Over the last two decades, The Times of India group has earned plenty of flak for its marketing and advertising gimmicks that have erased the difference between what constitutes editorial and what is supposed to be advertising. But what about its glorious competitors? On top is the front-page wraparound of Monday’s Hindustan Times, with a…
Monthly Archives: May 2010
A health report male journos will agree with?
Lies, lies and damn fags: Indian women journalists light up more often than ordinary Indian women. That’s the finding of a month-long study (authored by a male doctor) spanning 1,500 mediapersons in 15 print, television and advertising companies on the occasion of World No-Tobacco Day. While the national average of Indian women smoking is 1.5…
‘Vijaya Next’ gives ToI Crest a Kannada avatar
PALINI R. SWAMY writes from Bangalore: The Times of India group has unveiled its latest product in Bangalore: Vijaya Next, a broadsheet, all-colour, Kannada weekly for the “upwardly mobile Kannadiga population“. The 24-page Friday offering, priced at Rs 6, is a customised version of the Crest edition of The Times of India, complete with shades…
9-month Express programme in journalism
Express Institute of Media Studies, the journalism school of The Indian Express, is inviting applications for its 9-month programme. The last date to apply is July 3. Visit the website: Express Institute of Media Studies Also read: India’s ten best communications schools Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach? Times School of Journalism seeking…
‘The PM did his job; it’s the media that didn’t’
Manoj Joshi in Mail Today: “The Prime Minister alone cannot be blamed for the lacklustre national press conference he held on Monday. “True, he did not articulate an overarching vision for his government, nor for the country, for what is being touted as our decade of opportunity. “The media in equal measure failed to extract…
Times school of journalism seeking applications
The Times of India‘s school of journalism is inviting applications from graduates under 27 years of age for its business journalism course. The last date to apply is June 10. Visit the website: Times School of Journalism Also read: India’s ten best communications schools Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach?
‘Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose’*
* Or the more it changes, the more it remains the same. “Journalism in India was once a profession. It has now become a trade. It has no more function than the manufacture of soap. It does not regard itself as the responsible adviser of the public. “To give the news uncoloured by any motive,…
Why Manmohan should talk to the media more
B.V. RAO writes from New Delhi: Today, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will address a press conference in New Delhi to unveil the report card of his government’s performance in its first year. The press conference is going to be unlike any other before it. It will not be limited to Delhi journalists. Reporters from Mumbai,…
Sailing with the doves, supping with the hawks?
Kanchan Gupta, associate editor of The Pioneer and a part of Atal Bihari Vajpayee‘s PMO, kicks where it hurts most in the matter of the tainted Pakistani TV journalist, Hamid Mir. The Geo TV anchor, who has interviewed Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden thrice, now stands accused in the court of public opinion of…
Do “anonymous people” not count for media?
Death—ordinary, unglamourous, “smalltown” death—increasingly catches the glitzy, big-city English media on the wrong foot. Unlike the “26/11” siege of Bombay, in which almost as many people were killed as in the Mangalore air crash, you do not find TV and print journalists falling over each other to catch the “first flight” to the spot. Or,…
Gulf News staffer among Mangalore crash victims
The background of all those who perished in Saturday’s air crash in Mangalore is still unclear. But among those killed are a staffer of the Dubai newspaper, Gulf News, and her husband and their daughter who was probably headed for a career in journalism. Manirekha Poonja worked in the finance department of the newspaper, and…
Death of a Foreign Correspondent Foretold
Death scribbled an ugly autograph today, but the book of life is really about life. Tens of men and women who shackled their seatbelts in Dubai after dinner last night, with their children in tow, hoping to have breakfast with their near and dear ones in Mangalore, didn’t get to see them although they were…
When journo bites journo, it’s a ‘Super Exclusive’
Journalism is somewhat pompously described by its practitioners as a dog-eat-dog business. In reality, dog never eats dog; it just comes close to smelling its backside. At least in India, where media tigers are ever so ready to reveal the ugly innards of government, bureaucracy, police, cinema, business, sport, etc, but not rival media tigers.…
China wants to be a media tiger, too. India?
The American newsmagazine Newsweek is up for sale. C. Raja Mohan, the strategic affairs editor of The Indian Express, writes that Chinese academics are salivating over the prospect of picking it up as part of the grand media strategy the Middle Kingdom seems to have embarked upon. Writes Raja Mohan: “Bi Yantao, director of the…
Can only people of Indian origin save journalism?
James Fallows, an instrument-rated pilot, onetime software programme designer, and a 25-year magazine veteran, has a important article in the June issue of The Atlantic Monthly on the efforts being made by Google™ to fix the news business after having played a stellar role in breaking it. Google’s logic: we are all in it together.…
Behind every news story, there is a back story
Lobbyists, who in another age would have been called brokers, fixers, middle men, etc, are the flavour of the month this summer in Delhi with the (official) tapping of phones of top lobbyist Neera Radia aka Niira Radia allegedly revealing the names of two prominent media personalities. Ergo: a panel discussion. Also read: The TV…
And who’s afraid of the face-to-face powwow?
Manmohan Singh, prime minister of the world’s largest democracy, completes six years in office on May 22 without once being subjected to hard-nosed questioning by an Indian journalist—print, television, radio or internet—in a face-to-face, one-on-one, on-the-record interview. He will, however, seek the safety of the crowd once again when he addresses the media at a…
‘Baal ki khaal.’ ‘Dus hazaar tadtadate toofan.’
The world’s most underworked, overexposed reporter with an accountant who doesn’t question his expenses and with a boss who never phones in the middle of the night—Tintin—is now reporting in Hindi. Tehelka magazine reports that an Indian publisher “vexed by the isolation of Hindi-speaking readers from Tintin’s adventures” has obtained the rights to translate his…
‘You furnish the gossip, I will furnish the scoop’*
CNN-IBN editor-in-chief Rajdeep Sardesai, an Oxford blue, tweets on his former employer, front-paging a story that Indian cricket captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni may be on his way out after India’s exit from the Twenty20 World Cup. India’s premier cricket writer, Prem Panicker, on his blog on the games paper tigers play: “A leading national daily…
What media managers can learn from this woman
The accepted wisdom that business bozos tout is that newspapers, as we knew them, have outlived their utility in the internet age. That a reader gets what she used to earlier get from a paper from a zillion different sources today. And that if a newspaper has to survive, it has to do more than…
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