A one year Master’s program intended to allow one to, well, master journalism is not a whole lot of time—in fact, according to Anjali Shastry, it is “hella, hella, hella fast.”
And it’s even more intense when it’s 3,000 miles from where you spent your whole life. A graduate student at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, Shastry is in the midst of this rigorous rite of passage in her quest to leave her mark on the world. The lead political reporter for Merrill’s Capital News Service’s Annapolis Bureau, she’s also written for other state publications, namely, the Greenbelt News Review and the American Journalism Review, and juggles an internship with Voice of America doing social media. With already such a wide array of publications under her belt since graduating UCSB last June, one would think she’s been gearing up for a prominent journalism career for a very long time.
Not so: “I didn’t mean to get into journalism,” Shastry says, “—that was a complete fluke.”
“My entire life, I’ve known I wanted to write, that I wanted to do things with words. And I come to college, I’m an English major—I’m just like, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ Maybe I’ll get a Ph.D. Maybe I’ll be a novelist. Maybe I’ll be an editor.”
Things changed, however, after her freshman year and a friend encouraged her to join UCSB’s newspaper, The Bottom Line. Before she knew it, Shastry had become one of the most respected members of the Editorial Board. “A quarter in, I was a staff writer; a quarter after that, I was Features Editor; and then a quarter after that, I was Opinions Editor.” The welcoming, personal environment she found herself in at TBL allowed her to “cultivate this love of journalism on its own” and sparked a greater desire to produce words not just for the sake of it, but to have real-world effects, joining the campus’ Word Magazine and The Catalyst literary publications. Within a couple short years, biking between on-campus Editorial Board meetings has transformed into a four-day-a-week, Taylor Swift-fueled, 30 mile drive north to Annapolis to cover political on-goings in the state capital.
And it’s not just the commute that has changed: her undergrad career of witty feature articles covering Isla Vista life and stinging op-eds tackling often-overlooked social norms has evolved into a graduate portfolio that includes mostly hard news stories on Annapolis’ government as well as some feature-oriented pieces examining “technological innovations in digital storytelling.” Such a swift, dramatic swing in journalistic scenery and practice also set off what were perhaps inevitable, new insights into what it means to be engaged with society. At Merrill’s Capital News Service, this means staying on top of her beat of covering Annapolis politics. “If a bill is about to come out,” she says, “every senator or delegate attached to that bill, I follow them around for days. I’m like, ‘Whuzzup, tell me about this bill, what’s it doin’ today, what are you doin’ today, what’s goin’ on, has anything happened?’ I really follow it from the beginning to the end. So it’s like a different version of being part of the process and being engaged with the material.”
A thorough, comprehensive engagement with Annapolis politics has also solidified and informed Shastry’s notion of her role as a journalist; exposure day after day to the players and processes that make up the substance of her beat reports changed her perspectives on the issues she finds herself covering.
“I can totally see…an opinions writer who’s never met [Maryland] Governor [Larry] Hogan writing about his very short week in office so far or how he may be doing great or how he may be totally screwing up or whatever,” she says. “I’ve met Hogan a bunch of times, and so it kind of changes my perspective on that….But being part of the process, being really engaged with it, and also learning how to keep a distance from it so that you can report objectively….changes my view on everything.” This unique, in-depth, and more comprehensive understanding of her subjects has strengthened her notion of a reporter’s duty to remain objective and unbiased. “You can’t be part of the process where you’re giving [your subjects] ideas for things, you know. You can’t be advocating for anything. You have to follow them; you just have to be like a shadow….You’ve got to report on what they’re doing; you can’t make waves.” The result is a journalist who’s a “ghostly observer”—an “inside-outsider”—one who gives everyone featured in a report an equal voice.
Learning everything there is to know about Annapolis politics and how to give its players equal voices also mean that, as a reporter, Shastry and her work are becoming her readers’ window to the world where the journalist’s engaging reporting renders her as news-bringing middleman invisible. “That’s the point of a newspaper: we’re spreading news. So there shouldn’t have to be a comment on the people who spread said news. It should be about the news.” It’s the material that counts and the material that ideally should be the target of comments, she says. “You want the article to lay the groundwork for the information that they have, and you want them to be engaged—you want them to have discussions about it….I want there to be [on the part of readers] some sort of ‘Well, I think this because of this’. And I want people to be able to see other sides of the story that I can’t necessarily put in it.”
With the rate people are consuming content nowadays due to the information overload the Internet makes possible, Shastry’s increasingly realized how hard it is “to get people interested in news that isn’t about a Kardashian or about a woman who ate fire.” To combat this, she says, especially when myriad other news organizations are covering the same stories, addressing readers directly outside the article itself becomes as important as giving readers the opportunity to engage with each other.
