A new phase

Welcome to Export Quality, your home for news by and about South Asian Americans and Canadians - and everything in between

Export Quality has been, if nothing else, an experiment for me. A place to share my colleagues work and my own ramblings in a way I hope many of you enjoy.

While growing EQ in this era of a crumbling journalism industry and a slew of new newsletters has been slower than I expected, I’m incredibly grateful to find more than 330 of you as subscribers, hundreds more as followers on the app, and more than a handful of you willing to pay me to do this!

It’s with that optimism and your encouragement that I have taken my old beat in politics and explored it further here, as well as stretched some new muscles in interviewing South Asian diaspora creatives. There will certainly be more of the latter because these are the people telling the world the stories of our community, their stories, in a myriad of ways.

There will also be some more original reporting on the New York city mayoral race (with a desi candidate!), libraries and museums, foreign policy, cultural commentary, tech, books, movies and shows, and climate change - all the things I used to write about in a newsroom or have wanted to explore for a long time. Some posts will be about the diaspora, some not, but all of it will be from my brain.

My hope is that we form a community within EQ, like the blog days of old, and that EQ becomes a trusted source for news by and about our communities at a time when the American (and maybe Canadian) story is being controlled increasingly by those who do not represent or reflect us.

So, in light of the amount of work all of this takes, I’m turning on the payment feature on Substack on April 2. For now, I will NOT be putting any content behind a paywall because I understand many of you are on tight budgets as the cost of groceries rivals that of a mortgage.

But, if you enjoy my writing and reading/watching/listening to all the work I share from my colleagues, a small contribution will help me keep doing more of that and expand into audio, video, events, and bringing on guest writers!

Also, I want to hear from YOU! Comment or message me if you have suggestions for people I should interview, topics you’d like to see discussed, and especially if you want your work included in the round ups. This is as much your publication as it is mine.

And now, on to your required viewing/celebrating:

Big congrats to my dear friend

Jennifer Chowdhury

on being accepted into the MFA program at Hunter College (part of the CUNY system)! For those who don’t know, this is one of the best programs in narrative nonfiction writing in the country and only accepts six students a year. Having read the writing sample she submitted with her application, I’m very excited to see how her story unfolds.

A round of applause to Founding Editor of Central Desi, Ambreen Ali! NJ Spotlight News picked up her reporter Zoya Wazir’s story on how ICE raids are stoking fear in New Jersey’s foreign-born South Asians. It’s a great example of how specific community-serving newsrooms can provide valuable reporting for broader audiences.

Three cheers for Purbita Saha and co-host Deja Perkins who have been nominated for The Ambies, awards for excellence in audio presented by The Podcast Academy, in the Best Indie Podcast Host or Hosts category! Bring Birds Back from BirdNote is of course a podcast about how awesome birds are and how humans can help them survive. I highly recommend this nerdy, aweome listening and guarantee you’ll be astounded by what you learn! Winners will be announced on March 31.

Family’s experience highlights high mortality rate of Black babies, as Oregon pushes for culturally responsive care - Kaylee Tornay for InvestigateWest

Are U.S.-China Talks Accomplishing Anything? and Why a Small Pacific Island Territory Is Upending Nickel Prices - Rishi Iyengar for Foreign Policy

The Museum of Natural and Cultural History braces as the Institute of Museum and Library Services is threatened - Sajina Shrestha for KLCC/NPR for Oregonians

USC calls for hiring freeze, austerity efforts amid budget woes and Trump investigations - Daniel Miller and Jaweed Kaleem for LA Times

‘Democratized Access’ at Bonfire Ventures - Keerthi Vedantam for Los Angeles Business Journal

Canadian arm of China’s largest bank had plans to set up payments processor to collect spending data - Rita Trichur for Globe and Mail

How Solidarity Reporting Holds Officials Accountable - Dr. Anita Verma, Assistant Professor at UT-Austin. This is a great post about how “official sources have official agendas. That doesn’t make them true. Talk to the people who know because they’re living the issue.”

With the mass layoffs at the US Agency for International Development (USIAD) - and it’s strange proposed pivot with what is left - global development has never been in more trouble. I used to cover the United Nations early in my career and while the American presence was never without its problems, there was a general consensus that American aid workers and the thousands of contractors did their work in good faith to help those around the world in dire need - even if they were in need because of the consequences of U.S. government actions. So it couldn’t come at a better time that Lina Srivastava, in partnership with The New Humanitarian, has launched the Power Shift podcast. The purpose of the show is that it “pairs two people from different parts of the power spectrum in humanitarian aid – a decision-maker paired with someone whose work and life is affected by those decisions. We designed the dialogue to draw out their lived realities and foster a shared understanding of the potential for creating equitable and just processes in humanitarian aid.”