Mint editor R.Sukumar: “Cleavage,” he said…. Big ones, he said, moving his hands out till they were at least 10 inches in front of his chest…. The person, who worked for a business news channel, was telling me why the channel had hired a certain anchor for its morning stock market show…. I didn’t pay…
Monthly Archives: July 2011
Femina has a short message for men: tidy up
Femina, India’s oldest women’s magazine, has a new television commercial to mark its relaunch. The TVC stars the actor Kalki Koechlin and is directed by the filmmaker Anurag Kashyap. Originally published by The Times of India group, Femina now comes out of the World Wide Media stable, a Times group joint venture with BBC. Also…
Scam-buster Josy Joseph gets Prem Bhatia prize
Josy Joseph of The Times of India, who authored the paper’s big scoops on the Adarsh housing and CWG scams last year, has bagged the 2011 Prem Bhatia award for excellence in political reporting. He shares the award with J. Dey, the crime reporter of Mid-Day, who was slain in Bombay recently. Joseph, whose career…
Jug Suraiya on MJ, SJ, Giri, Monu & Mamma T
PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from Delhi: Books about The Times of India are like city buses. There isn’t one for years, and then two come along around the same time. And on both occasions, punsters imported from Calcutta are the ones steering the wheel. Bachi Karkaria came out with Behind the Times, “a poorly structured, poorly…
Nirmala Lakshman: I didn’t step down, I resigned
This is the full text of Nirmala Lakshman‘s July 20 letter to the board of directors of Kasturi & Sons, the holding company of The Hindu, on why she can no longer continue as the joint editor of the paper, following the elevation of Delhi bureau chief Siddharth Varadarajan as the next editor of the…
Why N. Ravi quit as Hindu’s editor after 20 years
This is the full text of N. Ravi‘s July 20 letter to the board of directors of Kasturi & Sons, the holding company of The Hindu, on why he can no longer continue as the editor of the paper, following the elevation of Delhi bureau chief Siddharth Varadarajan as the next editor of the paper.…
Malini Parthasarathy: Why I quit ‘The Hindu’
This is the full text of Malini Parthasarathy‘s July 20 letter to the board of directors of Kasturi & Sons, the holding company of The Hindu, on why she can no longer continue as executive editor of the paper, following the elevation of Delhi bureau chief Siddharth Varadarajan as the next editor of the paper.…
Malini Parthasarathy quits as Hindu exec editor
The Hindu boardroom strife—over the appointment of a non-family professional as editor—has claimed its first victim in the newsroom. Malini Parthasarathy, who would have become the first woman editor of a broadsheet English newspaper had the traditional succession plan been implemented, has resigned as executive editor of the paper. This, a day after the Supreme…
‘Editors are lobbying on behalf of corporations’
Corruption in the media is as old as, well, Malabar Hill, except that stories of individual transgressions—journalists and editors seeking cars, houses, laptops etc—have now been supplanted by stories of institutional transgressions. Writing in the Financial Times, London, the historian Ramachandra Guha puts his finger on a newer and more insidious form of media corruption:…
Does DNA terror column amount to ‘incitement’?
Janata Party maverick Dr Subramaniam Swamy‘s DNA article on “How to wipe out Islamic terror” after the 13 July Bombay blasts has stirred up the T-cup. Twitter has been abuzz, and the paper’s readers have reacted in droves calling the article “irresponsible and Islamophobic”. On the other hand, Swamy—whose Twitter profile reads “I give as…
Why Indian media can’t laugh at Murdoch’s plight
SANJAY JHA writes from Bombay: Rupert Murdoch, the emperor of media leviathan News Corporation, shuttled on a transatlantic flight over a tumultuous week-end that saw a popular British Sunday tabloid bite the dust, never to rise again. News of the World (NOTW) was founded prior to the Great Indian Mutiny of 1857, but closed with…
Did news TV twist Rahul 99% line on terrorism?
BASUDEV MAHAPATRA writes from Bhubaneshwar: The manner in which AICC general secretary Rahul Gandhi’s statement on stopping terror attacks before they occur was reported by TV journalists last week, and the way it was presented by news channels, hardly fulfilled any purpose of journalism. On the contrary, it exposed news television’s passion for tabloid journalism.…
‘TV coverage of 13/7 no different from 26/11’
Mint editor R. Sukumar on the coverage of the July 13 Bombay blasts by TV newschannels: “As a journalist, what made me really angry was the way television channels covered the blasts. For some time now, the channels have been trying to convince anyone who cares to listen that they have reformed and that, if…
Entries invited for Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize
PRESS RELEASE: The Shakti Bhatt foundation is inviting entries for the 2011 Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize in memory of the late journalist and books editor. Entries from first-time authors of Indian origin are welcome in the following genres: poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction (travel writing, autobiography, biography and narrative journalism), and drama. The prize carries…
Rajeev Shukla: from reporter to minister of state
PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from Delhi: Rajeev Shukla, the journalist who began his career as a lowly reporter in the Hindi daily Northern India Patrika in Kanpur in 1978 before turning to politics in 2000, is to become a minister in the Manmohan Singh government this evening. The 52-year-old will be the minister of State in charge…
The journo married to the Rs 100,000 crore heir
In all the wide-eyed reporting on the gold tumbling out of the vaults of the Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Trivandrum, reporters have (generally) missed out on one delicious fact: the fact, that one of our ilk is married into the erstwhile royal family of Travancore. That lucky somebody is M.D. Nalapat (left), former resident editor of…
NDTV reporter puts an indecent proposal in print
With everybody stabbing everybody’s back in the Congress, NDTV anchor and reporter Sunetra Choudhury has set tongues wagging in Delhi with her account of an interaction with a politician in the news, in DNA: “It wasn’t really a big, exclusive interview. He’d spoken to a rival channel and made wild allegations, and my editor wanted…
The Guardian, Nick Davies and News of the World
PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from Delhi: Most journalists who succeed in bringing down a minister or a bureaucrat, or a government, wear it as a badge of honour. How about Nick Davies, who has brought down a 138-year-old newspaper, the News of the World—and its mighty owner Rupert Murdoch—with his searing expose of the phone hacking…
When Manu Joseph met Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
Manu Joseph, editor of Open magazine, in The New York Times: “Nine years ago, I was invited by the Art of Living Foundation to interview Mr Shankar. “Mr Shankar was in the house of a wealthy businessman in South Mumbai. “In the living room he sat on a large, embellished, thronelike chair as about 50…
NDTV reporter wins domestic violence case
Jennifer Arul, the longtime face of NDTV from Madras, is in the news, with the settlement of the domestic violence case she had filed against her husband. While the story makes it to the city pages of the Madras editions of both The Times of India and Deccan Chronicle, there is no mention of it…
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