Shivani Naik
Sports (Print), The Indian Express
She has journeyed through the far pavilions — literally. “In my four years as a journalist, I have travelled out from the city to look for the lesser-known sports,” she says. With the spotlight on cricket, Naik feels coverage of others sports is still at an amateur stage. “But things will evolve. Till then, I shall continue covering different disciplines. Cricket is too uni-dimensional.”
She recounts a rugby match she covered in Chennai, where a boxing club was one team. “There was an altercation between the teams and then the boxers’ captain started running towards the referee, possibly to beat him up. I was standing near the referee and I thought he was going to attack me instead. So I ran. The entire field cracked up. Those are the kind of characters you find in lesser-known sports, and they make excellent news.”
—Siddhartha Sarma

Kishalay Bhattacharjee
Regional Reporting, Northeast (Broadcast), NDTV
Kishalay Bhattacharjee came to the Northeast seven years ago, planning to stay for a year. He stayed on. “The region is a great place to work; it has conflict, wildlife, rock music, diverse elements. The downside is stories from the NE do not generate much sponsorship.”
In the recent past, Bhattacharjee has begun concentrating on the big picture. He says he has been lucky that the stories to whose roots he reached became bigger issues, such as narco-terrorism. For the future, though, the journalist who pays equal attention to technical details sees “no possibility of the region figuring prominently in TV news. “Viewers outside know about Sania Mirza, 38th in world tennis, but not about Mary Kom, No. 1 in world boxing.”
—Siddhartha Sarma

... contd.