Incoming Programmes Officer Neha introduces herself, talks student journalism, and explores how the problem of the archive begins in the newsroom.
It’s my first week, and I’m reading back through indices and papers somewhat vertiginously, getting to grips with the three interconnected programmes and trying to decide what I should crack on with first. Disorienting, but exciting.
Based in Exeter and later Oxford, I came to PINF from a generally communications-oriented and academic background, having worked at a literary organisation, a national disability charity, the DPPA's decolonising unit consulting with UKHE, and also spent a year writing and negotiating publication for an eco-fiction novel (out in 2027!). But what I keep coming back to this week are the years I spent as a student journalist and editor whilst studying for my degrees.
Student journalism is a strange one: university papers are usually modelled in the image of the national broadsheet yet are akin to independent local newspapers in every other way. You’re writing for a ‘captive’ readership nominally part of the same community and living in the same general area, where the stakes feel enormous from the inside and seem invisible to those outside. Funding is scattered at best and nonexistent at worst.
Most in the 'stu-jo' gauntlet find out quickly that the hardest yet most rewarding aspect is informing people that they have a stake in and a right to scrutinise the decisions being made about them and their surroundings. The subjects that matter most tend to be the least glamorous: governance structures and classroom budget allocations and other small institutional drifts that shape the conditions of people’s lives without announcing their significance. Given enough time, you come to understand that power itself relies on this presumption of insignificance, and that the loudest of decisions are usually made in the quietest of rooms.
Later, during my time working on decolonising across various sectors, I kept running into the persistence of institutional amnesia, and spent quite a bit of time in archives writing up reports on UK institutions’ historical relationships with the East India Company and the British sugar trade and how these relationships continue to surface in the 21st century. Though the results differed across industries and regions, they all served as varying answers to the question of what happens when people lack the mechanisms to participate in their pasts and thus their present.
Monocultures are fragile in any ecosystem: if you plant the same crop across enough land, it’s only a matter of time until a single disease takes everything. Any history of a place taken as the truth contains within it a series of omissions, and no single account you find in the archive is ever the ‘true’ account but simply the last one left standing. Looking at the Local News Map, I’m seeing the precursor to the archive-problem playing out in present-day, getting a bird’s eye view of all the choices lost when people are made to believe there is only one.
A foundational concept in oral history is that memory that isn't practiced becomes pigeonholed, and that languages with no speakers become unspeakable. Communities covered only externally and only as peripheral problems, sites of deprivation or crime or 'secondary' aspects of a 'national' story, are put at risk of developing an indifference to local institutions that takes away their right to engaged citizenship. When the range of what gets covered narrows and the same stories are told about the same places by the same strangers, the whole ecosystem becomes brittle.
I find PINF’s framing most interesting in this context, how the mission isn’t necessarily to ‘restore’ something that has ‘declined’ but rather to point out that the conditions for a truly plural public sphere don’t spontaneously emerge via market forces. Turning once more to the Local News Map and ‘news deserts’, I’m already starting to trace how the communities most comprehensively underserved by existing journalistic infrastructure are clustered around areas experiencing sustained economic disinvestment, where it’s often advantageous for formal institutions to have the least public accountability, and living citizens are treated as little more than data sources, or 'problems'.
Which is all a convoluted way of saying: I don’t really have a policy background, but I’ve spent a lot of time across my career thinking about making causes legible to people who may not yet know they have a stake in them, and about the historical consequences of populations being made to feel like symptoms of their environment rather than drivers of change. And so, understanding that the ‘product’ can’t change unless the underlying reporting structures and funding models do so as well.
I’m really looking forward to getting properly started, and can’t wait to hopefully meet several of you at the Local News Forum in Belfast this October. Feel free to drop me a line anytime about anything. In addition to news chatter, I enjoy conservation, puffins, obscure litfic and terrible cinema, and can promise I don’t only talk about archives.
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