This promotional advertisement—showing the top half of a woman with a ten-pence coin covering each of her breasts—released by Rupert Murdoch‘s Sun newspaper has been ruled as not offensive or pornographic by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in Britain. Objections related to women being portrayed as sexual objects, the ads appearing on buses where children…
Monthly Archives: April 2008
Cursor on screen is edging out ink on paper
Philip Meyer says the last newspaper will be printed, packed, sold, (and hopefully) bought, read, crumpled and thrown in the first quarter of the year of the lord 2043. That’s 35 years from now, but The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, has acted before that eventuality could take place. The six-days-a-week newspaper has ceased ink-and-paper…
Announcement: Vinod Mehta in Bangalore
PRESS RELEASE: Vinod Mehta, editor-in-chief of Outlook magazine, is to deliver the convocation address to the graduating class of 2008 at the Indian Institute of Journalism & New Media (IIJNM), Bangalore, on Saturday, 3 May 2008, according to a press release from associate dean, Kanchan Kaur. The time is 10.30 am. The location: IIJNM, opposite…
’80 per cent of Indian journalism is stenography’
P. Sainath, the Magsaysay Award-winning rural affairs editor of The Hindu, at the Rajendra Mathur memorial lecture organised by the Editors’ Guild of India, says the moral universe of the India media has shifted; outrage and compassion among journalists has died. “One, the fundamental feature of the media of our times is the growing disconnect…
Rupert Murdoch eyeing print space in India?
There have been persistent rumours of it for a while now. Now Business Standard reports that Rupert Murdoch‘s Star group is indeed planning a foray in the print media in India. Top executives of Star are believed to have visited Bangalore and held talks with liquor baron Vijay Mallya for a possible joint venture. Mallya…
Network 18 rejects no-poaching pact with Times
PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from New Delhi: In what is being interpreted as a sharpening of knives before the next round of The Great Indian Print Media Battle, Raghav Bahl‘s Network 18 is said to have summarily rejected a proposal for an informal “no-poaching agreement” floated by the country’s biggest media group, Bennett, Coleman & Co…
The ads say it’s going to be smrtr and smplr. Bttr?
Like the proverbial wolf, “Deccan Chronicle is coming”, “Deccan Chronicle is coming” has been the cry in media circles in Bangalore for at least three years now. Well, this time it is coming for sure, and hoardings have sprung up across town promising a smarter, simpler paper aimed at the SMS generation. Less Words? Shouldn’t…
‘Media can’t be in a state of permanent war’
“There is nothing called ‘fiercely independent’ or ‘tamely independent’. You are either independent or you are not independent. I don’t believe in media as a crusade. I believe media is for disseminating truth. That’s our job. It’s not our job to go into a permanent war with somebody. I am not interested in a permanent…
JoJo says he wants to leave The Times of India
PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from New Delhi:The Times of India‘s executive editor Jaideep Bose says he wants to go. JoJo, as the affable editor is known, made the announcement on Friday afternoon at a retreat where editors of the paper had convened with brand executives over the weekend. With tears in his eyes, JoJo is reported…
How Murdoch is taking on the New York Times
American media observers went into a tizzy when news emerged that Rupert Murdoch would lay his hands on the Wall Street Journal. So what’s happened to the paper since he gained ownership of it? The Project for Excellence in Journalism has done a survey of the frontpages of the newspaper in three months preceding and…
Thankfully, the world’s flat or else he would’ve…
New York Times‘ foreign affairs columnist, Thomas L. Friedman, went to Brown University to talk about how “Green is the new Red White and Blue”, i.e. how corporate environmentalism can restore America to its “natural place in the global order.” Instead, the author of The World is Flat tasted a piece of pie. The protestors…
‘Anybody here been raped and speaks English?’
Who is the best judge of a foreign correspondent? The readers, editors and bosses of the foreign correspondent? Or the residents (and critics) of the places the foreign correspondent is reporting from? Surprising as it may sound, Amit Varma contends that it is the latter, and offers by way of evidence a Washington Post report…
‘Hindu had a discernible pro-China line on Tibet’
Tibet is in India’s backyard. Tibetans have been amidst us for decades. The Olympic torch issue has turned a dormant issue into political hot-button with diplomatic ramifications. So how did India’s major English newspapers cover the uprising in Lhasa? Sevanti Ninan, Shayoni Sarkar and Tenzin Paldon of The Hoot have done a qualitative analysis of…
Neena Gopal to edit Deccan Chronicle, Bangalore
Neena Gopal, the former foreign editor of the Dubai-based Gulf News who was in conversation with Rajiv Gandhi just minutes before he was blown up by a suicide bomber in 1991, is to be the editor of the Deccan Chronicle edition from Bangalore. A DC edition in India’s most crowded newspaper market has been on…
Why JoJo might want to leave The Times of India
SHARANYA KANVILKAR writes from Bombay: Well-placed sources in command central of The Times of India group confirm that the paper’s executive editor, Jaideep Bose aka JoJo, has indeed put in his papers as has been rumoured for the last couple of days, but not even editors who have his ear are in a position to…
Is anything OK if it can fetch a few dollars?
The Indian Premier League, the marriage between two of India’s greatest fixations, cricket and cinema, will be consummated at 8 pm in Bangalore today. On test is not just the durability of the shotgun wedding but the limits to which the shortest version of the game can be monetised by big business. There are eight…
‘Buy-sell-save-spend. Live rich. Enjoy.’
The monsoon is still a couple of months away but it’s raining newspapers in southern India. Last Friday, the new New Indian Express hit the stands. On Monday, The Times of India launched in Madras. And on Wednesday, Financial Chronicle, the business daily from the Deccan Chronicle group, arrived in Hyderabad and Madras. In photograph…
Freedom, at last, for an AP photographer
Bilal Hussein, the Associated Press photographer held in Iraq for two years by the US army without having formal charges filed against him, has been released today, 16 April 2008. In this AP photograph, Hussein, 36, holds flowers while wearing a traditional Iraqi robe. Hussein, a member of the AP team that won a Pulitzer…
‘Even a newspaper of record is mortal’
For the first time in 64 years, Le Monde has not appeared this afternoon, as staff at the French paper of record protest the move to axe 130 jobs—two-thirds of them in editorial, one-third in administration. In 1995, the paper produced a 40-page edition with 220 staff, today, it brings out a 30-page edition with…
Muh mein Ram, Ram. Bagal mein R.K. Laxman?!
On the day The Times of India launched in Madras, Bellur Ramakrishna steps across the ‘Laxman rekha‘ to see what the “prim, proper, orthodox, conservative, enlightened” reader of The Hindu is peering at. Also read: The right paper—no political pun intended
IJR 