sans serif records the demise of T.N. Shanbhag, the founder of Bombay’s legendary book store, Strand Book Stall, in Bombay on Friday morning. He was 84. Mr Shanbhag, who was once so poor that he couldn’t afford 75 paise to buy a paperback, built his enterprise, now happily expanded to Bangalore and Mysore, on the…
Monthly Archives: February 2009
How a slumdweller became a Newsweek reporter
The demographic profile of journalists worldwide has undergone a radical transformation in recent years. Whether it has actually made journalism better is a question readers, viewers and listeners answer every day and night with their remote controls and subscription renewals. Once the lowliest of low professions—the last hope for lazy bums, the dregs of society…
What a headstart of 1,562 months doesn’t give
In an interview with Sruthijit K.K. of contentsutra, N. Ram, editor-in-chief of The Hindu, talks of how things have changed for the “Mount Road Mahavishnu” after the entry of The Times of India in Madras: “It’s good, we welcome competition. The Times of India is a major newspaper…. I never put down The Times of…
How an Oscar winner ushered in a newspaper
Last year, when The Times of India made its big move to Madras to take on The Hindu, it used music composer A.R. Rahman, who won two Academy Awards today for the best original song and best score for the movie Slumdog Millionaire, as its vehicle of change with this slick television commercial. Also read:…
The 11 habits of India’s most powerful media pros
Eleven media professionals—editors, publishers, promoters, proprietors—figure in the Indian Express list of the 100 most powerful Indians in 2009. Eight of them have a presence in newspapers, three in television, only one is from the magazine sphere. Four of the 11 are from the language press. The IE ranking also lists the quirks and kinks…
Amita Malik, the ‘first lady of Indian media’, RIP
sans serif records with regret the passing away of Amita Malik, the radio journalist who grew to be one of India’s leading film and media critics, in New Delhi, on Friday. She was 86 years old. Often referred to as “the first lady of Indian media“, Ms Malik conducted path-breaking interviews with luminaries like Satyajit…
Why the great Indian media dream crashed
Rs 60 crore for hoardings to promote the launch of a television channel; Rs 1 crore per day for programming. Hindustan Times editorial director Vir Sanghvi on why the great Indian media dream came crashing down: “Many publishing houses ventured into businesses and products they had no understanding of, believing that the revenue from their…
K.N. Shanth Kumar back as editor of Praja Vani
Exactly two years to the day after he was ejected as editor of the Bangalore-based newspapers Deccan Herald and Praja Vani, K.N. Shanth Kumar (in picture) has been reinstated on the hot seat of the preeminent Kannada daily published by the family-owned The Printers (Mysore) Limited group. Shanth Kumar took over from elder brother K.N.…
The sad and pathetic decline of Arun Shourie
SHARANYA KANVILKAR writes from Bombay: Arun Shourie is one of the strangest cases on the Indian intellectual landscape if not its most disappointing. A living, walking, moving advertisement of how rabid ideology can addle even the most riveting of minds, stripping it of all its nuance and pretence; its very soul and humanity. *** Once…
Biggest Corporate Fraud is now Biggest Coverup
From a media perspective, the fraud at India’s “fourth largest Information Technology company” has been remarkable for two things. One, the failure of the business media in catching a whiff of what was cooking in the accounting kitchens of the disgraced Hyderabad company not just one year, but for seven years. If that failure is…
Calcutta editor arrested for Independent article
Many years ago, a news editor of Indian origin was arrested in Dubai for having carried a Peanuts cartoon strip that was not OK with the censors. In a similar incident, the editor, and publisher and printer, of The Statesman, Calcutta, were arrested yesterday on “a specific complaint” from a resident of Calcutta against the…
Sauce for a paper ain’t sauce for a TV channel?
If it is not all right in the eyes of The Hoot for NDTV to select the BJP’s prime minister-in-waiting L.K. Advani for a “Lifetime Achievement Award” in 2009, was it OK for Business Standard—in which Hoot editor Sevanti Ninan has a stake—to invite the leader of the opposition to hand the Business Standard Awards…
Should the government bail out the media?
Just a few months ago, Indian media organisations were prancing around in joy, launching new channels, new editions, new supplements, new “events”, as if there was no tomorrow. Where there was madness without a method, there is now panic without a method. Now, suddenly, media managers are acting as if there are ants in their…
Tehelka promoters ‘vindicated’ by official papers
First Global, the brokerage promoted by Shankar Sharma and Devina Mehra which had a 14.50 per cent stake in the webzine turned magazine Tehelka, has scored a major victory with official documents reportedly showing that the firm had been harassed by market regulators on trumped-up charges, after the then BJP-led government had been shamed by…
Yes. No. Maybe. Don’t know. Can’t say.
Recession or no recession, the fascination of the media with opinion polls continues. And recession or no recession, the pollsters turn out results that the media likes to hear. It takes a brief clip from ‘Yes, Prime Minister‘ to realise how it is all done. As Stephen Colbert said on Larry King Live: “I’m not…
Should the media be honouring politicians?
Should a designated prime ministerial candidate of a mainstream political party be chosen and given an award by a television channel which might have to cover him if and when he takes charge? Should the candidate so eagerly accept such a public honour? The candidate is L.K. Advani of the Bharatiya Janata Party, and the…
A businessman behind an iconic common man
India’s greatest cartoonist, Rasipuram Krishnaswamy Laxman aka R.K. Laxman, inaugurates an exhibition of his work at the Indian Institute of Cartoonists in Bangalore on Friday. Wheeling the legendary Times of India linesman, at right, is ‘Master’ Manjunath, the boy who played “Swami” in the television show Malgudi Days, based on Laxman’s brother, R.K. Narayan‘s famous…
The slaughter of the media lambs in Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka is on the verge of winning the war against the Tamil Tigers in the North, but will it ever win the peace? Thousands of civilians are missing, and efforts to trace them are weak. Nine journalists have died at work in the last three years, and the number may be even higher. Al…
Vir Sanghvi’s first HT blog targets Mint again
Former Hindustan Times editor Vir Sanghvi has once again launched into the new editor of Mint, R. Sukumar, for not carrying a column in which he had attacked the fledgling business paper’s coverage of the INX saga starring Sanghvi. In his first column for the newly launched blogs section of HT, Sanghvi writes glowingly of…
Will NDTV and Barkha Dutt sue Facebook next?
If there is anything that l’affaire Barkha Dutt versus Cheytanya Kunte holds a mirror to—besides media hypocrisy, thin skins, forked tongues, and such like—it is: a) the quality of legal advice media behemoths receive and act upon, and b) the mainstream media’s bottomless ignorance of the wired world and how it works. Even the spitting-image…
IJR 