 The International Association for Media and Communication Research Annual Conference 2021 Nairobi was organised virtually from July 11th to July 15th this year. Along with the annual conference, the IAMCR had supported no-travel events in different countries across the globe. In India, we had three such no-travel events. In Kolkata, we had organised the IAMCR India Regional Conclave and the theme was Rethinking Borders and Boundaries, the Digital Journalism Context. This offline event was organised in the Historic Press Club Kolkata on July 14th for over three hours and I am extremely thankful to the three eminent speakers who spoke on the occasion, the Honourable Pro Vice Chancellor Adamus University Professor Ujjal Kumar Choudhuri, the President Press Club Kolkata and an eminent journalist Shri Shnayase Suresh and the Communication Specialist UNICEF Office for Western Bengal, Ms. Shrucharetha Bhartan. I am especially thankful to all the colleagues over 25 of them who were present on the occasion and who took part in the Regional Conclave and took part in the discussions afterwards. Here is the video recording for all of you. The Press Club of Kolkata, after a COVID-induced hiatus of 16 months, organised its first face-to-face event on July 14th in partnership with International Association for Media and Communication Research IAMCR along with Kolkata-based Adamus University and Surendranath College for Women. It was organised due to the untiring efforts of IAMCR Ambassador in India, Dr. Uma Shankar Pandey. The focus was on digital journalism going beyond borders and boundaries, physical, emotional and cultural. The welcome note was from Dr. Pandey as the key host. IAMCR online conference is on right now from 11th of July and today is the fourth day. We as part of the IAMCR in the Regional Conclave, we decided to have the team very similar to the original team and that is why we think more as a boundary to the digital journalism context. Now, digital journalism is one thing that has finally taken up in a big way in the last 17 to 18 months. Probably it might have taken a longer time to capitalise, it might have taken a longer time before we had access to all the technologies that we do, but whatever it is, digital journalism is now here to stay. Not just digital journalism, even online and a lot of communication and teaching and all these things are here to stay. The Pandey's welcome was followed the video recording of a session from the digital divide section of IAMCR Nairobi was played out. It was played out from the speakers. It was the last one of the participants played the session. I am happy to see you and I am absolutely happy to be in a university building at the University of Rome to remote and online teaching. This produced a lot of different reactions and effects involving teachers, involving staff members, involving students. And of course the first days, the first weeks were extremely difficult because of an obvious unpreparedness of the Russian journalist medication to the situation. However, this was not an exclusion worldwide and the idea to study circumstances revealed journalist medication in many different countries came from the World Journalism Education Congress, which actually invited us to join in a way to connect each of youth and extension youth behind the area. To open the discussion, the President of the Press Club of Kolkata and a well known senior broadcast journalist working with the Doordarshan Mr. Sneha Shishur analyzed two authentic media industry documents, Digital News Report and Ernst & Young FICCI frames report of 2020 to dwell upon the spread and impact of digital journalism in Indian context. I am not a specialist, I am a reporter. So I will report something, I will basically report on two documents. Both the documents are quite familiar to you. One is DNR, that is the Digital News Report of Reuters and another is Ernst & Young FICCI Report, annual media and entertainment industry report. We all have to depend on it. Yes, there is digital divide. And the melting of digital is what is the topic of the day is that it traverses without border, sans border, which goes out of the border. There is no physical border and digital. So today what I get and somebody in the US also gets the same thing. This is the digital and the availability and access. If you have digital divide, if you have connectivity, if you have gadgets, so you have this. So it is the future of media. Proportion of social media used by any purpose of news. That is, you know, what is the purpose of news for which there are two things. You can see the Facebook and the other one is YouTube. So one borderless, they are almost the same and proportion of proportion that use each social media network for news in the last week average in 24 markets in various countries. You can see across the year that how the Facebook has increased as a first source of media next. Now COVID misinformation, now misinformation, we used to talk about information more. But now, especially in the digital because of the going away of a get keeping role and the responsibilities are not coming into all these digital legislations and all for digital media. But since everybody is a journalist and a watcher is also a communicator, the sender. So receiver has become a sender. Everybody can disseminate information. So that's why a lot of fake news and in these countries we see that the WhatsApp contributes most fake news and on the other side, other countries we see that it is the Facebook which gives you the most misinformation. Once upon a public service news through digital platforms, people are getting public service news because of COVID and all they wanted to know, even every day things got changed. Firstly, the second phase of the official first it was the six weeks or five weeks to six weeks then now it is 84 and we may not know that it may be reduced also. Truth trusts transparency on one side. They give it for the digital media and the fake news is on the other side. Mobile journalism is growing, everybody knows you are all professors, mostly are scholars and you don't explain. Media laws of cyber world and internet, this has become a major, major factor. Obviously media laws are other laws like sedition laws being applied to media. This is an area of major deliberations. This is not an area of today's discussion. Political economy of online media and new media ecosystem and power of new media. This is very important and if anybody discusses it in the light of the recent elections that how social media and new media were used for campaigning. This is a major, major deviation and it's increasing election after elections. Obviously