The Inqlusive Newsrooms LGBTQIA+ Media Reference Guide by The News Minute (TNM) and Queer Chennai Chronicles (QCC) was launched in Bengaluru on Friday, June 9. The launch was followed by a day-long training session for journalists on how to cover LGBTQIA+ issues sensitively. The Guide is being localised into Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Hindi, and Marathi, and training sessions will be held across the country in English, Tamil, and Hindi. The Inqlusive Newsrooms is supported by Google News Initiative.
The News Minute's Editor-in-Chief Dhanya Rajendran said, "We are very proud to have produced this guide for journalists. At TNM, we have been developing processes to ensure sensitive coverage on a range of issues, and this is a very important moment in our journey. I believe this is compulsory reading for all journalists and I hope the Indian media ecosystem as a whole will become more sensitive in how we represent LGBTQIA+ persons."
The 94-page guide has chapters for various beats including crime, politics, education, health, entertainment, business, sports, alongside basics for reporters, editors, and commissioning editors and opinion writers. Most people who have contributed to writing this guide are queer, and many are also journalists.
The idea for this guide first came up in 2021 when Queer Chennai Chronicles (QCC) conducted their Chennai Queer LitFest. This edition of the fest was online owing to the pandemic, and TNM’s Ragamalika Karthikeyan was on a panel on how media reports queer issues. During the panel discussion, she spoke about TNM’s guidelines for our team on how to cover LGBTQIA+ issues. The question of whether newsrooms in general have style guides for covering queer issues came up, and as far as we could tell, there was no such resource that was detailed. The logical next step was for QCC and TNM to join hands and create the resource.
Queer Chennai Chronicles (QCC) is an independent publishing house and literary forum. QCC was started in 2017 with the aim of highlighting LGBTQIA+ writers and translators, and to make existing literary spaces and media platforms queer inclusive. C Moulee, Co-Founder, Queer Chennai Chronicles and one of the project leads for the Guide said, “There is ignorance about LGBTQIA+ communities and identities in the media at large, and there are several preconceived notions - both positive and negative. We are now at a stage where only the stereotypes about us are consumed as news - and, as most queer persons will tell you, even these stereotypes are far off the mark. The diversity of our communities is erased. When reporters call us for stories, there is always a niggling suspicion in our minds that they’ve already written what they want to, and only want to fit in our quotes to make their articles more credible. We are ‘characters’ in the story that has already been plotted out.”
“For many of us who have worked on this Guide, the idea for a resource such as this has existed in our heads for several years,” said Ragamalika Karthikeyan of The News Minute, one of the project leads for the Guide. “One of the things queer persons hear from journalists and newsrooms when we point out mistakes and misinformation in stories about LGBTQIA+ lives is — “We didn’t know.” We didn’t know what the right language was. We didn’t know how to tell this story more sensitively. We didn’t deliberately make any mistakes — and we want to learn. Well, here’s a guide that you can refer to, a guide that will help you learn and unlearn. The objective of the guide is educating journalists and newsrooms about the right language to use for LGBTQIA+ persons and communities, with chapters addressing questions that journalists in different roles have,” she said.
The contributors to the guide include C Moulee (he/him) - Co-Founder, Queer Chennai Chronicles; Ragamalika Karthikeyan (he/she) - Senior Lead - Audience Revenue & Experiments, The News Minute; Gireesh (he/him) - Writer & Poet. Editor, Queer Chennai Chronicles; Senthil (he/him) - Program Director, Queer Chennai Chronicles; Vai (they/them) - Independent Artist; Azeefa Fathima (she/her) - Senior Reporter, The News Minute; Shivani Kava (she/her) - Reporter, The News Minute; Lakshmi Priya M (she/her) - Senior Sub-editor, The News Minute; Jahnavi (she/her) - Assistant News Editor, The News Minute; Ranjitha Gunasekaran (she/her) - Assistant Resident Editor, The New Indian Express; Narayani Subramaniam (she/her) - Writer & Marine Researcher; Sayantan Datta (they/them) - Science Journalist; Sahana Venugopal (she/ze); Ankur Paliwal (he/they) - Independent Journalist, Founder of queerbeat; Ragi Gupta (they/them) - Head of Creative Content Management, Pixstory; Himanshu Arya (he/they) - Journalist; K Sathya Keerthi (he/him) - Photojournalist; Vijayta Lalwani (she/they) - Independent Journalist; and Chetna Anand (she/her).