Shreya Raman on how to make the most of data in your reporting
Shreya Raman
In the fourth episode of our “Peer-to-Peer” series, the 27-year-old data journalist (BehanBox, FT, IndiaSpend, Nikkei Asia…) tells us about her data journey, and shares useful tips for those of us who aren’t data specialists.
After working for a year in broadcast journalism at the news channel Mirror Now, Shreya Raman started digging into data to unearth stories. She spent three years as a reporter with IndiaSpend, the first data journalism initiative in India, then almost a year as a part-time data analyst with India Migration Now, a research, data and media agency.
Living between Mumbai and Goa, she now reports independently (BehanBox, FT, IndiaSpend, Nikkei Asia…) on a variety of subjects “at the intersection of gender, caste and disability.”
“As I started reporting on gender, I realized that, in India, gender reportage is very much focused on the suffering of women, in a very binary sense. And it’s the suffering of women of a particular caste and particular class. It’s mostly urban, educated, upper-caste women. (…) I realized that it’s not enough to just talk about women as one big group because we’re not a homogeneous group.” — Shreya Raman in Peer-to-Peer, episode 4
In this conversation, we talk about — you guessed it — data, but also the lack of it when it comes to women’s and girls’ lives, or what is called the gender data gap. Shreya Raman also shares some of the things she has learned while working with data, which might be useful especially to journalists who aren’t data specialists (so… most of us).