Happy October! I love this time of year when we get into cozy mode and start getting ready to celebrate so many holidays — including Diwali which is on Nov. 1 this year! Thank you to everyone who applied for our mentorship program this year, we were able to connect 22 Didis to work on career goals and professional mentorship!

Meet the Didi

This month we’re chatting with Iqaluit-based journalist Meral Jamal. Jamal writes news and feature stories from Inuit and Indigenous communities across Canada’s North and has written for publications such as The Globe and Mail, Canadian Geographic, and international publications including Undark and The Guardian. Jamal is passionate about producing journalism that is grounded in community, that dives deep and sees wide. Jamal is a graduate of the School of Journalism at Carleton University (Class of 2021), holding a bachelor of journalism (honours) with a minor in history.

Tell us about yourself. What led you to exploring a career in journalism?

My family is from India and four generations of us have lived in the United Arab Emirates since 1912. Both places aren’t known for the freedom of their press or the health of their governments and at least in the case of India, their democracy. I was also in high school in 2016 when the US federal election was taking place. Witnessing the villainization of journalists and the media get so much worse in real time and also seeing the resilience of journalists, especially the few who were racialized or marginalized — it made me want to be in the profession myself. 

You're now working in Iqaluit. How did that opportunity come about? 

I was in my second year of undergrad in Carleton’s journalism program when I had the opportunity to spend six weeks of my summer in the Yukon. It was with Stories North, an experiential learning program by professor Kanina Holmes, and its goal was mainly to create spaces for collaborative, land-based and reconciliation-driven storytelling where non-Indigenous journalists and Indigenous communities work alongside each other to produce a body of work. 

That experience of being up “North” in the Yukon, working with First Nation communities and sharing stories that are rooted in resilience and aspiration — all of it made it certain for me that I would like to work somewhere in the North once I graduated. Everything then aligned when, in my graduating year, Carleton announced an internship program with CBC’s northern bureaus. I applied and was selected as the inaugural intern, which then turned into contract work and a move to Nunavut after I switched jobs to the local paper a year after. 

Tell us about working as a South Asian journalist up North? What is your day to day life like?

That’s an interesting question, I think as a South Asian and particularly, immigrant journalist, a lot of my work up North has to do with learning, re-learning and finding ways to centre Canada’s colonial history in all the journalism that I do. 

It’s also about building bridges between first Canadians like Inuit in Nunavut and new Canadians who are immigrants like myself and I try to do this both in my work as a journalist and my life as a member of the community. The actual work really just looks like taking the time to get to know the people around me and not distancing myself from people who may end up becoming my sources one day. It has also looked like trying to learn the Inuktitut language, participating in civic life like volunteering at the local food bank, and trying my very best to learn the history and the lived experiences of Inuit without homogenizing it all. 

I have also, in particular, focused my work on climate change in the Canadian North and the Arctic in a larger sense. As a news desert and a region said to be warming faster than anywhere else in the world, I believe this work is extremely important. So I’m always on the lookout for climate change stories and also climate resilience and stewardship stories and I try to make the time to research and report on them. 

What is a memorable story that you’ve reported on?

That’s a tough one. I got to write a couple stories through the 2023 Persephone Miel Fellowship from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and it all started with a story about a field school for Arctic snow that was taking place in the community of Cambridge Bay last spring. It was amazing to document the work of seasoned researchers who were essentially trying to test the effectiveness of instruments used to measure Alpine snow conditions on Arctic snow instead. 

At the same time, it was super cool to see how this work was being guided by the knowledge and lived experience of Inuit knowledge keepers at the school. One of the elders there actually mentioned how different types of snow make different sounds when you walk on it and that the sound can tell you the depth and density of the snow. Researchers at the school didn’t know that themselves but found their work to be made far easier moving forward. It was a moment of seeing Indigenous knowledge and scientific research integrate and expand our shared understanding in real time and to tell that story was a real honour. 

You are one of the ‘graduates’ of Didihood’s mentorship program. How did it help you in your career?

I underwent the Didihood mentorship in my last semester of undergrad and it was a truly challenging time. It was 2021 and COVID was still ongoing and the industry was both burnt out and experiencing another round of layoffs both locally and around the world. 

I was mentored by tech journalist Shruti Shekar though and it made a huge difference in my life. Shruti worked with me on my resumes, applications and mock interviews. She forced me to think hard about what kind of journalism I want to do and how to get my foot in the door in the industry. And she really did help me with all my anxiety about graduating into a pandemic and a supposedly declining industry by helping me understand and explore what my niche is — what makes my work meaningful, unique and worthwhile. 

What would be your advice to younger Didis looking to pursue a career in journalism?

I think it’s just about staying true to the stories you want to tell and trusting it will find an audience eventually. Even though my work now is more aligned with what I want to do — long-form climate change reporting with Indigenous and minority communities — I had to start out and learn the necessary news skills through the public broadcaster and the local paper in Nunavut after. I was rarely writing climate-related stories when I started out but I got to learn everything that is needed to write a well-informed and well-told climate story now. 

Also, pursuing mentorship and other networking opportunities, even if it’s informally reaching out to someone whose work you find inspiring. It doesn’t even have to be a journalist — just find people who are doing the work that you would like to do, the work you feel aligns with your values — and reach out.

What we’re reading:

What we’re watching / listening to:

Is the new South Asian Music category at the Junos a step in the right direction? Journalist Jeevan Sangha discusses what this new award means to the music community. Segment starts at 17:25.

— Roohi Sahajpal

Issue 77
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