Professor of Practice

Prof Kanchan Kaur comes with about four decades of experience in journalism and journalism training. She has worked at news organisations like the Indian Express, New Delhi; the Deccan Herald, Bengaluru and the Gulf News Dubai. She has mainly been a reporter, covering a range of topics from crime to politics, environment and technology; though she has had brief stints at the editing desk, too. The move to training journalists built on her work as a journalist. Her areas of interest have been reporting and writing—given that she has reported the cities of Bengaluru and Sharjah intimately. Teaching reporting and writing meant teaching students to pitch story ideas, write fact-based stories that provided comprehensive context, within tight deadlines and bring out bi-weekly editions in print, broadcast and multimedia. At the Indian Institute of Journalism and New Media (IIJNM), where she worked for two decades, she taught several courses while guiding the programme as Dean for over a decade. She ensured that all curricula were updated regularly, resulting in students who were industry-ready. Following a stint at the University of Florida where she did a course on Teaching Digital Journalism, she drove the focus of her, and her students’ work toward multimedia journalism. She also liaised with various international institutions to run modules of semester-abroad programmes for Earlham College, Illinois and for the University of Technology, Sydney. She helped Poynter Institute run a workshop for journalists in Bangalore, in collaboration with IIJNM. Facebook and Google News Initiative ran workshops with IIJNM. Since 2015 she has worked in News and Media Literacy—teaching courses as well as building curricula for them. She was an Advisory Committee member for the BBC’s Young Reporter Programme, and recently worked on a revised News Literacy Programme for Google News Initiative. She is on the Advisory Council of the Asian Network of News and Information Educators and has been a regular speaker and moderator at the Trusted Media Summit organized by Google. She has also taught Business Communication at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, as well as at various corporate houses for the Alliance Business Academy. She has recently completed a course on Journalism and AI run by Polis, a think tank of the London School of Economics and Google News Initiative. She is enrolled into a PhD programme at the International Institute of Information Technology, Bengaluru, where she is researching the area of fact-checking. She has a master’s in international relations. She is dedicated to helping students and others embrace the wonderful world of journalism and news and media literacy while she continues to learn, because teaching after all, involves a lot of learning.

Department of Liberal Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (DLHS) Bengaluru

Qualification: MA , PhD