The Art of Reporting

The Bhawanipur Education Society College (BESC) is known for its unconventional take on education, preferring to free the young minds from the shackles of rote and recite mode of studies to help them grasp hands on. As part of this initiative different courses are made available to students who can learn how to follow their hearts to fulfilling careers. Christened Career Connect, these courses are a talking point in the academic world and are not only lauded universally but are also sought to be replicated across different campuses.

However, BESC does not stop by just offering such courses, it seeks to live up to the spirit of Career Connect by providing students opportunities to test their learning hands on, wherever possible. One such area, where the BESC students excel consistently is Communications, with BESC encouraging its students to take up a number of related tasks so as to prepare themselves for their careers ahead. To be more specific, it is always a BESC student who reports and or takes the photographs to cover a variety of events that take place in the campus, acting as cub reporters.

To facilitate this process, the Collective “Expressions” has been formed, where students wishing to learn reporting are provided with the opportunity. Again, true to its self, the BESC does not leave things to fall into place and provides a plethora of background support to the students, including workshops and seminars conducted by acknowledged experts from the field to help the students attain perfection in their chosen crafts.

The Art of Reporting Workshop was a part of this series only – aimed at the members of the Expressions group, all those who want to break the next trending news item. The workshop was conducted by Chawm Ganguly, Editor, Blogger and Communicator of note, who is an adjunct faculty at the BESC, conducting the certificate course titled 36 Chambers of Corporate Communications. 53 students attended the workshop.

The workshop dealt with the very basics of reporting and the faculty spelt out the key points that reporters must seek to report on about an event before they delve deeper into the contents. The who’s, why’s, what’s, when’s, where’s and how’s constitute the basic structure of an event that is being reported on and it is on this structure that thoughts and words are applied to create the final report he explained. He also provided the attendees with a basic form, filling out which leads to the creation of this structure and urged the students neither to try and hide ignorance behind flowery language, nor to manufacture facts to meet the narrative. Reporting, pared down to the bones, is what is desired he pointed out repeatedly asking the students to get to the fact and facts alone without falling to the temptation of either slipping in their opinion or to showcase their verbosity.

A follow up workshop was also promised, one in which the art of writing and being creative with words will be taken up.

Prof Dilip Shah, the Dean of Student Affairs of BESC and the moving spirit behind the Career Connect initiative spoke at length about the age of communication – about how in the near future, it will be the ability of communicate clearly and concisely that will act as a differentiator between the humans and the AI that will gradually take up most of the repetitive work freeing humans to pursue higher, more creative functions. Spelling out the importance of communications in the emerging world of digitised businesses, he asked the students to make full use of the opportunities that have been provided to them, including the free use of the experience and creative inventiveness of the faculty seeking to help them communicate more effectively and efficiently.