our country has a digital divide, 54% usage does not mean that everybody has access but it is true that there are illiterate people but they manage to send pictures and take pictures and things like that, they are using smart phones. Moving on, the next speaker UNICEF communication specialist Ms. Shuchorita Bordhoun presented a powerful integrated social communication case study of how UNICEF communicated on child welfare and related issues during the pandemic raging for nearly one and a half years using print, television, radio, online, social media, webinars at all and made a strong impact. What happened in media because I also happened to work with media very closely a lot of the media was not sure whether they should go to ground zero and start reporting or is it going to start affecting them and therefore they should stay away and I'm telling you this because on those days too I was out with the media and in between trying to gather information about what is happening and also trying to draw a sense of what is it that we need to report in terms of trying to see that where is testing happening are the information on deaths and testing rates transparent enough how should it be shared and a whole lot of information that was suddenly coming onto the public domain as well as media was getting briefed on them and you also had agencies trying to tell you about the situation of the virus which apparently at that point of time was only evolving and you had different sets of information leading and adding to more confusion, chaos and therefore trying to assess what we were at the brink of so this is also some of the as part of being in the development sector we support, provide technical support to the government to civil society organizations, to academic institutes, research organizations trying to see what is the information that needs to go out in the public domain for people and therefore there's a whole series of creatives that we started developing I'm not sure for any other campaign we accumulated as much of information including creatives and spent as many resources as we have done for a moment yes the as it was evolving the information also started evolving until we looked at what is known as COVID appropriate behavior we were able to pinpoint what are the specifics that need to be told because in our kind of communication this is what we tell the media also to kindly share and this is the kind of awareness that we also provide at the community level including us because this is a kind of a behavior that we need to practice so we could pinpoint it to COVID okay we have an excellent series of deliberations I think this has been one of the most appreciated during the COVID time and my experience of working with the entire team has been no less than exhilarating if I can say we have all kinds of media educators we had the senior most reporters including those covering those important weeks we have pro vice chancellors vice chancellors we also have guests from across the border which is why I want to mention this that in the times of digital access whatever much that we had we had already gone local in many ways because of the way people participated earlier when we used to have these occasions mostly we could fit a size of maximum 50, 60, 100 and it was a larger number that's really 200 but here at each of the sessions we have no less than 150 and the people who connected all across the country at many times they were outside the country and in a very short period of time we could start telling us where is the next one happening so what you see is this is something that we need to record breaking sort of things in terms of what we are discussing today this was one of the best examples in my experience that I carry where the resources were the minimum that we used the people who spent time on arranging were minimal of course we gave in our best but if you had to have so many events and if you had to have that many kind of people it would have been very difficult the last speaker of the conclave was the Pro-Vice Chancellor of Adamus University Professor Rujwal Kumar Chaudhury who was earlier the media dean of institutes like Symbiosis and Amity Universities Pearl Academy and Whistling Woods International he focused on the rise of mobile journalism and how digital media is democratizing news sourcing stories from the hinterland Abolten grassroots voices to be heard as well the rediscovery of journalism in digital times leading to the glaring digital divide in the society were all explained by Professor Chaudhury there is a huge rise of mobile journalism today and that's one critical point that the academic field academic media people in academics are somewhat missing out 752 universities in India out of the 1043 universities have media departments not even 25% of them have a separate module course chapter not chapter I won't say module or course on mobile journalism is considered to be just journalism of another variety once upon a time it was told print TV radio internet just another medium today internet is the mother medium all the other have combined with the internet similarly just now it is told journalism is just another way of being journalism you will see 3 years from now mobile journalism is the mother way of being journalism the topic of today is rethinking borders and boundaries now you might say border and boundary is the same meaning why are we repeating it's like Sapa Riva Saith so why are we repeating the borders and boundaries are not only physical here there are virtual there are psychological there are emotional there are media space borders there are multimedia borders and boundaries which are physical boundaries as well linguistic boundaries as well cultural boundaries as well and today how digital media is actually breaking these boundaries that were there for so long there are new digital revenue models possible the new digital revenue models will actually bring these options in front of us so even when we talk to our learners as mentors we must mention this very clearly that times of Indian entity is not the source of jobs only 101 reporters dot com is there for example there are reporters from from hinterland of the country and they are aggregating the stories and then they are working as an agency to connect to thousands of news platforms in the world Roti Kapta Makaan Siksha Swas for any human being a dignified life these five are the components today the sixth component is digital connected and if that doesn't connect the country you will find another form if Roti Kapta Makaan is not there then people think that when there is no digital divide there will be