Subbu Vincent | Transparency, Journalism and Digital Publics: How Bangalore compares with the Bay Area‬‬

Date
-
Event Sponsor
Center for South Asia
Location
Encina Hall West, Room 219

The digital era has been a game-changer in many areas of public life, including city government. But the transparency movement in most democratic nations came earlier. Both the US and India have sunshine laws, with differing histories and federal contexts, and broadly laid out on the same premises of the citizen’s right to information. But what is the real journey civic and investigative journalists are making in Bangalore and other Indian cities using sunshine laws? How does this differ from the transparency-enabled civic journalism in Bay Area cities? Interesting nuances spill out when one compares tech-savvy Bangalore and the Bay Area. I will discuss the implications for "the digital public and journalism” by looking at two independent aspects: One, crowdsourcing as a human-agency-method to equalize collective wisdom between city-communities and their newsrooms, and two, surfacing newsworthy data and documents from city government-data portals.  

Subramaniam Vincent is currently a John S Knight journalism innovation fellow at Stanford University.  At JSK, Vincent is working on hard newsroom problem: How can community newsrooms track their cities ahead of the reporting process?  

Vincent is an Internet engineer turned civic journalism-entrepreneur.  He spent the first 10 years of his career in research, product development and deployment of Internet technology. His foray into journalism was an accident; it was US-inspired. He co-founded two publications – India Together, with Ashwin Mahesh, an India focused developmental e-journal,  and Citizen Matters, with Meera K, a civic newsmagazine for Bangalore. Citizen Matters integrates citizen journalism with professional journalism and works in collaboration with anti-corruption activists. The two publications together are associated with a total of 11 journalism awards in 12 years.

Subramaniam Vincent is also the author of chapters to two media books related to India. His work is covered in chapters of two books on Indian media.  He relocated from the US back to India in 2006, and returned to the US in 2015 for the JSK/Knight fellowship at Stanford.

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