Indian editors and journalists with a bit of journalism in their jeans talk, bravely, hopefully, of batting for the reader. In journalism schools, professors are drilling ethics and integrity into the skulls of innocent heads looking at a career in God’s Chosen Profession. But does the reader care, asks Vir Sanghvi. Take, for instance, the…
Monthly Archives: April 2007
‘Journos no longer write history’s first draft’
The shootout at Virginia Tech has marked a giant leap for citizen journalism. On 9/11, passengers in the aeroplanes heading towards World Trade Center made calls on their mobile phones. This time, when the gunman went on the rampage, a Palestinian graduate student Jamal Albarghouti was shooting pictures with his cell phone. Albarghouti appeared on…
‘Indian media is losing its adversarial position’
Indian news television doesn’t have too many with the intellecltual wherewithal to bite the hand that feeds, but V.K. Shashi Kumar, editor of the special investigation team of CNN-IBN, bravely does that in a fine blog titled ‘Moronic Media’. As channels like Aaj Tak prepare to slip from the Richard Gere-Shilpa Shetty smooch to the…
Shorter is sweeter after a long sentence
How to write better? Good question. Answer: no answer. There is no one way for writing better. There is no magic formula, which, if you follow to a T, will ensure that your sentences fly off the paragraphs and pages. We need to pick up lessons, tips, ideas from here and there. In “Artful Sentences:…
Indian media hotter than IT and automobiles?
Indian media grew at the rate of 20 per cent in 2006. And, according to a new report of the department of labour, the Indian media industry will grow at an average of 18 per cent year on year, with an employment growth rate of 27 per cent. By 2013, it will provide more jobs…
You—yes, you—are the centre of our universe
Magazines, newspapers, television channels, not to speak of the internet, are full of “You”. Ten ways to help you get a bod like Angelina Jolie. Stocks you should avoid in the new year. What you can do to stop global warming. How it affects you. YouTube. Your call is important to us. Your country needs…
Coca-Cola harps on the great Indian gas trick
For a company of its size, vintage and pedigree, Coca-Cola’s advertising in India (like that of AirTel) has been positively pathetic since day one. But its new commercial, shot by Rajeev Menon, is distinctly, even if disgustingly and disagreeably, Indian. Centred around a bottle of Coke that goes missing on a train while it is…
In print, only your mom reads your byline…
Indian media houses, especially print organisations, are still to get used to focus groups, surveys, interactions, etc, as a means of making our journalism more engaging and relevant to the reader. In Britain, The Daily Telegraph recently invited some bloggers and readers to come and meet the journalists, and Ben Fenton writes he now realises…
The only Marxism that will survive is Groucho’s
It’s one thing for mediapersons to have reservations in private about a subject or issue they are covering, and quite another for them to let it show in public. But that’s what the National Union of Journalists has done in Britain. NUJ members have voted to boycott Israeli goods because of the “savage, pre-planned attack…
The snarf who got to the bottom of it all: RIP
[odeo=http://odeo.com/audio/2252432/view] Many journalists and writers have made their signature line or phrase all their own. Harold Ross would often insert “So, help me God” in much of his correspondence. A.F.S. Talyerkhan would end his columns with the line, ‘Get me, Steve?” Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, the American author who died on Wednesday, made the phrase “So…
The longest byline in journalism today…
The Kannada humourist YNK (Y.N. Krishnamurthy) used to say that the poet Kuvempu hadn’t named his son Poornachandra Tejaswi—he had “sentenced” him. And in every newspaper and magazine office, there are snide ones about having to continue some bylines on page 16 or having to bastardise the column width to fit a byline because of…
Will the real Ponnappa please stand up?
Can a cartoonist have two views on the same subject on the same day in two different publications? In The Times of India, Bangalore edition, yesterday, the cartoonist N.S. Ponnappa took the safe and predictable Koramangala stand on the N.R. Narayana Murthy issue. But, surprise, surprise—or maybe, no surprise, no surprise—in Mid-Day, Bombay, yesterday,…
In Kaliyug, everything is a cycle, including news
News happens—or rather, news gets reported—in a strange fashion in India id est Bharat. If there is a train accident, you can rest assured that half-a-dozen more accidents will be reported in the next couple of days. If a Mary statue drinks milk in Meerut in the morning, you can be dead sure that it…
How should media deal with eunuchs, hijras?
ANIKA SHARMA writes: How many of us in the media know who eunuchs are and who are hijras? What role is the media playing in educating society about transgenders and transsexuals? And what role can it play in educating the families of eunuchs, especially young eunuchs? Eunuchs and hijras are as much a part of…
Struck dumb by 24-hour news television
Expectedly, 24-hour news television offers a fair bit of entertainment because of its inherent pressures. But what Zee Kannada served up on the day the writer Poornachandra Tejaswi passed away was a pure unadulterated first. In its quest to be seen to be doing the right thing, which was not to ignore the death of…
HENRY DAVID THOREAU: All news is gossip
WHAT’S THE NEWS? By Henry David Thoreau To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day in one of the…
To do unto us what we (allegedly) did unto them
Everybody at the receiving end of the media has a crib against the media. We (allegedly, and of course sometimes truly) cheat, cook up, distort, fabricate, lie, misquote, put words in the mouth, screw up, and heaven knows do what els to get a good story out. But how many of our victims have the…
It’s not the end of the world if you’re fired
Fired from your job? Downsized? Rightsized? Irrationally “rationalised?” Not to worry. It’s a big world out there, a big world wide web. The Santa Barbara News-Press suddenly found it didn’t need an “x” number of journalists. The journos walked out and set up a news website of their own called Santa Barbara Newsroom to compete…
‘New media skills = Better job prospects’
We have gone through this before, but there is no harm in repeating it again. Tomorrow’s journalists are better served by having multimedia skills. Students who can speak into a camera, film a story and edit it, maintain a blog, and have some kind of online presence will be preferred over those who don’t. Read…
Pictures that should give lensmen an idea or two
During the Vietnam war, America sprayed the Mekong River delta with Agent Orange, a chemical weapon more devastating than napalm. Thirty years later, the aftereffects of the chemical are still to go away and still very evident. The celebrated war photographer James Nachtwey, went in search of children deformed by Agent Orange in Vietnam and…
IJR 