livesinfocus.orgSandeep Junnarkar is an award winning journalist and former New York bureau chief for CNET News.com.

He is currently associate professor at the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism.


"I've always wanted to start blogging. I kept trying to come up with a topic, but they rang hollow," explained Junnarkar.

After years of searching he eventually he hit upon a topic that was specific-enough and in May, 2005, he started his first blog Lives in Focus with photographer Srinivas Kuruganti.

Lives in Focus looks at those suffering from HIV and AIDS in India and specifically on how a change in the Indian patent law has affected access to valuable retroviral drugs.

Junnarkar says the blog has allowed him to rediscover his passion for reporting by concentrating on issues he cares about and reporting in ways he can't with traditional media.

"It's hard to admit that," he says of his frustrations with traditional media.

"After you've spent a great deal of time, earning good money, getting a decent reputation and winning awards, but really wanting to start doing what you want to do and to harness the power of the internet to be able to present the stories of these lives in ways that traditional media can't really do or isn't doing yet."

He added: "Blogging has changed my ideas of what can be considered journalism, but only if the fundamental tenets of journalism are observed: accuracy, fairness and balance.

"Even though I am trying something I had never done before as a journalist for mainstream media, I make sure the context I provide for each audio or video interview meets those standards.

"At the same time, I am energized and inspired with the idea of allowing people to describe their lives in their own words.

"In the future this might mean allowing people to shoot video and record interviews of their own friends and families - providing a picture of lives that we rarely see or hear in the mainstream press."

Despite having filled the blog with text, video, audio and almost 2,000 pictures, Junnarkar runs the operation on a shoestring budget.

This month Srinivas Kuruganti, director of photography for Lives in Focus, was sent by another company to do some work in India.

Kuruganti took advantage of the opportunity to collect photographs - to be published soon - of Indian drug addicts and how they are dealing with HIV/AIDS.

Prior to this Junnarkar raised $6,000 in donations to fund flights and living expenses.

For publication he uses Typepad, a pay blog hosting service and Google Adsense advertising just about covers the hosting costs.

He is careful to harness Google to get his blog noticed, using keywords to attract search engines. He then monitors where visitors are coming from and what keywords they are using with a free statistics tool.

"You can track where people are coming from. Often it's just a Google search. I'm gathering some of the search terms that are coming up. Google has been of tremendous help [in bringing visitors], as has Yahoo!

"One of the wonderful things about blogs is that somehow it is spreading around. I'm trying to see where it goes organically."

Traditional media coverage has also played its part. The BBC has interviewed Junnarkar twice and an Indian news service featured the blog.

The blog has been mentioned by several local newspapers in the US, and by Global Voices, the popular blog aggregator.

Junnarkar recognizes that some journalists - like Andrew Sullivan - have turned blogging into very a lucrative source of income, but that's not the intention for Lives in Focus.

"I don't see this as a model whereby I could do this and this alone for a living. We're doing this on the side.

"By no means is it providing our livelihood. I'd like to post twice a week, but that's unrealistic," he said.

The frequency of the postings is not the key to making the blog successful, that Junnarkar believes, is achieved by keeping the focus narrow.

"I really wanted to focus on one aspect. I didn't want to write about AIDS in India, but about people's access to drugs and how they are surviving this crisis.

"In all our projects in the future we'll have very particular themes rather than it being a really wide topic like AIDS in southern Africa. That would be too wide. It would always be focused on a particular topic. A very narrow topic."

Yet, illuminating the rest of the world on the plight of others is not the sole aspect of the blog.

Equally important to Junnarkar is that the blog can act as an oral record for voices that are seldom heard.

"The fact that there is this oral history about this time period is important to me. Imagine what it would be like if we had oral histories of people during the great plague in Europe.

"That's what I'm hoping to have here. We see the beginnings of a health crisis that hasn't been taken care of.

"How do we deal with it differently next time? This blog should exist as a resource for people to realize how people had lived their lives and tried to survive during this time."

He added: "One thing we are considering is not only covering such big issues as AIDS.

"The mission of the Lives in Focus is to present the voices of those rarely interviewed in traditional media. I think there are many local issues with global interest."

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