Proponents of user-generated content, participatory journalism, social networking, citizen journalism and all the rest can’t stop talking of the “democratisation of the media”. We are, we are told, being given more information, more perspectives, more opinions, more everything—and most of it without filters or fees. But in a powerful and provocative new book, The Cult…
Monthly Archives: June 2007
A painter’s tribute to the eternal potmaker
What is a history lecturer who becomes a pioneering tabloid cartoonist, who becomes a broadsheet newspaper caricaturist, who becomes a children’s storybook illustrator, who becomes a multimedia graphic artist called? Answer: B.G. Gujarappa. After nearly three decades of experimenting in the various styles of art, “Gujjar” as he is better known, is now a full-fledged…
MUST LISTEN: Murdoch & Wall Street Journal
[odeo=http://odeo.com/audio/12930993/view] In India, newspapers are sold and bought, changed and transformed, and most times “suspended” or closed down, as if papers are no different from roadside tea stalls. All this goes in the name of “market forces”—buyer wants to sell, seller wants to buy, who are we to ask? Little do journalists, academics, or readers…
It’s fast. It’s slick. It’s a blur. It’s a newspaper
The new TV commercial for the Toronto Globe & Mail. Link via Innovation in Newspapers
B-school babes will soon have a new opening
Time magazine has an exclusive on Rupert Murdoch, and the soon-to-be owner of the Wall Street Journal responds, in true Murdoch style, if he will tabloidise the venerated business newspaper, a fear most of his detractors express, by, say, putting topless page 3 girls a la The Sun. “When the Journal gets its Page 3…
In Pakistan, fourth estate meets fifth column
At a recent press conference, the BBC Urdu Service’s Masud Alam walked up to a tall, rugged man, with close-cropped hair, wearing a white salwar-kameez and leather sandals. “Which paper are you with?” He pretends not to have listened. Some of the reporters around us have heard me though, and they are now watching us…
Photographers, go fly a kite for such pictures!
Shooting panoramic pictures in Indian cities is a major pain for photographers, because of the security restrictions and the high cost of hiring a helicopter or glider. Randall Munroe shot this picture of Boston, with the main campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the frame, by fitting a Rs 1,000-camera to a kite.…
Does a tree make a noise only for the cameras?
What is news? And who decides what is news? Is one politician attacking another, an event which happens every other day, always news? Is the stock market going up or down, an event which could happen several times a day, sometimes on the same day, news? These are old questions and they get asked again…
‘Thank God Blair called the media a feral beast’
Question: What do you do when the Prime Minister has your newspaper in mind when he calls the news media “a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits”? Answer: Hope that somebody will ask his successor whether he agrees with the surmise. Tony Blair launched into The Independent while speaking at the Reuters…
Entries invited for $15,000 journalism prize
“Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” So said the French political philosopher, journalist and politician Frédéric Bastiat (1801–50). Now there is a prize named after him, worth $15,000, open to all published writers around the world. But the deadline is just a couple of…
A 24-year-old made finest (media) movie ever
Orson Welles‘ Citizen Kane (original trailer above), a scathing biopic of William Randolph Hearst and made when Welles was a ripe old man of 24, has once again topped the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 best films of all times. And Phil Rosenthal uses the occasion to marvel at how many great movies…
Say hello to the electronic news box
Gender bias: do men write better than women?
YES—Men write better than women: “Male lit is violent, offensive, and crude, but it’s also genuine. Confident, without apology, ready to be humiliated, without the prudish restraint of grace, or the contemporary stink of gender guilt.” NO—Women write better than men: “Women tell it straight. No choice but to be straight when nobody wants to…
Because the only certain thing in life is death
There are television shows on living, cooking, playing, buying, selling. Why not one on dying? That’s precisely the blank in the television schedule that a German company is doing. And soon EosTV will be bringing the grim business of ageing, dying and mourning, live, 24 x 7 x 365. “Most of the programming, however, will…
BBC contest for photographer of the year
BBC News is conducting its annual summer photography competition with six specific themes: blue, hidden, concentration, look down, heritage, and time. Each participant can submit upto three entries per category. The two photographers who get the most reader votes will go forward to the final and one of them will be awarded the title of…
‘Despite boom, Indian journalism is shrinking’
The Indian media is getting bigger, fatter, richer, but is it getting any better? More importantly, does it have any possibility of getting better? These are evergreen questions. They have been asked before (recently by Martha Nussbaum) and will doubtless be asked again and again. In the Columbia Journalism Review, Basharat Peer, a former rediff.com…
Malayala Manorama is read by people who think…
GIRISH NIKAM forwards the suspected reader profile of Indian newspapers. It’s an old list, sure, but still an interesting one if only because it shows how much some of the papers have changed—and how much some of our expectations from newspapers have changed—since the definitions were first thought up. Please add new names and definitions…
“Surely, you must be joking, Mr President?”
The outgoing Indian head of state, Avul Pakir Jainulbdeen Abdul Kalam, has been a darling of the media. His hair, his “repeat-after-me” routine, his air and submarine rides, his telegenic effervescence, and not least the relatively easier access journalists have had to his little hut on top of Raisina Hill have endeared the cameras, in…
‘It didn’t work for us. But maybe it will for you’
“Experiential Journalism” is a word that trips off many editorial and managerial tongues these days. Instead of just saying how things work, show the reader/ viewer/ listener what it does, and he or she will be infinitely more interested in your output. A Fuji TV journalist in Japan did just that yesterday to show how…
Read My Bips: ‘Our miseries sell newspapers’
“I’ve purposely ignored all the speculations about my relationship with John Abraham all this while. Too paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, reports of its demise are vastly exaggerated. I have avoided commenting on this, despite a variety of insulting, ridiculous and downright laughable suggestions. “If the media is to be believed, John apparently has no consistent…
IJR 