“If you let your emotions take over, you’re useless as a reporter” Maria Ressa, CNN’s Jakarta chief, in conversation with Madhavi Purohit

IT’S a rainy day in Mumbai and I’m racing off to the Cricket Club of India to attend a workshop for journalists. The workshop is to be conducted by CNN’s Jakarta chief Maria Ressa. I go through her bio-data thinking, “Wow, this one’s a heavyweight.”

Maria has reported on three changes of government in South East Asia: In Indonesia in 1998, in East Timor in 1999 and in the Philippines in 2001. Just days after a lethal car bomb killed almost 200 people in Bali, she provided the exclusive report that the first-known videotapes of an Al Qaeda training camp in Indonesia had been found.

From her Jakarta base, Maria has also reported on the downfall of former President Suharto in 1998, and the troubled term in office of President Abdurrahman Wahid, the country's first democratically elected president. During that time, she also focused on the roots of separatist, religious and ethnic violence in West Kalimantan, a separatist conflict in Aceh and Irian Jaya, and religious war in Ambon. Before joining CNN, Ressa was vice president of a videotape production company in Manila, where she produced weekly public affairs programmes for Philippine television. She was responsible for pioneering the investigative news magazine format on Philippine television.

The awards she has received include the SAIS-Novartis International Journalism Award in 2000 for her work in East Timor, the Asian Television Awards in 1999 for Indonesia and the Ferris Fellowship at Princeton University for 2000-2001.

I am already looking forward to meeting her after the workshop. I reach my destination and make my way into the room crowded with 80-odd journalists from various TV networks, newspapers, magazines and dotcoms. Maria introduces herself and insists she wants this to be an interactive session. And boy, does she get it!
“Why you? Why us? What’s all this about anyway?” someone asks. The mood is palpably cynical, hostile even.