Why Barkha Dutt always wanted to be a media entrepreneur

The award-winning journalist tells us about her heart-wrenching experience of covering the pandemic, the importance of teamwork and why a business model cannot sustain itself on journalism alone

“I see this as a book about people, of the intimacy of strangers, of the extraordinary Indian,” says award-winning journalist Barkha Dutt, about her new book, Humans of Covid: To Hell and Back, a searing account of her reportage on the COVID-19 pandemic across India.

Dutt’s country-wide coverage on the humanitarian crisis over the past two years has been widely lauded for its unflinching account of the pandemic’s devastation. Soon after the nationwide lockdown was announced in March 2020, Dutt and a small team of two piled into a Maruti Ertiga and hit the road, covering 30,000 kilometres over 120 days, with the car often doubling as a studio-cum-hotel room. In those early days, little was known about the virus; there was complete confusion about whether masks were needed for all or just frontline workers. When those who could afford to shut themselves in did so, Dutt’s reporting across the country was exemplary. She was everywhere, traveling to places ravaged by the virus, relying on the kindness of strangers as her shoes tore, her car broke, and when laundry needed to be done. Never one to shy away from a challenge, Dutt’s coverage of the pandemic work won her accolades; even detractors admired her tenacity, initiative and courage during this time.

A chronicle of collective memory

Humans of Covid captures Dutt’s ringside view of what India endured during the pandemic. Written over a period of three months in late 2021, soon after Dutt lost her father during the deadly second wave, she describes the book as a “chronicle of collective memory.” It is full of heart-wrenching tales, with an outpouring of emotion palpable in each chapter. Dutt says she broke down daily while writing it. “It was the first time I was confronting everything I had seen, including my father’s death and everything that was taken out of me emotionally as a reporter,” she says. She almost abandoned the enterprise but her publisher, Chiki Sarkar, urged her to stay the course, and Dutt persevered. “I had all these people with their tragedies, courage, compassion and resilience and I wanted to chronicle their lives in both visual and written form, so that they knew in the midst of all that sorrow, there would be a record of this moment,” she says.

While she didn’t keep a diary, Dutt had thousands of hours of footage and photographs (“I look at this material and I wish that one day there was some sort of global museum dedicated to this time” she says), which she referenced. In the book, she notes how the virus was never the great equaliser it was purported to be. While the rich baked banana bread and marvelled at clear skies, the poor lost livelihoods and walked home hundreds of kilometres on foot. Even as the book shines a light on those whom Dutt refers to as “beacons of hope and strength,” she points out the costly policy failures. As she wrote in a recent piece for the BBC on the first anniversary of her father’s death, like so many Indians, he did not have to die.

Humans of Covid is also reflective of Dutt’s own evolution. In her telling, the pandemic enabled her to rediscover her roots as a shoe-leather reporter. Candidly, she admits to a staleness and ennui that had crept into her work as a television journalist. With over 25 years of experience, she says she “got caught up in this maelstrom of politics living in India’s capital–you end up in this navel-gazing universe. Instead of pushing myself to be the best I could I was kind of becoming middling. I wasn’t connecting with my audiences enough, I wasn’t talking about issues that really matter to me. The pandemic pulled me out of that.”

Redefining journalism

Dutt, who turned 50 in December last year, had flirted with the idea of becoming a media entrepreneur several times over the past decade. She was restless at the direction TV news (and she) had taken. And while she had registered her independent YouTube news channel MOJO (which means magic but is also a play on mobile journalism) a few years ago, she embraced it wholeheartedly only at the end of 2019. As a news junkie, her timing could not have been better. She was deluged with news that she says tested her mettle as a reporter: the nationwide protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, Donald Trump’s visits against the backdrop of the Delhi violence and shortly thereafter, a pandemic. While Dutt seems to be a one-woman army, she has grown MOJO into a team of 20. Her challenge, she says, is to bring attention to other journalists on her team. “I want people to say MOJO and think of at least five other names besides mine,” she explains. The channel is available on YouTube and recently had a soft launch of its website. Funding is received via grants and donors, including IPSMF, the Bengaluru-based Independent and Public-Spirited Media Foundation. MOJO pitched and won to be one of 65 journalism partners for YouTube.

Dutt, who works seven days a week, regularly putting in 14-hour-long days, also runs the gender-focused event called We the Women, and is commissioned to develop content for non-MOJO projects. “We are a for-profit multimedia content and events company and I do not believe a business model can work only on journalism itself,” she says. “Journalism is at our core but news will not pay for itself, so you have to use affiliated skills.” She hopes to explore the OTT space and develop an offline, membership-based community for women, amongst other projects. “MOJO is why I became a journalist,” she says. “People say this is Barkha 2.0 but I say it's Barkha 1.0. I have rediscovered what I am good at and what I love doing.”

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