Learning journalism from the best

Welcome back to The Chennai Emailer — a local journalism project that brings out original human-interest features & news compilation from Chennai. It’s run by me—Mohammed Rayaan😊

This newsletter is my passion project to highlight the best local journalism in Chennai after participating in this year's Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism (City University of New York).

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Hey there! It's been a while since I last wrote. I decided to take a break to learn more about local journalism while focusing on my work at The Hindu business line.

I am back to the usual routine now and hope to continue providing the best of journalism and learning in the process. A lot of exciting things happened in Chennai in the last one-and-a-half month.

After the Chess Olympiad, several sporting events such as the Surfing Festival, Tamil Nadu Cycling League and then the WTA Tennis Women's Tournament at the SDAT Stadium in Nungambakkam took place.

For The Hindu BusinessLine, I wrote on how several brands and companies are starting to spend money in sports. When I was reporting, I learned that companies and local authorities could come together to transform a city into a sports hub or at least create a small-scale impact.

Creating a vibrant sports-loving city requires a team effort not just from the authorities but from ourselves. It was fun to watch the matches along with sports enthusiasts and at the same time write about it.

I spoke to several people involved in the tournaments. Among them was Ajith Haridas, Chief Mentor of Hatsun Badminton Centre, a coaching centre in Thiruthangal in southern TN. What he said made a lot of sense:

Rabbit hole

Since sports reporting is something I haven't done much, I started reading other publications’ reportage to get an idea. And I fell into a rabbit hole.

I stumbled upon a long-form report by Shobana Radhakrishnan for Citizen Matters about the sports scenario in Chennai post-Covid. The article spoke about the hardships faced by local athletes in the city due to long shutdowns of stadiums and training centres, and how it forced them to look for other opportunities owing to a lack of sponsorships or even government support.

The article is a clear explanation of what goes wrong when the grassroot level of planning is not done properly to promote sports. I had similar conversations with folks I spoke to for The Hindu BusinessLine article.

In my personal opinion, the SDAT stadium could have been a lot more well-decked during the WTA Tournament. Unlike the Chess Olympiad, I felt WTA wasn’t promoted/hyped enough. Currently, the Indian Super League is on and the Chennaiyin FC are playing on their turf in Nehru Stadium.

One fan took to Twitter to share the state of the women’s restrooms in the stadium which was then followed up on and reported by Shrivathsan, a sports journalist for DT Next.

The lack of cleanliness was appalling. Eventually, the authorities took action and Tweeted with a reply.

This made me realise the importance of writing regularly such local news reports; addressing common problems and how we can solve them together.

Finding the best of local journalism

As I continue to learn more about local journalism and how other news portals are creating high-quality reporting, that was when I stumbled across different publications beyond the ones that work in Chennai.

My professor from the EJCP CUNY Program, Jeremy Caplan, suggested sometime back that I read local news portals operating on Substack to try and understand how they do their journalism.

He was right. It’s always great to learn from the best. My quest to understand how journalism is done across the globe is what helped me land a fellowship at CUNY. Eventually, that was how I came upon Splice Media, helmed by Alan Soon and Rishad Patel.

Thanks to them, I am super delighted to attend Splice Beta as a Fellow. It’s "an inclusive and diverse media start-up festival on November 1-2 in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai. Beta is the only event in Asia that brings together the media ecosystem".

Apart from my regular reporting for The Chennai Emailer, I have also decided to run a fortnightly journalism project that documents my newsletter’s progress. The idea is to interview local journalists and ask them about their work. I believe it would be exciting to learn their reporting style, ask how they monetise and engage with their community.

Will keep you folks posted! Until then, I am off to Chiang Mai!

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Did you like reading this edition? Should I do better? Please don’t hesitate to offer me your feedback. I am open to ideas and suggestions. Feel free to reach me at [email protected] or you can simply reply to this email or comment below. See you soon! Do forward this newsletter to your family and friends. 😊❤️