At some point in the early years of Khabar Lahariya, a story about a stolen buffalo calf made the front page. The women who put it there understood that the theft of a calf in rural UP was not a minor story dressed up as news. It was a story about inter-caste harassment, about whose losses count and who gets to decide what the public needs to investigate. The Good Reporter: A Memoir of Journalism in the 21st Century is a memoir about journalism built on that understanding.

The book opens with a warning. “This is a somewhat elliptical, unreliable autobiography of ten very different women,” it says before you have properly settled in. The story of what this collective has done over two decades of rural journalism in UP “has always been a better story to tell than how we have done it and keep doing it.” That distinction between the what versus the how is what the entire book turns on. If you came for the rousing version, the collective has already clocked you.

The Good Reporter is written by ten women from the Khabar Lahariya collective, alongside journalist and co-founder Disha Mullick, and no single voice carries it alone. It has no protagonist or narrative...

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