Ammu Joseph Collection

Ammu Joseph (b. 1953) is a journalist and media critic based in Bengaluru whose work has focused on how the Indian media covers women, and how women fare within media institutions. She studied at Women's Christian College in Chennai before going to Syracuse University in New York, where encounters with the founders of Ms. magazine gave early shape to her interests. She began her career in 1977 at Eve's Weekly, where feminist journalism was the entire point of the publication rather than a minority concern within it. After stints at Update and The Indian Post, she moved to Bangalore in 1988 and has worked as a freelance journalist since, a choice that has given her the independence to pursue long-term critical work without institutional constraint. Her book Whose News?, co-authored with Kalpana Sharma and published in 1994, remains a landmark in Indian media criticism. It documented how the press fixated on violence against women while consistently ignoring their work, health and agency. Women in Journalism (2000) followed, drawing on interviews with 200 women journalists to document harassment, pay gaps and the structural barriers that shaped their professional lives. That research fed directly into the founding of the Network of Women in Media, India in 2002, which now has over 600 members and is one of the most sustained feminist media collectives in the country.

Ammu Joseph has also carried these concerns into international work, contributing to UNESCO initiatives on gender and media, drafting gender-sensitive indicators for media accountability, and coordinating the Global Media Monitoring Project. Her writing continues to appear regularly, and her critical attention to the relationship between journalism and gender has remained consistent across nearly five decades of work.