The Good Reporter

A COLLECTIVE BIOGRAPHY OF KHABAR LAHARIYA 

In 2002, a group of women from a rocky, feudal belt in Uttar Pradesh made an unusual provocation: that despite histories of exclusion from education, uneven levels of literacy, training in fields, brick kilns and forests, they would publish a local newspaper. It would be sold on the newsstands of Bundelkhandi towns and villages. 

Over the last twenty-five years, this newspaper—Khabar Lahariya—seeped slowly into other districts, states and mediums. It grappled, as media across the country and the world has, with the digital transformation of our lives. It became the first hyperlocal digital news channel entirely run by women. 

In The Good Reporter, through a slow and embodied process of history-telling, with layered and contradictory memories, this story is turned inside out. 

Ten women take the pen to interrogate, and then shape a portrait-in-progress of complex, flawed, tenacious journalists and the continuing collateral damage of radical acts. 

This is a story of an ever-changing rural India, and of the price we pay for chafing against the norms that still hold our worlds in place.