Earlier this year, JHR announced a new program, Enhanced Access to Opportunity for BIPOC Youth in Canadian Media, which offers paid internships at leading Canadian newsrooms to BIPOC high school/university students and graduates who are interested in a career in journalism. Through this program, Anupriya Dasgupta (pictured here) is one of two fellows who have been selected to intern at Ricochet Media, where she looks forward to gaining newsroom experience. We talk to Anupriya about what she hopes to take away from this new opportunity.
Anupriya Dasgupta is a 2022 JHR Fellow at Ricochet Media.
Congratulations on being selected as Ricochet Media’s 2022 JHR Fellow! During your internship, what are you most looking forward to?
I am most excited to learn from the Ricochet team! I’ve only just begun and am already engaged in research for some investigative pieces that we hope to take on. Not only is the research process exciting and interesting, I am also familiarizing myself with other aspects of investigation that I have not attempted before. I appreciate being able to learn at an actual newsroom as opposed to a classroom setting because I find I do my best and learn most effectively when I am actually tasked with real assignments. I think I will gain a lot from working with and learning from my supervisor and the rest of the team.
In your experience, what are some of the biggest challenges for BIPOC youth embarking on a journalism career in Canada? How do opportunities like this internship help mitigate those challenges?
I think it can be quite intimidating for a journalist who is just starting out in the field and is unfamiliar with the ways in which traditional forms of journalism or broadcast news operate. For me, over the past four years working at a student paper, I struggled to find my beats or areas that actually interest me and that I feel moved to write about. I know that daily news reporting is not something I’m interested in, and being in a news environment that was largely filled with people who were a lot more interested in that sort of thing and in a culture that had a history of cultivating the talents and skills of journalists who wanted to do well in a traditional broadcast space was alienating for me. It is also hard to find the right types of mentors who can encourage you to take on work that is suited to you. Now that I’ve become a lot more acquainted with magazine and investigative work and have been able to meet journalists in the field who are more similarly situated as I am and have similar goals, I feel much more capable of navigating this terrain that I had earlier thought was not for me. I am grateful for this fellowship opportunity, and in particular, being able to work under such a great team, because it is helping me break into this world that I would have otherwise found perhaps too daunting.