Manno Wangnnao
Morung Express News
Kohima | May 5
Independent Journalist from Nagaland, Manno Wangnnao has been awarded the prestigious Fetisov Journalism Award (FJA-2020) for her contribution in the work titled “Migrants from Another World”. Listed as the First Prize in the Category- ‘Contribution to Civil Rights’, “Migrants from Another World” is a cross-border investigative journalism collaboration involving journalists from 14 different countries.
On winning the Award, Manno Wangnnao relates to The Morung Express that “for me, the thing is if I am not getting up excited in the morning, then I will not work because that is how I am.” She previously worked with APN News Channel as a news anchor for close to a year and ‘got bored by the end of it’ in her words. Then, she took a year off. “I would keep telling my family that I want to be a journalist but nobody was aware of it. So I thought the best thing would be to get a PG in journalism,” she recalls.
Subsequently, she joined Times Now as a Production Assistant and worked there for close to 7 months but left the job because it was not like she imagined. “My life is not about all that salary or money. I don’t see myself having a secure life,” she goes on to say while putting across that “I have always wanted to cross boundaries, I’ve always wanted to challenge the norms and to think beyond what we are taught.”
So for her, there was no question of her following set patterns. “I think when I won this, all my life—people berated me for not sticking to TV and for the first time in my life, I felt like for all the times I left my job (within that one decision that I was not happy), all my impulsiveness as far as my job is concerned, as far as my passion is concerned, it paid off. If I hadn’t left those jobs when I was done with it, I would never have gotten this award,” she states. “God has been very kind to me,” she further adds.
Manno Wangnnao is based in Tizit and currently works as a freelance journalist. “Eventually I want to go back to fulltime journalism but right now I am very disturbed by the fact that our tea farmers are illiterate and are being taught very wrong methods of cultivation where chemicals are being used”, she says. Towards this end, she is actively involved in helping farmers practice organic farming.
“I thought this is a personal war that I need to do. Once people understand the importance and start doing it themselves, I will probably get back to fulltime journalism,” she states. One of the things she is looking at in the near future is to pursue journalism independently and tell people stories that are close to her heart.
