Last week, the Grammy Award winning musician Vishwa Mohan Bhatt lamented that although there were over 500 television channels in the country, there was not one for classical music. The ad man cum analyst Santosh Desai joins the debate in The Times of India: Do more options actually mean more choice? We have a few…
Monthly Archives: September 2011
Tiger Pataudi’s parting shot for the media
A day after the passing of Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi, The Telegraph has reprinted a 1995 interview with the former cricket captain, who also did a stint as editor of Sportsworld, the now-defunct magazine from the Ananda Bazaar Patrika group that owns The Telegraph. The interviewer is Salman Khurshid, the current Union law minister, whose…
A town shuts down to protest media corruption!
Unbelievable as it may sound, residents of the town of Mudhol in North Karnataka observed a bandh (shutdown) on Tuesday, September 20, to protest “blackmail journalism” and the growing number of imposters masquerading as journalists to extort money. According to a report in the Kannada daily Praja Vani, the bandh in the town of 100,000…
So many reporters, so little info on Sonia Gandhi?
Nothing has exposed the hollowness of so-called “political reporting” in New Delhi, and the fragilility of editorial spines of newspapers and TV stations across the country, than the Congress president Sonia Gandhi‘s illness. Hundreds of correspondents cover the grand old party; tens of editors claim to be on on first-name terms with its who’s who;…
The nation wants to know: TOI or Times Now?
As a story, newspapers verus television is as old as the bush telegraph. But the story gets more interesting when a group owns both print and electronic properties, as The Times group does. Can it afford to decry one or the other? On the strength of this advertisement, evidently it can. “While it may stir…
Is UPA hitting back at ToI, India Today, DNA?
There has been plenty of buzz in recent days that the Congress-led UPA government has quietly begun hitting back at the media for the manner in which it has exposed the scams and scandals, and for the proactive manner in which it backed the middle-class led “Arnab Spring”. There have been rumours, for instance, of…
Everybody’s changing the game these days
It is the title of a book by Ram Charan on innovation. In the US, Bloomberg has a weekly TV show by the same name. And everybody from the Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi to Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan has begun spouting it in recent weeks. Say hello to the “game changers”.…
EPW journalist bags Appan Menon award
Srinivasan Ramani, a senior assistant editor with the journal Economic & Political Weekly (EPW), has bagged the Appan Menon memorial award for young journalists. Ramani, who is pursuing his PhD in international at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), won the prize for his coverage of India’s role in the emergence of Nepal’s new constitutional republic.…
Anna Hazare: 17 TV interviews over 11 hours
Exclusive interview with Barkha Dutt on NDTV 24×7. Exclusive interview with Rajdeep Sardesai on CNN-IBN. Exclusive interview with Rahul Kanwal on Headlines Today. “Live” exclusive interview with Arnab Goswami at “8.23 pm” on Times Now…. It was all in a day’s work for anti-corruption campaigner Anna Hazare on Tuesday, 13 September, as he rolled out…
How ‘New York Times’ stumped India’s censors
Foreign publications usually get into a kerfuffle with superpatriotic Indian authorities over the depiction of the geographical boundaries of India in maps and infographs. Publications like The Economist, for instance, have noisily run afoul of censors for (corrrectly) showing parts of Kashmir as belonging to Pakistan and China. The New York Times which recently launched…
The TV anchor who’s caught Omar Abdullah’s eye
Nora Chopra, the diarist/ gossip columnist of M.J. Akbar‘s weekly newspaper, The Sunday Guardian, gives a delicious little rumour floating around in Delhi some more oxygen. “If the Delhi grapevine is to be believed, Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah and his wife Payal are getting divorced by mutual consent. “The reason behind the…
Sanjaya Baru quits BS to join strategic thinktank
Sanjaya Baru is stepping down as editor of Busines Standard less than two years after he took over from T.N. Ninan. On his Facebook page, Baru, former media advisor to prime minister Manmohan Singh, posted this status update: “OK, now it is final! From 1st November I step down as Editor, BS and take over…
Times Now looking for journos in five cities
Inclusive media fellowships for journalists 2011
PRESS RELEASE: Inclusive Media for Change, an initiative of the Delhi-based centre for study of developing societies (CSDS), is inviting applications from print and electronic journalists for media fellowships to explore grassroots issues in rural communities. The fellowships are open to fulltime and freelance English and Hindi journalists. The fellowship duration is 3-6 weeks, and the…
PTI reporter has a kiss with death at Delhi HC
A Press Trust of India (PTI) reporter had a narrow escape when the deadly bomb went off outside gate number 5 of Delhi high court today, shortly after he had picked up his entry pass. The news agency’s legal reporter Upmanyu Trivedi had collected his pass from the reception counter and was moving towards the…
Top-6 dailies devote 2% coverage on rural issues
“India lives in its villages.” “Agriculture accounts for 60% of the Indian economy.” “Two out of every three Indians live in the rural areas.” The cliches abound about Bharat id est India. Yet, a study of India’s top-three English and Hindi newspapers shows that they devote only a minuscule porportion of their total coverage to…
IJR 