The well-known poet and journalist Rudyard Kipling, who travelled extensively and worked for many years as a correspondent for The Pioneer in Allahabad, quoted in today’s paper: “Take well-ground Indian ink as much as suffices and a camel hairbrush proportionate to the intersperse of your lines. In an auspicious hour, read your final draft and…
Monthly Archives: January 2011
Arnab Goswami edges out Barkha on power list
NDTV group editor Barkha Dutt is the big media dropout from Indian Express‘s 2011 list of the 100 most powerful Indians. Dutt, who entered the ranking at No. 82 last year, has made way for her former colleague, Times Now editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami, who enters at No. 90. Barring Arnab and Star India CEO Uday…
Who was the newsmagazine editor who…?
An item appearing in “Glass House”, the gossip column compiled by Shantanu Guha Ray in the latest issue of India Today: “PSSSST…: “Did an editor of a newsmagazine recently visit the intelligence bureau to brief its chief over Hindutva terror?”
Khalid Mohamed on ToI, DNA, HT and the stars
Khalid Mohamed, longtime film critic of The Times of India and sometime editor of Filmfare—who hopped over to DNA and then to Hindustan Times in Bombay after making four films in the interim—talks about his 32 years in journalism and the stars he met along the way, in the January issue of Society magazine. #…
Anish Trivedi sentenced to six months in prison
Anish Trivedi—a former investment banker who gave up Wall Street to host radio, anchor television and run a media company; writer of two plays (Still Single and One Small Day), and a regular contributor to magazines like GQ and Elle—gets his 15 minutes of infamy for a 2006 column in the Bombay tabloid, Mid-Day. Facsimile:…
Vir Sanghvi & Barkha Dutt: “We were targeted”
Society, the monthly lifestyle magazine of the Magna group owned by Nari Hira, has a cover story on Vir Sanghvi and Barkha Dutt in its January 2011 issue. For the first time, the two journalists most affected by the Niira Radia tapes, appear on the same platform. In his 3-page interview, Sanghvi states: “I am…
Did Radia tapes impact journos’ Padma awards?
There is a palpable sense of shock among media folk that the 2011 Republic Day honours’ list contains no “working journalists” i.e. those still burning the phone lines and greasing the totempole in anticipation of the big day. There are no awardees from the exalted world of television, with the honours going to old-world print…
Padma awards: Homai Vyarawala, T.J.S. George
Last Friday, many journalists received an SMS that contained the list of names that had apparently been forwarded to the Union home ministry for consideration for the Padma awards this year. The names: Manini Chatterjee (The Telegraph), Raj Chengappa (The Tribune), Vijay Darda (Lokmat), Arnab Goswami (Times Now), Aarti Jerath (The Times of India), Alok…
To err is human, to cc and bcc is divine
A correction and retraction appearing in The Hindu, issued by the editor-in-chief, N.Ram, appearing in today’s paper: “It was wrongly stated in the report by our Special Correspondent published in The Hindu of January 23, 2011 titled “Expunge remarks against Graham Staines: Supreme Court’s remarks ‘gratuitous,’ say editors, civil society members” that the statement was…
Note to directors: It was Shammy not Barkha
No One Killed Jessica? Well, someone ‘killed’ Harinder Baweja. Raj Kumar Gupta, the director of last weekend’s multiplex marvel—in which Rani Mukherji essays the role of a single, bitchy, aggressive, passionate, foul-mouthed, investigative journalist probing the murder of the model Jessica Lal at a Delhi bar—may have made the world believe that his ‘wet dream’…
Prabhu Chawla: A post-dated announcement
A front-page notice appearing in The New Sunday Express, the Sunday edition of the Madras-based The New Indian Express, on 23 January 2011, announcing the arrival of former India Today editor Prabhu Chawla as the editorial director of the paper. Chawla, who also hosted the Seedhi Baat show on the Aaj Tak channel, has launched…
Hu, Wen and why China scorns Indian media
When the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao visited India in December 2010, he was critical of the Indian media, saying it repeatedly sensationalised the border situation, causing damage to bilateral ties. He even lectured a group of editors to play a more active role in enhancing friendship between the two countries. However, when the Chinese president…
INS: “We reject wage board recommendations”
The following is the full text of the media release issued by the Indian Newspaper Society (INS) in response to the report submitted by the wage board led by former Supreme Court judge, G.R. Majithia, which recommended a 35 per cent hike in salaries for working journalists, and increased the retirement age to 65 years.…
Cash transfer scheme is already here for journos
A preferential allotment of a house or a house site to a journalist (or media house) can now be ferreted out by an RTI application. A car or a SUV is a moving advertisement. A harmless retainership for the lawyer-son can be cruelly outed by the Niira Radia tapes. A free ride in a Reliance…
Scholarships for conference of science journalists
MEDIA RELEASE: The world conference of science journalists (WCSJ) is offering a limited number of scholarships to science journalists from developing countries to attend the 7th world conference of science journalists to be held at the Grand Hyatt hotel in Cairo, Egypt, from 27 to 29 June, 2011. Aspirants will be required to explain their…
Four lessons in journalism from Tata’s chief PRO
Christabelle Noronha, corporate affairs chief of the Tata group, in a letter to the editor of the business daily, Mint, which had carried a story on the Tatas blacklisting The Pioneer, Outlook*, Open, India Today group and The Times of India group for their “biased reporting” of the 2G spectrum allocation scam: “Is it not…
Correction: Indian Army didn’t rape 200,000
An item appearing in the gossip columns of Mail Today: Edward Behr: Anybody here raped and who speaks English?
Have Tatas blacklisted The Times of India again?
Tata Steel, the flagship company of corporate behemoth Tata Sons, is going in for a follow-on public offer (FPO). This display advertisement appeared in the Delhi editions of the Hindustan Times and Mint, Indian Express and Financial Express, The Hindu and Business Standard, on Friday, 14 January 2011, but not in the Delhi editions of India’s…
Aditya Sinha on the “worldview” of Delhi journos
Aditya Sinha, departing editor-in-chief of the Madras-based The New Indian Express and editor-designate of the Bombay-based DNA, in his farewell column in TNIE: “A friend asked if I would miss Chennai and I thought, what an absurd question. Over the last four years, Chennai has become a part of me. My three teenagers have become…
A ‘wrong’ map lands Mint in a bit of a bother
A screenshot of the business paper Mint‘s web homepage on Sunday, 16 January 2011, after a graphic accompanying an Aakar Patel column on corruption showed Pakistan-occupied Kashmir as a part of Pakistan. Result: pages 10 and 11 are now missing from the epaper site of the newspaper.
IJR 