in the sewer just to remove it a few miles downstream?

Indians have learned to live without toilet paper, or paper hand towels, or paper cups. Public restrooms are equipped with water sprays to clean the needful area. Want to dry your hands? The air will take care of that. Filtered water stations contain communal metal cups. The user lifts the cup in the air and pours a bit into his mouth, so as not to contaminate it with his germs.

By necessity, India is efficient in this way. However, the country has a severe problem with street trash.

Streets are piled high with plastic bottles, food wrappers, and so on. Stray dogs and sacred cows wander city lanes nibbling on the discards. When visitors question the mess, Indians might answer that trash cans get stolen, or city services are inefficient.

Our Indian tour guide, Sundhya, said said Indians lack a “civic sense,” and so they feel free to throw trash on common ground. She cited another reason as well: the growth in plastic packaging.

In the past, biodegradable materials were used to pack everything. Restaurants packed food in banana leaves. Picnic plates were made of leaves stitched into sturdy discs.

Today, of course, all these materials commonly are made from plastic. And so goes the cycle of economic development and resource consumption.

Sundhya predicts that children will lead the way to a new environmental consciousness. I saw a picture in a local magazine of a child holding a homemade sign. It read, “cleanliness is next to godliness.”

Amen to that.

Things remembered and things learned

Sara Shipley Hiles
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A boy bathes in the Kaveri River. Photo by Sara Shipley Hiles.

When we stumbled out of the Bangalore airport Sunday morning, bleary-eyed and eager to start our adventure, the stench of sewage swept over us. Ah, the smell of India! Or one of many smells in this sensory-overload place.

Many things reminded me of my first trip to India almost exactly four years ago, when I visited Hyderabad with a group of Western Kentucky University journalism students and professors. I was overwhelmed by the madcap traffic, the bleating car horns, the piles of trash on the streets and the free-roaming cows and dogs eating it. I took my first autorickshaw ride and drank cup after cup of sweet, milky chai.

 

 

 

 

 

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A market stall in Mysore. Photo by Sara Shipley Hiles

Two days into my second trip, I appreciate the now-familiar sights, sounds and smells. This venture will show me much more of the continent, as we will travel to Mysore, Pondicherry, Goa, Chennai, Delhi, Varanasi and Allahabad.

Here are three new things I’ve  learned already:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  1. Not all of India drinks tea. Here in the south, coffee is the preferred drink. They call it “filter coffee,” and like chai, it’s typically served with large doses of milk and sugar.
  2. Although many south Indian women still wear saris, young women here are increasingly adopting the salwar kameez, a tunic with pants. Young people consider it more modern.
  3. Sandalwood trees are protected, due to over-harvest. You cannot cut down even a sandalwood tree on your own property.

I can’t wait to see what else I learn in the next week and a half.

The world is flatter

Sara Shipley Hiles

BANGALORE – We arrived in India at 4 this morning, and presently drivers whisked us to the campus of Infosys, the IT giant made famous in Thomas L. Friedman’s bestselling 2005 book, “The World is Flat.”

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The 80-acre Infosys campus in Bangalore includes modern architecture and “green” features. Photo by Sara Shipley Hiles.

It was here, in Bangalore, that Friedman came to study the forces of globalization, and here that a conversation with then-Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani inspired the book’s title, according to an interview in Wired magazine:

WIRED: What do you mean the world is flat?
FRIEDMAN: I was in India interviewing Nandan Nilekani at Infosys. And he said to me, “Tom, the playing field is being leveled.” Indians and Chinese were going to compete for work like never before, and Americans weren’t ready. I kept chewing over that phrase – the playing field is being leveled – and then it hit me: Holy mackerel, the world is becoming flat. Several technological and political forces have converged, and that has produced a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration without regard to geography or distance – or soon, even language.

That conversation became a touchstone for Friedman’s influential book. It was so popular, even my mother bought copies for all eight of her children.

So why are we here? I’m part of the University of Missouri’s Global Scholars program, which seeks to help faculty build strategic international relationships. The Winter 2014 trip brings 11 faculty members to India, the world’s largest democracy and soon to be its most populous country, the birthplace of Friedman’s “Globalization 3.0″and home to some of the world’s poorest people. It’s a land of contrasts, to be sure, as I learned on my previous trip to India in 2009.

Our fearless trip leaders are Jana Hawley, professor and chair of the Department of Textile and Apparel Management, and Kattesh Katti, curators’ professor of radiology and physics and senior research scientist at the MU Research Reactor.

Here’s the tie-in: Katti, who grew up in India, just happened to be high school buddies with Nilekani. Unfortunately for Katti, he did not get in on the ground floor with Infosys, which was founded in 1981 by seven guys with $250 and since has grown into a multi-billion-dollar global company. But Katti still calls in a few favors from his old friend, including a private chat with us scholars later in the trip.

