PALINI R. SWAMY writes from Bangalore: A first-generation newspaper promoter launches a newspaper with his first name as part of the title. After a few years, he sells the now well-established newspaper to a well-established newspaper group. The new owners (neither of whom share the original promoter’s surname) continue to publish the newspaper in its…
Monthly Archives: March 2012
Wisdom founder-editor dead; long live Wisdom
An advertisement published in The Hindu on Tuesday, March 27, in memory of the founder editor of Wisdom, the lower-priced monthly magazine containing bits of information from here, there, everywhere a la Reader’s Digest—on which generations of Indians grew up.
Minister distributes newspapers in Kerala
Kerala, is in the throes of an indefinite newspaper strike. A section of newspaper agents in God’s own country are demanding a trade discount of 50 per cent of the cover price, festival advances, pension schemes, etc. The strike oddly doesn’t affect papers owned by political parties, including the communist newspaper Deshabhimani. *** From The…
The Indian Express programme in journalism
Let the record show: Kazmi is not forgotten
The arrest of the journalist S.M.A. Kazmi by the Delhi police in connection with the attack on an Israeli embassy car in the capital’s diplomatic enclave has been all but forgotten by members of his fraternity. In Bangalore on Sunday, members of Quds Freedom Movement staged a dharna demanding his release. Photograph: Karnataka Photo News
Ex-TOI, ET editor E. Raghavan passes away
sans serif records with deep regret the passing away of Ethiraj Raghavan, an Indian Express stringer who rose to be Editor of the largest selling Kannada daily newspaper, Vijaya Karnataka, in Bangalore on Saturday. He was 61 years old, and is survived his wife Kumuda and their daughter Swathi. After stints with the Express in…
Lots of people watch Lok Sabha TV. Surprised?
It doesn’t look pretty when a free-to-air public service broadcaster gets into the TRP race. Lok Sabha TV, the channel of the lower house of Parliament, has issued newspaper advertisements through the audio-visual publicity department (DAVP) of the government, of the viewership commanded by it in Delhi during the first week of March—when the results…
Could this happen on Indian TV some day?—II
More Pakistani mayhem, this time from Express TV, circa 2010. Also read: Could this happen on Indin TV some day?
Poonam Pandey, Sachin Tendulkar & Telegraph
There are many pertinent questions to be asked about the unbridled (and burgeoning) use of Facebook, Twitter and other social media as a source of news by newspapers and TV stations—not to mention websites like these. One of those questions faces The Telegraph, Calcutta, which carried a picture* posted by the actor-stripper Poonam Pandey on…
There’s IIT, there’s IIM, there’s IISc and there is…
Just so that the torch-bearer is not forgotten in all the buzz about and clamour for private journalism schools during admission season.
A quick lesson from The Hindu on court reporting
A clarification published on the home page of The Hindu today on a front-page news story by the paper’s Supreme Court correspondent J. Venkatesan published in the paper. The story and the clarification come on the day the SC took up the issue of reporting of court cases by the media following applications from three…
Could this happen on Indian TV some day?
Mayhem—absolute, unadulterated mayhem—during a panel discussion on the Pakistani television channel Express News.
Every channel is a winner in great poll race
For politicians, an election is a loaded game: there is one winner and the rest are losers. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Unless, of course, it is a hung parliament or assembly. Not so for those in the business of capturing their victories and defeats. All three of India’s leading English news channels are…
How a small newspaper registered its protest
Stories of newspapers running blank editorials and news columns during the censorship era of the Emergency in the mid-1970s are legion. But in this day and age, when space is calculated in square centimetres? Star of Mysore, the 35-year-old evening newspaper from Mysore, ran this front-page on March 3 to protest the murderous assault on…
Why ‘The Times of India’ does what it does
Back in the old days, the simple principle guiding newspaper front-page editors was, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Death, disease, despair was meat and drink. No longer, under the gaze of brand managers. Today, newspapers have to explain why they put news on page one, as the Delhi edition of The Times of India does…
The newspaper hawker who became a millionaire
Reporters and editors—and proprietors—becoming millionaires overnight is no longer news. In India’s naxal heartland, a news hawker becoming one is. Jaideep Hardikar reports in The Telegraph, Calcutta, on the curious case of Pawan Dubey and his Toyota Fortuner. And it is all linked to payouts made by the steel company, Essar, to buy peace from…
Press council chief bats for ‘porngate’ journalists
Close on the heels of his missives to the chief ministers of Bihar and Maharashtra, the chairman of the Press Council of India (PCI), Justice Markandey Katju, has shot off a letter to the speaker of the Karntaka legislative assembly against the crackdown on the media in Karnataka following the Porngate expose. Below is the…
How CNN-IBN predicted the UP elections right
Exit polls have lost much of their sheen after some priceless flops. But Yogendra Yadav and his team at the centre for study of developing societies (CSDS) came closest to predicting the Uttar Pradesh elections right, for CNN-IBN, with just a sample of 7,000 in a state of nearly 15 crore people. Image: courtesy Mail…
Bangalore lawyers not to represent media houses
Lawyers prone to wearing nationalism and patriotism on their sleeves have vowed not to represent terrorists (like Ajmal Kasab, the gunman caught alive during the November 2008 siege of Bombay). But the media too? The Indian Express reports that the violence unleashed upon media personnel and equipment by lawyers in Bangalore has taken a strange…
‘Mail Today’ rises in the land of ‘The Daily Mail’
Making use of the five-and-a-half hour time gap, Mail Today, the tabloid daily from the India Today group, has expanded its footprint to the United Kingdom. Editor-in-Chief Aroon Purie explains the move in a note on page 3: “Targeting the large south Asian population in London, Mail Today wants to connect with the diaspora by…
IJR 