As Baba Ramdev‘s fast was abruptly ended and the yogi shifted to Dehradun in great secrecy, Star News had a breaking news slide: “Star News ne Baba ko LIVE dekha“.
Meanwhile, Sunday’s Indian Express provides some evidence that the preferred newschannel in the corridors of power may be changing in Lutyen’s Delhi.
IJR 
I find it really strange that The Indian Express has beaten all powerful The Times of India in publishing the story on the midnight police action on Baba Ramdev’s dharna at Ram Leela Maidan.
The Sunday edition of The Times of India (New Delhi edition) makes no mention of the story of the police action. Whereas The Indian Express has the story in full detail plastered all over the front page.
Is this a case of The Indian Express becoming a more efficient news-gatherer as compared to the highly successful The Times of India? I have no idea why the Times of India failed to have this story in 5 June edition, when The Indian Express could.
Perhaps the Times journalists had a rather long binge on booze and beer on Saturday night so they could not be at the spot to cover the news… (Saturday night full tight – which means on Staurday night we are fully drunk.)
The Sunday edition of Times of India looks totally dated as compared to The Indian Express and this is rather unfortunate. I hope the Times management will take some action so that this kind of inefficiency is not repeated in future. Thanks.
Re Indian Express carrying the Baba arrest / police action story and not ToI.
Dailies with a larger print run will have earlier deadlines. (On top of that, on Saturday nights, the deadline is earlier because the pages are more than on other days.)
IE is not the comparison for ToI because IE, with a smaller print run than both, can keep pages open later than ToI or HT. If HT carried the story and ToI didn’t, then it lends itself to interpretation.
Dear Jthomas,
Thanks for the detailed info. Now i understand why IE seemingly managed to beat the HT & TOI in carrying this story in front page .
This is clearly a case of the nimble and agile David (IE) beating the mighty Goliath (HT & TOI). Now the question is – why can’t newspapers with larger print run have the technology or the system to carry last minute breaking news.
I, as a customer of TOI and few other papers, am not interested in excuses. I want to see the latest news splashed on the first page with my morning breakfast. I pay for the paper with my hard earned money, and I deserve the best.
In the age of the Internet and 24 hour news channels, the newspapers need to change their system. They can’t make absurd excuses that because they have a large print run so they can’t carry stories that break in the middle of night. This is taking things too lightly.
I am not exaggerating at all. The Sunday edition of two of the most powerful newspapers does look extremely dated. It is inexcusable that they failed to make even a cursory mention of such an important story.
the newspaper establishment must reform itself, they can’t continue to serve stale news and still expect loyalty from their customers.
Re: Inability of large dailies to print late and still distribute at daybreak.
It is a physical limitation all dailies face. There is an optimal speed of so-many-copies-per-minute at which any printing press can roll out newspapers.
If you increase the speed beyond that, the paper reel will snap and disrupt the printing. Also, if you roll beyond a certain speed, the printing ink won’t dry and it will smudge all the pages.
How dailies with large print orders try to overcome this problem (number of copies to the time it takes to print) is by distributing the load.
For example, if a paper that has to print 500,000 copies for sale in Delhi NCR did that in five printing units in different locations, it can reduce the printing and distribution time considerably.
It’s to divide or stagger printing for ease of distribution [to take in latest news and deliver it at dawn] that you find papers running separate editions for New Delhi and Gurgaon and Faridabad, for example.
All dailies are attempting to stagger printing with varying degrees of success, depending on the resources at their command.
“Meanwhile, Sunday’s Indian Express provides some evidence that the preferred newschannel in the corridors of power may be changing in Lutyen’s Delhi.”-Please post the link to the story.Anyone?Please.
The Bangalore edition of Sunday TOI had Baba’s arrest headlined. If Bangalore TOI could do it, why couldn’t Delhi TOI?
Good question. I had no idea that Bangalore edition had the news headlined.
If Bangalore could do it, then why couldn’t Delhi!
Mystery deepens.
Perhaps in Delhi everyone got busy learning yoga from Baba Ramdev, so the story of police brutality could not be filed….
Inexcusable. No spin.
@Ashok @Objectivist Mantra
The SToI I got in Bangalore did not carry the Baba arrest story. “Baba. govt declare victoy on Day 1” was the second lead story (lead was “Ilyas Kashmiri dead”) in the issue I got at home less than 7km away from the ToI on MG Rd.
The arrest story may have been appeared in the last few thousand printed. In which case, it’s worth checking if some areas in Delhi received ToI or HT copies with the arrest story.
Disclaimer: I hold no brief for ToI. If anything, I have worked in IE and other rival publications in my time. My intent was only to explain the constraints in publishing, for the benefit of readers of this media-oriented “Sans Serif”
Thank You Sir.Appreciate the way you tried to explain such technical things in simple terms.
Thanks Mr. Jthomas for all the info. then it is possible for a newspaper to have a different content for different areas. I had no idea about this.
Perhaps TOI might have published a different story on the ram leela ground drama in the papers that went to other areas of Delhi. It is possible.
It is certainly completely unlike the TOI to miss out on such an important issue. This is a highly competitive and aggressive paper. That is how it has survived at the top for so long.