This story is from March 17, 2013

​Indians hit the highspots in American journalism

That honour goes to Gobind Behari Lal, a 1937 Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and science editor emeritus of Hearst newspapers who engendered specialized science coverage in the US in the time of Edison and Einstein.
​Indians hit the highspots in American journalism
WASHINGTON: Who was the first major Indian-American star journalist in the U.S media? If your answer is foreign affairs pundit Fareed Zakaria or CNN’s medical maven Sanjay Gupta, or even further back, Time essayist Pico Iyer, you are off the mark -- by a few decades.
That honor goes to Gobind Behari Lal, a 1937 Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and science editor emeritus of Hearst newspapers who engendered specialized science coverage in the U.S in the time of Edison and Einstein.
A staunch Indian nationalist and Ghadr Party activist, Lal died in 1982 having worked right till his death at 92, just about the time a few brown Indian faces were starting to show up on American copy desks and in newsrooms.
In the two decades since, it is a rare that a major publication in the U.S doesn’t have scribes of subcontinental stock on their rolls, with many of them in the higher echelons of editorial and management. Over the past week, the Indian inroads into such top level journalism found public expression with changes in Time Magazine and Newsweek, two hoary publications all too familiar to Indian readership.
Time Inc announced that Bobby Ghosh, who started his career at the Deccan Chronicle in Vishakapatnam, would be Editor of Time International; and over at Newsweek, and its new digital avatar Newsbeast, head honcho Tina Brown announced that Editor Tunku Varadarajan was leaving the magazine ''to move on to a new phase in his life'' including writing a book and spending time in India, ''a country he left when he was 16, and which he wants to get to know again.''
Ghosh’s elevation was greeted with delight among his many friends and fans who have followed his sparkling career from the time he came to TIME in 1998 after ten years as a journalist in India and two on the staff of the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong. In a staff memo shared with the media, Martha Nelson, editor-in-chief, and Rick Stengel, Managing Editor, said ''Bobby, quite simply, is a magnificent journalist who has done the highest level of work that one can aspire to in our profession.''

Ghosh served five years as Time’s Baghdad bureau chief throughout what the editors called ''the worst of the Iraq war,'' writing ''two of our most unforgettable cover stories'' -- Life in Hell, and Sunnis vs. Shi'ites. ''He was not only fearless in his work in Iraq but he was the guardian of all who worked for us in Baghdad. The breadth of his interests and the depth of his expertise is reflected in a sampling of his recent international covers, from soccer star Leo Messi to Bollywood icon Aamir Khan to a profile of Egyptian president Mohamad Morsi,'' the memo said.
"This appointment has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he saved me from getting teargassed in Tahrir Square last year,'' Stengel joked.
Ghosh was not the only Indian-American working in Baghdad for top media. Washington Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran, now the National Editor of the paper, and Sudarsan Raghavan also reported from there at the height of the insurgency, as did Fox News' (and now ABC's) Reena Ninan and CNN's Sanjay Gupta.
Ghosh, Varadarajan, Zakaria, Chandrasekaran are among the scores of Indian-Americans in key editorial positions in universally recognized U.S media outlets, including such vintage publications such as New Yorker and TV networks such as ABC and CBS where there are growing number of anchors and reporters of subcontinental origin.
Madhulika Sikka, Executive Editor at National Public Radio, Nikhil Deogun, Managing Editor at CNBC, and Raju Narisetti, who has headed digital operations at Washington Post and Wall Street Journal before his recent elevation as Senior Vice President at New News Corporation have all hit the high spots in the journalistic world. Some of them are second and third generation Indians, such as Los Angeles Times' Managing Editor Davan Maharaj, who is from Trinidad. Some are astonishingly young: Last January, Huffington Post appointed Jimmy Soni, a 26-year old speechwriter at Washington DC Mayor's office, as its Managing Editor.
"These are fantastic journalists who offer Americans a window to the world, bringing in a broader perspective, '' says Sreenath Sreenivasan, who is himself a distinguished technology journalist, academic administrator and professor of journalism at Columbia University. "Two decades ago, it was hard to imagine there would be so many newsmen of Indian origin in the US."
The South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA), which "Sree" helped found, now boasts of more than 700 members, many of them marquee names such as Zakaria and Jai Singh, who last year moved from Huffington Post to head Yahoo Media Network. But with many unregistered members, the number is well over a thousand, Sreenivasan said.
End of Article
FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA