CHENNAI: Schooling from St Hilda’s, Ooty, B.Com from Stella Maris, Chennai, a Young India Fellowship at Ashoka University, Delhi, and MA in Journalism from Boston University — Madurai girl Shwetha Surendran is making strides at ESPN in the United States. She is the inaugural fellow and the first South Indian to have bagged ESPN’s Investigative Journalism Fellowship with American University, following which she was recruited by ESPN’s Investigative and Enterprise Unit in Washington DC.
A former intern with The Hindu and The New Indian Express, the seeds of her interest in journalism were sown at a young age. “The first time I did proper journalism was at Hilda’s; in fourth or fifth grade, I was recruited to be part of a journalism club. It was for the school paper called the Hilda’s Herald. I loved going around and talking to people; I didn’t even know it was journalism then. It has been a passion ever since,” she shares.
With a keen interest in investigative journalism, this F1 and football fan — a fiercely loyal FC Barcelona women’s team fan — opted for sports investigative data journalism. “As I grew up, I saw sports in a different light; the money and the scandals interested me. And (things like) geopolitics, sexual harassment, all of it bleed into sports. When I saw that I could focus on these rather than what happens within a game, that appealed to me,” she adds.
Citing two of the stories that she has worked on she says, “One of the stories I worked on, with Paula Lavigne who is also a reporter in the unit, was based on tweets. We looked at posts from the colleges and their sports team’s accounts to see who they tweet about more. The general hypothesis was that male athletes get more attention than female athletes. But now that there is NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness through marketing and promotion) in which college athletes also get paid based on their exposure on social media, if male athletes get more mentions than female athletes they’d probably get more NIL money. So we looked at all the data, worked on it for months and made sure the article was interactive for the readers. The other one was about long-term player health in the NFL, alongside my colleague Mark Fainaru-Wada. It was grounded in research that’s come out in recent years.”
Going forward, Shwetha wishes to bring in more nuance in her articles, while making the readers think and reflect. Over the months, she has learnt to balance, both her professional and personal life. “I take time off to do something beyond journalism, and it also helps; I feel like I get so many of my fresh perspectives when I am not doing journalism on the weekends. Journalism can get a little exhausting, but I am a type-A organiser, and planning and setting a timetable gives me enough room to navigate through it,” she wraps up.