“If someone’s just like, ‘Hey, the prime minister of India’, which is definitely a comment that I’ve gotten a few times on stories about India—they’re like, ‘I hate him’, and I’m just like, ‘What is it that makes you hate him. Do you have any factual reasons? Do you happen to know the prime minister of India personally, and one time he ate your doughnut—what’s going on?’ Trying to get involved and just be like, ‘We’re not just putting information out there, we want you to engage with it, and we will engage with you’.”
The article itself is the groundwork for readers’ engagement; Shastry’s addressing their concerns is an added layer of engagement that provides a greater feeling of connection and elevates her work above competitors’. The Internet and social media’s capability for this kind of interaction between those who are actively and passively civically engaged has changed a reporter and her writing’s roles, according to Shastry. “I didn’t always see being a reporter as being someone who has to facilitate discussions. Think about how static a newspaper is. Before the Internet…if you commented on it, you had a discussion with your family at the breakfast table about a story.” The greater audience she’s had since starting to write in a grad school capacity has forced her to begin tackling head-on this new journalistic responsibility of actively facilitating article-based discussion.
Her platform as a reporter serves as her readers’ catalyst to positive interaction with the world around them—Shastry’s most basic notion of civic engagement—even if it involves simply becoming more aware of what’s going on around them and “finding yourself in a different position with the world just because you know more now.” A recent Capital News Service story on the state budget, at the very least, broadened her readers’ realizations of what is going on in their state and how it affects them—an active instance of civic engagement sparking an intellectual instance. The learning process she’s undergoing through her Master’s program becomes a sort of chain of civic engagement: constantly tracking down politicians and getting her microphone ahead of the competitions’ mics greatly expands her own awareness of the world, which results in her producing relevant articles to inform and engage readers, which then in turn allows them to intellectually interact with the world around them—be it in their thoughts, on a comment board, or sharing on social media.
But it’s not just hard news stories, however, that can spark others’ civic engagement; for Shastry, feature stories, like those she’s written for the American Journalism Review, have the potential, if composed well, to get people interested in and caring about significant issues that matter but may not affect them. “Think about the Rolling Stone UVA story, right? The rape story. Yes, it was massively discredited, but what it did is it took a very complicated issue and it humanized it. And it put it around the story of Jackie, and…it resonated with people. And yes—yes, it was discredited pretty heavily, but the point is, it exploded—it made people care about this issue. Reporting a rape in a hard news story would not have had that affect.”
In a feature story from this past August for the American Journalism Review, Shastry brought in the perspectives of a Santa Barbara reporter and a UC Santa Barbara student activist and journalist to examine the effects of the media’s coverage of tragedies within affected places. The explicit human element underscoring her article draws on the experiences of those who weathered the media’s coverage of the May 2014 Isla Vista tragedy by juxtaposing a reporter’s assertion that it’s her job to ask those who were affected questions and to keep people informed alongside a student’s belief that it’s unethical to immediately bombard these people with questions. Becoming this metaphorical window for readers to peer directly inside the media’s effects on a place in the wake of tragedy humanized this issue and allowed readers to relate to an important concern in society that doesn’t necessarily affect them. The more she’s written for organizations like the American Journalism Review and Capital News Service, the more Shastry has realized that making these articles compelling to read is vital to being a civically engaged journalist as well as sparking others’ civic engagement. “The day I can make a story about the budget interesting to read—I think that’s the day that I learn that I know how to do my job.”
Paired with her goal of bringing personal awareness and connection to a broad range of issues, the inherent, informative nature of Shastry’s work means journalistic writing plays multiple roles in society. Facts and information like Maryland’s proposed $40.4 billion budget or its effects on Medicaid are intended for dissemination—to inform readers of what they should be acknowledging and considering. Topics such as the media’s descending on Isla Vista in the wake of its tragedy to get teary-eyed quotes allow readers to broaden their intellectual horizons and join a wider community and its values. Perhaps the most significant facet of her work is the opportunity that being this window to the world in the setting of modern, feedback-oriented reporting provides; presenting events, ideas, and issues in a thought-inducing manner and setting naturally induce these roles while allowing readers themselves to build on the discussions her articles lay out.
Despite solidifying her notions of what it means to be a journalist in modern society and producing professional content for real people’s consumption and digestion, Shastry is still diving into these new roles and learning to put into practice these strategies for facilitating her own and others’ civic engagement—her bureau chief in Annapolis, is, after all, her teacher as well. The more experience she gets, the more engaging her writing becomes, and the better she understands how to weave words and insights into having deep, wide-ranging effects.
“I don’t know how to do my job,” she reiterates, “until I can make a story about the budget fun.”
From Ideas to Paper 