Change is the only constan

Eight years ago, I saw a small ad in the Friday magazine of The Daily Star which changed the course of my life—for better or worse. The Star, it said, was looking for a feature writer. I had never imagined myself as a writer, much less a journalist, but I was overtaken that day by a curious desire to apply for a position. I thus penned an elaborate application, justifying why the magazine was the best fit for a young anthropologist interested in making sense of and telling stories about the world. I remember writing, with great conviction, how only in the magazine one could be a storyteller, a journalist and anthropologist all at once.

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Eight years of being an ‘accidental’ journalist later, I can say with certainty that I stayed in this profession because of those early days at the magazine and what it taught me about what journalism could be. It was why I took up the position of editor at Star Weekend years later, after the magazine had been reduced to a tabloid, a shadow of its former self. It is why I write, even at this penultimate hour of the final final issue of the Friday magazine (as we know it), there is hope for journalism still.  

Journalism, at its best, is a way of seeing, interpreting and interrogating the complex world that we inhabit. Yet, so often, print journalism in this country is reduced to a 500-word ‘breaking’ story with no ‘before’ and ‘after’, as if an event exists in a vacuum and can be made sense of without context, without multiplicity of voices and without any acknowledgement of our own implication in the story. At Star Weekend, we warned ourselves against such simplification—reality was nuanced, and the stories we told had to be as well.

And we weren’t interested in the kind of apolitical storytelling that is fashionable in certain elite circles in Dhaka these days—we believed in having a point of view, a pro-people, pro-worker, pro-women, pro-minorities, pro-environment, pro-democracy, pro-freedom point of view. We tried to constantly interrogate our own privileges, operating as we did within an elite English newspaper, and made conscious efforts to address our class bias in the kind of stories we did and how we did them. We tried to be ethical in our representations—of survivors of violence, of sexual and ethnic minorities, of the people who trusted us to tell their stories—and reflexive about the role of the media in perpetuating harmful stereotypes and hierarchies. We spent many a Tuesday afternoon debating the politics of an image or the usage of a vernacular—we wanted to be deliberate as well as responsible in our choices. If we faltered, as we must have, we ask today for your forgiveness.   

We were luckier perhaps than our colleagues in the newsroom who are so caught up in the aggressive cycle of breaking news and day to day events in an increasingly chaotic socio-political climate that they could easily begrudge us for the week we got to spend pursuing and honing a story. We were luckier too than our colleagues in the editorial section who have the difficult job of saying what needs to be said without actually saying it in so many words. In many ways, it was our distance from the newsroom that gave us more freedom to experiment, push the boundaries of censorship and curate a platform in which critical and politically conscious public opinion was a driving force. We weren’t always successful—constrained as we were by a lack of resources, increasing commodification of the media and intolerant state and non-state machineries—but, hey, at least we tried.

We had to deal with our fair share of criticism as well. Our issues, we were told, were not glamorous enough to attract advertisers. We wore it as a badge of honour. Among other things, it meant we had the freedom to fill up our issues with what we thought was worth informing the public about, instead of nice, glossy photos of products masked as content. Despite repeated requests, we politely (and at times not so politely) refused to succumb to PR requests. As we count down to the end, at least we can say we remained true to our ideals… and what’s so unglamorous about that?