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MU’s Global Scholars stroll on the Infosys campus, led by Kattesh Katti, second from left, and Jana Hawley, far right. Photo by Sara Shipley Hiles.

Meanwhile, we get to enjoy a day at the Infosys campus that includes staying in the upscale “guest house,” really a private hotel with its exclusive restaurant and ayurvedic soaps, and touring the 80-acre grounds. Tomorrow morning, we will hear from company executives.

The forces of economic globalization haven’t slowed, and we scholars are part of  intellectual globalization – the sharing of ideas across the continents.

I’d be curious to ask Tom Friedman: What questions do you have for Infosys and its founder now?

2013 resolution: Face up to climate cliff

Sara Shipley Hiles Leave a comment

Note: This was originally written as a guest post for Riparian Rap, a blog about river science and related topics. See the original post here.

While we’re all making New Year’s resolutions about eating less and exercising more, let me suggest something more important we can add to our collective to-do list for 2013. This one’s big. It will take courage. It will take political will and compromise. It will take personal commitment.

I’m not talking about gun control, or even the fiscal cliff. I’m talking about facing the climate cliff. Climate change is the biggest long-term threat facing our economy and our society, yet we find plenty of ways to avoid facing it, despite mounting evidence.

2012 was the hottest year on record for Missouri and 18 other states, and the continental United States as a whole, according to a recent report from the National Climatic Data Center. The ninth straight year of record-breaking heat was also an historic year for extreme weather, from severe drought to super-storm Sandy.

Graphic source: National Climatic Data Center’s State of the Climate 2012 report, http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/2012/13/supplemental/page-1/

 

Yet what dominates the news cycle? Not climate change. An annual analysis of climate change coverage conducted by The Daily Climate, a nonprofit journalism site, found the number of stories on climate change dropped 2 percent last year, the third year of decline.

Media Matters, a progressive media research center, found that climate change coverage on network TV remained low last year, despite the weather extremes. The report singled out Sunday shows for spending just 8 minutes on climate change, down from more than an hour in 2009, and not quoting a single scientist on climate change in four years.

I don’t blame my fellow environmental journalists, many of whom have fallen victim to newsroom cuts. We are pushing hard to cover what we see as the Story of the Century. And some publications have actually increased climate coverage, but even they can fall prey to industry pressures.

News broke today that The New York Times, which far outpaced four other national papers with its climate reporting last year, will dismantle its environment desk.

This is particularly disappointing. The Times managing editor for news Dean Baquet told InsideClimate News the move wouldn’t change the newspaper’s commitment to covering the environment or climate change.

I hope so, but I’m worried. Climate change needs to be on the national agenda, as much as the latest disaster. And yet climate change wasn’t mentioned once during last year’s presidential debates. Environmental groups are protesting “climate silence.”

It’s not just about saving polar bears, as some cynics would say. Just last year alone, The United States saw 11 weather-related disasters pass the $1-billion cost mark. While scientists are loath to attribute individual events to climate change, a warming world tilts the system toward chaos – very expensive chaos. (For a helpful analogy, see the clever video explaining how greenhouse gases are the “steroids” of weather, much like steroids in baseball.)

The World Bank released a report warning that the world must take steps to avoid warming 4 degrees, as is predicted by the end of the century without radical policy change. The report threatened devastating consequences, including the inundation of coastal cities, higher rates of starvation, increased water scarcity and more high-intensity tropical storms.

If these events come to pass, we will be very sorry we didn’t address climate change when we had the chance.

So let’s do something that’s good for us this year. Eat more kale, and don’t be afraid to talk about climate change.

Graphic source: National Climatic Data Center’s State of the Climate 2012 report, http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/images/us/2012/ann/Prelim_Significant_Weather_US2012.gif

 

About the author: Sara Shipley Hiles is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Missouri. She is also a freelance journalist and longtime environmental reporter and member of the Society of Environmental Journalists. While at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, she wrote a series of stories about extensive development of floodplains that were underwater in the Great Flood of 1993. Her academic research looks at media coverage of climate change.

Dead zone pollutant grows despite decades of work. But who’s the culprit?

Sara Shipley Hiles Leave a comment

For two centuries, the town of Hermann has been known for the Missouri River. But now the river is making Hermann known for an unexpected reason: It is a hot spot for nitrate. Despite three decades of costly efforts to clean it up, the levels at Hermann have increased 75 percent since 1980. From farm and urban runoff, nitrate throughout the vast Mississippi River basin funnels into the Gulf of Mexico, where it sucks oxygen out of the water and kills almost everything in its path. One of America’s most widespread and challenging environmental problems, this pollution continues to pour into the rivers – and ultimately the Gulf – at a growing pace. And no one has figured out exactly why. One theory is that more fertilizer is washing into the watershed because corn acreage has skyrocketed. But some old nitrate could be bubbling up from contaminated groundwater, and urban population growth could play a role, too.

