The School of Mass Communication, KIIT Deemed to be University organized orientation programme for Semester-VI students of Integrated Master of Communication and Journalism (IMCJ) programme on 16th December 2021 via online mode. Mr. Pradeep Bagchi, Senior Editor, Times of India, Delhi graced the occasion and delivered a talk on ‘Emerging Media Opportunities’.
Mr. Bagchi shared experiences of his journalistic journey and spoke on various aspects and trends of journalism including emerging career opportunities. He elaborated on the requisite skills and qualities for print, audio-visual and digital mediums. He started his talk with specific importance on mediums and said every medium requires a different skill-set of writing. Citing various current issues and news, he explained the different formats of writing a story. He spoke about different traditional elements of drafting a piece of news and the changes that we are adopting in the contemporary trend of journalism. In this context, he spoke about PVR (Preview, View and Review) format, different forms of intro and creativity in selecting the keywords.
Further, he spoke on news curation and news aggregation and elaborated how these two forms of gathering news are different from each other. He suggested the students upgrade their skills to enter and sustain themselves in the media market. Every new form of technological advancement gives another set of opportunities. One should be ready with the skill set to grab the opportunities, he stated. Further, he spoke about the career avenues of data journalism.
At the end of the talk, there was an interesting question and answer session, where students and faculty asked various questions related to reporting, editing, interviews and journalism careers. All the questions were well explained by Mr. Bagchi.
Earlier, the orientation programme began with Dr Bidu Bhusan Dash, Assistant Professor and Course Coordinator of the School of Mass Communication introducing the School and welcoming the speaker for the event. Dr Rajeev Kumar Panda, Assistant Professor and mentor faculty coordinated both the sessions. Ms Priyanshi Tripathy, a student of VI semester introduced the guest and Ms M Snehanjali, a student of the same batch proposed the vote of thanks.
Mr. Bagchi is a senior journalist with over three decades of experience in India’s top media organizations like The Times of India, TV Today Network, CNN-IBN (News18), NewsX and United News of India. He was part of the senior editorial team for the launch of two TV news channels in India – India Today (Headlines Today in 2003) and NewsX (2008). He has worked as a newsroom consultant and was part of an international team that launched Bangladesh’s first 24×7 news channel (Somoy) in 2011. Currently, he is working as the Senior Editor with the Times of India in New Delhi.
In the later part of the session, the course instructors, Ms Ruby Nanda, Dr Anurag Sahu, Mr Souptik Garai, Ms Sananda Mukherjee, Ms Chinmoyee Deka, Dr Dash and Dr Panda discussed their respective courses and oriented students for a better understanding of the courses in the semester.