Dith Pran, who served as interpreter to the New York Times‘ Sydney Schanberg during the Cambodian genocide under Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, has passed away in New Jersey at the age of 65. Dith’s relationship with Schanberg, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting, formed the basis for the Rolland Joffe film The…
Monthly Archives: March 2008
Can a boy-actor hold a candle to an editor?
Tongue firmly in both cheeks, Sans Serif is pleased to announce a global campaign for Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter (top, right) to be drafted to play Tintin. Reports in the British papers suggest that Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson have zeroed in on 17-year-old Thomas Sangster (top, left) to play the boy-reporter who (sigh!)…
‘The TV satellite is mightier than the ICBM’
From The Economist obituary of Sir Arthur C. Clarke: “In 1962, at the chilliest part of the cold war and just after the launch of Sputnik had heralded the space age, he discussed in ‘Profiles of the Future‘ the implications of transatlantic satellite radio and television broadcasts, with information raining down on previously isolated parts…
‘Indian media doesn’t cover 70% of population’
The Magsaysay Award-winning rural affairs editor of The Hindu, Palagummi Sainath, continues his one-man crusade against the growing disconnect between mass media and mass reality. At the launch of the website of Janashakthi, a Kannada weekly, in Bangalore on Thursday, Sainath said: # Media is disconnected with 70 per cent of the population and is…
All in a day’s work for our valiant lensmen
The life of photographers and videographers in India has become hell thanks to the relentless media boom, with dozens of them jostling for space, nudging each other, often coming to blows with each other, all to capture a frame which the reader may not notice, and sometimes not even care. The problem multiplies manifold when…
How many magazines can one man publish?
He is 39 years old. He looks frail, anaemic, infirm. He cycles 50 kilometres a day. He has already edited and published children’s magazines in 50 Indian languages and dialects over the last 18 years. He has earned the label patrika premi (magazine lover). His mission in life is to publish children’s magazines in 300…
Only in India: 90 per cent off for journalists!
A shower of freebies is the first sign that an election season is around the corner. Three weeks after finance minister P. Chidambaram wrote off farm loans worth Rs 60,000 crore with an eye clearly on the coming general elections, the gravy train is picking up steam across India. In the southern State of Andhra…
Why blogging is more interesting than reporting
The jury is still out on blogging—and if left to the mainstream media, it will remain out for ever. Is it good, is it journalism, does it have the “institutional” checks and balances, do bloggers go out and report a story… questions like these have been hurled for very nearly a decade without hurting anybody.…
P. Sainath lecture on media in Bangalore
P. Sainath, the Magsaysay Award winning rural affairs editor of The Hindu, will deliver a lecture on the media in Bangalore on Thursday, 27 March 2008. The lecture has been organised by the cultural tabloid Janashakti. The venue is the Senate hall of Central College. The time is 4 pm. Also read: ‘A media politically…
24 hours, six TVs, one laptop, two radios…
This is the age of the information overload. Gone is the top-down, one-way, take-it-or-leave-it hierarchy of the past. News, views and juice now bombards the reader, listener, viewer, surfer. Scores of voices plead, rant, shout to catch your attention as the dissemination of fact and opinion no longer remains the sole province of people with…
A rural newspaper that’s a voice of the women
The district it is located in is one of India’s 200 poorest. There is practically no industry worth its name and the local economy survives on rain-fed agriculture. Literacy levels are abysmal, and only one in three women knows how to read and write. The sex ratio is skewed in favour of men. And incidents…
Tintin publisher Leblanc passes away
Sans Serif records with regret the demise of Raymond Leblanc, the Belgian publisher behind the comic-book hero Tintin. He was 92. The iconic boy-reporter, created by Herge, had first appeared as a character in 1929, but it wasn’t until the association with Leblanc began that he became a global hero. Tintin first appeared in a …
Alltop: aggregation without the aggravation
There are several ways for journalists, journalism students, journalism educators and journalism consumers to stay on top of what they want from the world wide web. You can surf. You can search. You can subscribe. . You can customise, depending on your interests. You can scan, using an aggregator. Etc. The indefatigable Guy Kawasaki has…
‘It’s all about irreverence, not subservience’
Indian journalist Seema Mustafa on the genesis of her opposition to the India-US nuclear deal, which some speculate could have contributed to M.J. Akbar being eased out of his position as editor of The Asian Age: “It had to do with a certain commitment with which I joined the profession—a belief that journalism was powerful…
Ramnath Goenka Journalism Awards
The Ramnath Goenka Foundation is inviting entries for the third annual Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Awards. India’s biggest media awards, with 23 categories and over Rs 25 lakh as prize money, has added one more category, Excellence in Civic Journalism, this year. The awards will be for the following categories: Journalist of the Year…
When a newspaper is no longer a newspaper
THEJAS H.K. writes from Madras: There was a time not too long ago when I used to walk a couple of miles to get a copy of The Hindu in Mysore. Here, in the City of its birth, it is delivered to my room at 6 am, but over the last few years, a strange…
How Indian TV slayed a dangerous superstition
In a moment of pure television, an Indian rationalist has challenged a black magician to kill him on live TV—and survived to tell the tale. On March 3, Sanal Edamaruku of Rationalist International found himself opposite Pandit Surinder Sharma, a tantrik who claims to be a consultant for top Indian politicians and is a wellknown…
‘Too many junkets at stake to make enemies’
Kesava Menon, the former Islamabad correspondent of The Hindu, reviewing ‘Anatomy of an Abduction—How the Indian Hostages in Iraq Were Freed‘ by V. Sudarshan, former diplomacy correspondent of Outlook: “The Indian media has a relationship with the country’s diplomatic corps that is somewhat peculiar when compared with its approach to other arms of the government…
Does good news about Islam make bad news?
VINUTHA MALLYA writes from Kuala Lumpur: Sans Serif, of course, hasn’t carried even a word on the subject, but the “anti-terrorism” call sent out by one of the oldest and most orthodox Islamic seminaries in South Asia, the Dar-ul-Uloom in Deoband (Uttar Pradesh), has received scant square centimetres in our so-called “national newspapers”. Which is…
Khushwant Singh on his last day at the Weekly
The dirty old man of Indian journalism, Khushwant Singh, has used the occasion provided by M.J. Akbar‘s unceremonious exit from The Asian Age to describe his own departure from The Illustrated Weekly of India in the latest issue of Outlook: “The journal, like all others published by Bennett Coleman, including The Times of India, had…
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