Subir Ghosh: Services
Subir Ghosh takes on journalism, research, writing and speaking assignments directly, and has worked independently since 2014. Publishing, design, web development and political risk projects are delivered by Inscriptions, the publishing and content consultancy he directs, which brings a full production team to work that a single writer or researcher cannot carry alone. Both routes begin in the same way, with a note setting out what is needed and when, and both are scoped and agreed before any work begins.
Commissioned Directly
Journalism
The work covers reported features, investigations, analysis, commentary and interviews, and it has appeared in newspapers, magazines and digital publications in India and abroad since 1991, first in a wire agency newsroom, then across daily newspapers, an environmental research organisation and specialist trade media, and since 2014 as an independent.
The subjects are corporate accountability and crony capitalism, industrial policy, textiles and apparel, sustainability, the environment, press freedom, conflict, the Northeast and cinema. They overlap far more often than they divide, because the questions running through all of them are the same: who benefits from a decision, who pays for it, and what the record shows when the claims made in public are set against the documents filed in private.
What distinguishes the reporting is where its evidence comes from. A great deal of journalism on industry and policy rests on what interested parties are willing to say. This work rests as much on filings, audit reports, court papers, official disclosures and the paper trail that surrounds any decision involving public money, read alongside sources built up over three decades of covering these sectors, and in the case of the Northeast, of reporting from within a conflict rather than about it from a distance. Several of the books came out of precisely this method, one of them assembled over four and a half years from dozens of separate sources.
Commissions are accepted from newspapers, magazines and digital publications, and from foundations and organisations that fund independent journalism, whether for a single piece or for a series developed over a longer period.
Research and Content Analysis
Two related strands of work sit here, and they can be commissioned separately or together.
The first is media content analysis, using a method developed over years of running a media analysis project, in which individual news reports were assessed against as many as a hundred separate parameters in order to establish how a subject was actually being covered rather than how it was assumed to be covered. The value of the approach is that it replaces impression with evidence. Instead of an assertion that a story was under reported, or slanted, or driven by a narrow set of voices, it produces a measured account of what appeared, where it appeared, who was quoted, what was left out, and how the framing shifted over time. It can be applied to a single publication, to an entire sector's coverage, to a campaign, or to a defined period, and the findings hold because they can be checked by anyone who wishes to.
The second is commissioned research, which draws on the same discipline but is not confined to media. It means taking a question that is discussed everywhere in general terms and answering it with figures and findings that did not previously exist in one place, whether that concerns an industry, a policy, a region or a set of environmental indicators.
Either strand is delivered as a written report, as a dataset, or as both, with the scope agreed at the outset. The work is commissioned by non governmental organisations, industry bodies, academic and policy institutions, and publishers.
Writing and Editing
This covers work where the writing is done on behalf of someone else, or where someone else's writing is made ready to publish.
Ghostwriting extends to books, columns, opinion pieces, speeches and reports, and is undertaken for people who have something worth saying and no particular reason to be able to write it themselves. Credit, confidentiality and the extent of the involvement are settled in writing before the work begins, and the arrangement stays private unless both parties agree otherwise.
Editing and copyediting are offered as standalone services, including for books issued by trade publishers, and the work means what it says: reading closely enough to catch what is wrong, and staying restrained enough to leave the author's own voice intact.
Institutional reports are written and edited end to end, from the structure of the document through the drafting to the final text. These include annual reports, research reports and the publications organisations produce to explain themselves to funders, members, regulators or the public.
Content strategy sits alongside these, for organisations that have concluded they need to publish something but have not yet worked out what it should be, who it is for, or how often it should appear.
Speaking, Moderation and Teaching
Talks and panel appearances are given on press freedom and the legal pressure applied to journalists in India, on corporate accountability and crony capitalism, on textile and apparel supply chains and the sustainability claims made within them, on environmental policy and conflict, and on reporting from the Northeast. These are subjects on which there is both published work and direct experience to draw on, rather than a general familiarity.
Moderation is undertaken for conferences, panels and industry events.
Workshops are conducted for newsrooms and institutions on documents based investigation and on media content analysis, which are the two disciplines this practice rests on and the two that are least often taught.
Delivered through Inscriptions
Inscriptions is the publishing and content consultancy that Subir Ghosh directs. Where a project requires editorial, design and production working together rather than a single writer or researcher, it is delivered by the company, which has the team and the capacity for it. The services below are set out here because they form part of what can be commissioned; fuller detail on each is available on the company's own site.
Contract Publishing: the full production of magazines and periodicals, from commissioning and editing through design, layout and production, for associations, corporates and institutions that want a professionally produced publication without carrying the overheads of an in house editorial team.
Custom Publishing: one off publications built to a specific brief rather than to a template, including handbooks, manuals, in house newsletters, institutional histories, commemorative volumes and commissioned books.
Editorial Design: design and layout for print and digital publications, built around readability rather than decoration, covering magazines, annual reports, research reports, books and covers.
Content Solutions: writing, editing and content strategy at a scale beyond what one person can deliver, where either the volume or the timeline requires a team working together.
Drupal Websites: secure, stable and scalable sites built on Drupal for publishers and organisations that have structured content to manage and traffic to handle, together with the caching and architecture that go with it.
Political Risk Assessment: assessments built on ground level intelligence and on reporting networks developed over decades rather than on summaries assembled from public sources, decoding political and regulatory developments into something an organisation operating in a contested sector or region can act on.