(more…)

Save The Times-Picayune!

Sara Shipley Hiles Leave a comment

I just signed a petition to save The Times-Picayune, New Orleans’ prize-winning newspaper, which recently announced plans to cut print publication back to three days a week.

Save the Times-Picayune!It was where I cut my teeth as a cub journalist, starting on the copy desk during my senior year in college at Loyola University. I became a stringer, writing about issues on the college beat, including the paper’s first story on the then-unknown phenomenon of the Internet. Later, I covered city government, higher education, the famous Louisiana legislature, and topics including a Superfund cleanup, underage drinking, homeless teenagers and the Pearl River swamp. I was there when the paper won one of its Pulitzer Prizes, for a series on the dire state of the world’s oceans.

I owe much in my career to my mentors from the T-P, including Kristin Gilger (now associate dean of the Arizona State University Cronkite School of Journalism), Keith Woods (now a vice president at NPR), and Mark Schleifstein (still the voice of the environment at the Picayune).

But it’s not out of a sense of mere nostalgia that I question the Picayune’s move.

I’m all for digital news. It is, I believe, the way of the future. I just think that the time isn’t right to cut back print publication – and certainly not to cut the newsroom by half. Here’s why:

  1. This move won’t save much money. According to an analysis by Rick Edmonds on Poynter.org, these cuts will save a paltry 3 percent. He figured saving 25 percent of costs by eliminating four days of printing plus employee cutbacks, compared to a predicted 22 percent loss in advertising and circulation revenue.
  2. A professional staff is needed to create a professional product. Readers and viewers want a high-quality publication, whether it’s on paper or on the Internet or both. Cutting half of the newsroom – reporters, editors, copy editors, designers, photographers and so on – will dramatically limit the Picayune’s ability to create its award-winning, community-focused coverage.
  3. The digital divide is still great, especially in New Orleans. A story published by thelensnola.org reported that high-speed Internet subscribers in New Orleans tend to be white and in higher income brackets. The implication is that poor, minority communities will be more cut off from the news – and the civic engagement it fosters.
  4. Many people complain that the paper’s website, NOLA.com, isn’t ready for prime time. The website got a recent redesign, but critics say the site is terrible.

Journalism is a business, sure, but it’s also a public trust. Good journalism can and should be done on multiple platforms. This move, however, seems rash – especially in a city where the print edition is still so much loved and needed.

The “best assignment ever”: Live Twitter coverage

Sara Shipley Hiles Leave a comment

Can class assignments be both educational and entertaining?

I think so. Last semester’s Live Twitter Coverage assignment seemed to hit that sweet spot for students, who said it was “exhilarating,” “fun,” “a great learning experience,” and even “one of the coolest assignments I’ve had.”

It’s easy to duplicate, so I’ll share it here for other instructors who might want to try it. Enjoy!

Twitter for Journalism

 

Overview: This assignment teaches students how to use Twitter for journalism – specifically, to cover a community event live on Twitter as part of a group project. After the event, students write a two-page paper describing the experience and analyzing their work. Later, the teacher leads the class in creating a Storify story about the event. This assignment spans 2-3 weeks of class.

Student audience: This assignment was for the JOUR 2500 basic reporting class at Bowling Green State University, which all journalism and PR students take. It’s appropriate for beginning reporting students but could apply to more advanced students as well.

Advance planning: The instructor should identify a major community event that students can cover over several hours or days. In Fall 2011, I used the Black Swamp Arts Festival, a community arts fest in downtown Bowling Green that spans three days. In Spring 2012, I picked BGSU’s Dance Marathon, a student-driven event to raise money for charity that lasts for 36 hours. I put the event dates on the syllabus early in the semester, then as the time came closer, gave students the opportunity to sign up for two-hour time slots using Google docs. Last semester, because I had 30 students and only 13 shifts available, I let them pair up. In the fall semester, students were on their own.