another rebellion another anti-social group we need to connect the society as much as possible there may be fake news so-called fake news there will be anything but still we need to connect what can be done? what? government says 6% of the GDP for education in the liberation policy and actually spend 2.9% so make it 6% and any additional 3% we spend for digital connected 2% the government has made compulsory 2% of profits for CSR corporate social responsibility by every private company give it for digital connectivity 3 those who are directly connected to internet or telecom or devices production of devices have CSR of giving free or low cost items everywhere I had one older mobile which I wasn't using because this Samsung is smarter faster so that I contributed to an NGO please contribute we contribute our old clothes which are not torn and tattered at the moment they become tight and you know we give it we contribute our old books why not contribute the old laptops the old mobiles and put funds to buy low cost smartphones and contribute why not give our institutional infrastructure for a few hours every week to the less privileged children around the universities and colleges will the private universities and colleges do it? they need to do it that's their institutional social responsibility we are careful about government social responsibility we are careful about corporate social responsibility how far are we careful about institutional or individual social responsibility that's the question I would like to answer at the end Professor Chaudhury also narrow casted a short film on the five W's and one H of mobile journalism which drove home the point of rising significance of mojo emphatically mobile journalism is becoming the harbinger of web led or digital led convergence in journalism in times to come and this mobile journalism is being fronted by the coming in of the smartphone the smartphone is perhaps the biggest breakthrough in this century in the 21st century because today it is not only personalized it is net driven it is becoming cheaper it is becoming wider in usage just in India 830 million of smartphones are there in use even considering that many would be having two or three even there would be at least 600 million people in this country in India who would be having smartphones iPhone is a major development but even others other smartphones Samsung and many others are becoming cheaper and the capacity of battery internet power internet capacity internet becoming cheaper apps memory higher memory these are empowering the smartphone and actually creating the world of mobile journalism so what in one line would be mobile journalism identifying recording editing and producing news on the smartphone in the simplest manner so today we are moving not just the raw citizen journalist or user generated content on the smartphone that's the beginning of it but that's not journalism in the real sense and it is to evolve to structure user generated stories it's only when UGS comes it becomes truly mobile journalism a new workflow is coming for media telling storytelling where reporters are trained and equipped for being fully mobile and largely autonomous this is the crux of the point encourages cross-platform creativity and digital innovation because innovations can be brought forth only when you put in a structured story with what you get on the streets what you get all around and what you can do through your research together so there has to be a breaking of the silos silos between social media desk and video production desk and you are moving we are moving to an era where photography, radio, TV and web all these content are coming closer and it's the web content that is going across seamlessly to the other platforms there are various organizations which are practicing mobile journalism in a very effective manner we can talk about CBC in Canada, NDTV in India Lemon Blue in France Irish Broadcaster RTE RTE is even bringing full documentaries short through the mobile technology hand held mobile technology India is waking up to mobile journalism as a field, as a practice in journalism and I was also a part of education it's only in the last couple of years that institutions are rising to the occasion of including a full course sometimes a basic and an advanced course on mobile journalism Dr. Uma Shankar Pandey moderated the lively interaction session with the members of the audience who are from the academic field there is an observation how content is now free flowing across devices it does not limit itself to one of the devices and apart from that obviously there are issues with the digital world we are living in which obviously has been funded by our community it's basically the digital divide along with the health issues which is also I think moving to be one of the major concerns what are we all looking forward to learning and teaching in a blended mode where you know one way to handle it thank you so much do you think that people's choices people's views are still more segregated in terms of what to expect for what medium and can this change when he was speaking about the kind of discrimination how digital media can be a way ahead of tackling all these kinds of myths or false information and misinformation you also had a kind of resource you have a resource that but then we talk about community channels they have lack of resources they are also structured by government institutions which they are actually not allowed so how do they relay the all nature radios or the kind of government so that is what I want to know we were trying to prioritize what the scientific and correct information was and trying to promote that in various platforms I just want to just end with one word I realize that you have mentioned it was done from the homes of the artisan producers was done from us giving our recordings over mobile and even the videos that you saw there of all of them were done on mobile so I just wanted to mention that you were talking about that I slipped from that but madam you can talk more about that but in this presentation I was only talking about two community radio stations for reaching out to an added for heart of people who are not human beings thank you very much to each one of you individually personally for making it here I know these co-editons are very difficult but you all participated in an historic meet in many ways this is the first I am clearly a regional company of this sort this is the first physical meet this is the first time we are talking about the regional context in this particular manner so just to register our number of sincere thanks we also have a physical certificate