Indian media houses, promoters and practitioners are gung-ho about foreign direct investment (FDI) in all sectors except the media, under the specious argument that the media is not a “commodity”, etc. Media barons who justify the worst excesses of modern Indian media under the this-is-what-the-consumer-wants logic, somehow find it convenient to block FDI in media…
Monthly Archives: December 2011
‘Objectivity is horse shit. We have our biases’
Journalism schools and media houses with codes of conduct spend an awful lot of time chasing “objectivity”. Arun Gupta, the Indian-American journalist who straddles the worlds of politics and journalism and is co-founder of The Occupied Wall Street Journal, the mouthpiece of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, says objectivity is a whole load of codswallop.…
N.S. Jagannathan, ex-editor, Indian Express: RIP
sans serif records with regret the passing away of N.S. Jagannathan, former editor-in-chief of The Indian Express and Financial Express, in Bangalore on Saturday, 24 December 2011. He was 89 years old. NSJ, as he was known to friends and colleagues, succeeded Arun Shourie in the Express chair and held the post till 1992 after…
Swamy and his media friends (and enemies)
In the latest issue of Tehelka magazine, Ashok Malik has a profile of the “irrepressible” Subramanian Swamy, the maverick economist-politician behind the 2G spectrum allocation scam. The profile is occasioned by Harvard University’s recent decision to not renew Swamy’s teaching contract for a venomous column in DNA in July on “How to wipe out Islamic…
‘Fake’ Jhunjhunwala takes on real Shekhar Gupta
That dead-tree journalists are cut off from the digital world is evident from the manner in which they react to blogs, tweets and status updates that don’t consider them god’s gift to journalism. Indian Express editor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta is without doubt one of the top journalists of his generation, with a magazine, newspaper and television…
ToI apology that meets Justice Katju’s standards
Typically, newspaper apologies in India are buried in some far corner, regardless of the extent of the error, so that no one really notices. Market leader The Times of India sets a precedent with a 15 cm x 15 cm, three-column apology on page 3 of its New Delhi edition for a February 2008 story…
Anchors, editors, motormouths & other nuisances
It’s that time of year once again, when columnists crawl out of their quilts, double-dip their quills in vitriol and go for kill (yes, it’s a punny time of year, too). The veteran journalist Jawid Laiq—with Indian Express, New Delhi, Economic & Political Weekly on his resume—does the needful in Mail Today, with a list…
IRS sparks TOI-Mumbai Mirror vs DNA-HT battle
Mumbai Mirror was launched seven years ago to protect The Times of India from the new kids on the block, DNA and Hindustan Times, on its hometurf. TOI says the latest Indian Readership Survey (IRS) puts Mirror‘s average issue readership (AIR) at 7.54 lakh copies, ahead of both DNA and HT. In Mumbai, TOI remained…
Interesting if true: 172 ads over 80 pages costs…
Rajiv Gandhi‘s 2011 birth anniversary: 108 ads across 48 pages in 12 newspapers surveyed by sans serif. Indira Gandhi‘s 2011 birth anniversary: 64 ads across 32 pages in the same 12 newspapers. Now, the Union information minister of information and broadcasting has put a figure to the advertising blitz: Rs 7 crore in all; Rs…
Aroon Purie’s daughter Kalli has a story to tell
PhotoShop™ is a crucial piece of software in the laptops of Indian celebrities—and Botox™ a vital vial in their make-up kit—especially when they have to deal with a newspaper or magazine profile. And brave is the bold-faced name that appears in print with neither weapon having been deftly employed to perform its optical illusions. India…
Rajeev Chandrasekhar picking up Eenadu TV?
For a paper which turns its nose at news about the rest of the media, The Times of India has a strange item on its business page, news of the mobile phone entrepreneur turned member of Parliament, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, evincing some interest in Ramoji Rao‘s Eenadu television chain in Andhra Pradesh. The ToI report comes…
T.S. SATYAN Awards for Photojournalists
sans serif is pleased to announce the winners of the inaugural T.S. Satyan Memorial Awards for Photojournalism, instituted by India’s first web-based photosyndication agency, Karnataka Photo News, in association with churumuri.com, in memory of the legendary photojournalist who passed away two Decembers ago. The awards will be presented by the governor of Karnataka, H.R. Bhardwaj,…
‘The New York Times’ calls Sibal’s Facebook bluff
Indian politicians are long used to happily denying what they said on record (and in front of cameras) without ever having their versions contradicted. Union telecommunications and information technology minister Kapil Sibal is learning the hard way that The New York Times isn’t write-your-pet-hate-newspaper-or-channel-here. Last Monday, an NYT story which said “Big Brother” Sibal had…
Bombay Times, Hindustan Times and plagiarism
Hindustan Times had an ethical malfunction 15 years ago, when its then editor V.N. Narayanan was revealed to have plagiarised over a thousand words of his Sunday column from Bryan Appleyard‘s piece in the Sunday Times of London the previous week. (Narayanan was let go without a formal explanation from the paper as to why…
Did R.K. Laxman subtly stifle Mario’s growth?
The passing away of the legendary Illustrated Weekly of India, Economic Times and Femina cartoonist and illustrator Mario Miranda in Goa on Sunday, has prompted plenty of warm reminiscences from friends, colleagues and co-linesmen, along with a vicious doosra. Bachi Karkaria recalls her colleague from the third floor of The Times of India building in…
South meets North: ‘Deccan Herald’ now in Delhi
Karnataka’s oldest English newspaper, Deccan Herald, has made a brave northwards foray with the launch of its New Delhi edition on 11 December 2011, 100 years after political power moved to the national capital from the east. Vol 1, No 1 of the 63-year-old Bangalore daily arrived this morning in the usual quiet, understated manner…
‘Business journos deserve credit for reforms’
India’s second oldest business magazine, BusinessWorld, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this month. A special issue to mark the occasion features all the editors of the fortnightly turned weekly magazine from the Ananda Bazaar Patrika (ABP) stable talking about their respective tenures: Dilip Thakore (now editor, Education World): I served as editor of BusinessWorld for seven years…
Killer hospital was featured in two magazine lists
Hindsight is 20-20 and this isn’t the time to point fingers, of course, but the ghastly fire accident at the AMRI hospital in Calcutta that has left nearly 90 dead, most of them patients, draws attention to the pitfalls of magazines, newspapers and TV channels getting into the ranking game, beyond their ken of expertise. On…
All the news that is fit to cook, serve and eat
Although his reputation as a political journalist lies in tatters after the Niira Radia tapes, Vir Sanghvi is still a marquee food name in the Hindustan Times‘ Sunday magazine, Brunch. When not reporting for his paper’s hunger project, former HT managing editor Samar Halarnkar whips up a food column in the business daily Mint, titled…
Assam journalists plea to PM on detained journos
Two journalists of the newly launched (and rather awkwardly named) northeast daily, Seven Sister’s Post, are missing after they went into Burma on a story and one of their colleagues reportedly put up a Facebook status update that they had gone in search of the ULFA founder Paresh Baruah. What initially seemed like good publicity…
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