Week 1

Twitter setup: Prior to class lectures and practice on Twitter, I asked students to do two things: 1) set up their Twitter accounts, and 2) read a set of articles on Twitter and journalism. My instructions looked like this:

Prior to class Tuesday, set up a Twitter account you can use for news purposes, if you haven’t already. Fill out your bio and add our class website. Bring your Twitter username to class so we can share. Download Twitter app to your smartphone, if possible. If you don’t have a smartphone, read the instructions for using Twitter via SMS. Important sites:
– Twitter – go here to create your account, fill out profile
– Tweetdeck – download a nifty, free desktop Twitter user interface
– Twitter mobile downloads for your smartphone or read FAQs on SMS and other options

Online Twitter readings:
–Knight Digital Media Center: Twitter for Journalists
– Mindy McAdams – Journalists:  How to Get Started on Twitter
– ASNE Twitter guide
– Mashable’s Twitter Guidebook (a comprehensive guide)
– Mashable – Twitter for Journalists
– Twitter’s own Twitter guide for journalists

Class 1 – Twitter lecture: I gave my introductory lecture on Twitter on Tuesday and had students log into their Twitter accounts to do some exercises. You can find my Twitter PowerPoint here. Homework for the next class was:

Follow your classmates and instructor on Twitter. Find 10 and follow “real” journalists.  Post 10 new journalism-related tweets (or retweets).

Class 2 – Event Planning: On Thursday, I reviewed specific instructions for the weekend’s reporting shift, including research and planning for students’ shifts. You can find my Spring 2012 assignment sheet here on Google docs. My list of Twitter Best Practices is here.

Week 2

Class 1 – Live Twitter practice. We used part of a class to do a brief live-Tweeting experience using Susan Cain’s excellent TED Talk on The Power of Introverts. Pretending the lecture was live on campus, I gave the students 10 minutes to prepare by doing research. Then we covered the 20-minute speech “live” by Tweeting it as we listened. I instructed the students to use a group hashtag. We used TweetChat and TweetDeck to follow the Twitter stream and watched it scroll live on the projector screen. Half the class Tweeted using the lab computers and half used their mobile devices. Then we switched halfway through the lecture. This exercise proved a great way to practice and work out some of the kinks of live Tweeting, such as having links and hashtags saved in advance, and what to do when mistakes are Tweeted. (Answer: Correct them in another Tweet.)

Week 2 ended with the weekend Live Twitter Coverage assignment. The Dance Marathon event lasted from Saturday morning until Sunday night. Students had signed up for two-hour shifts. All I had to do was sit back and monitor them on TweetDeck, occasionally retweeting or sending them private notes. Ahhhh!

Week 3

Class 1 – Post-mortem. First, we discussed what worked and what didn’t.

The biggest mistakes: spelling and AP style errors, as well as several name misspellings. Students corrected these factual errors as soon as they noticed them. Other mistakes: Not preparing enough, getting too focused on the technology and not stopping to talk to people enough. Some people had technical trouble; one person had to borrow someone’s laptop on the spot.

The upsides: lots of fun, lots of photos and some video. The students universally enjoyed the assignment, even if they didn’t think they would at the outset. They found Twitter a fun, valuable tool. They loved the immediacy and the interaction with both audience and sources. Some people got creative by adding novel hashtags and bringing in new usernames.

The students’ papers were due. Part 1 was a cut-and-paste of their Tweets (so I didn’t have to search for them individually). Part 2 was their self-evaluation against the assignment and the Twitter Best Practices document. The paper was easy for me to read, and I enjoyed hearing their honest (and sometimes funny) self-reflections.

Class 1 or 2 – Storify. Next, I led the students in creating a Storify on the Dance Marathon event. To spend more time with Storify, make this an entire separate class. You can find my Storify handout here. I encouraged the students to approach the Storify as a separate story with a beginning, middle and end, using not only their own Tweets, but those of others, as well as any content they could find on the Web. Afterward, we uploaded the Storifys to our class website. Here’s one example:

 

That’s it!

Hope you enjoyed this overview of a simple Twitter live coverage assignment. If you like this assignment or use it yourself, please let me know.

 

Hands-on learning

Sara Shipley Hiles Leave a comment

Watching my 3-year-old son, I’m often reminded that we learn by doing. We practice tracing letters, putting together a puzzle, or hitting a baseball.

Learning journalism is the same way. Whether it’s live-Tweeting a local festival, covering a city council meeting, or visiting the Occupy encampment in downtown Bowling Green, students learn best when they can apply what they’ve learned in the classroom.

Theater and film department chair Ron Shields opens the door to what he calls the "Taj Mahal" of costume shops. Photo by Sara Shipley Hiles.

I recently arranged for my Basic Reporting classes to get a “media tour” of the Wolfe Center, BGSU’s sleek new arts building. Spokeswoman Jen Sobolewski handed out media packets, Theatre and Film Department Chair Ron Shields took us backstage, and project manager Ryan Miller shared construction details.

Students took notes and photos and then published their stories on our class website, BG Reports.

Here are some pictures I took during our visit.