Star India CEO Uday Shankar, a former editor at Aaj Tak, on the defining moment of his journalistic career, from the 8th anniversary special issue of Impact. By UDAY SHANKAR I remember an incident almost 10 years ago, that brought home to me the power of the media and its ability to impact people’s lives.…
Monthly Archives: November 2012
What time did you break your story yesterday?
As newsrooms integrate, with reporters also filing for the digital editions, the Hindustan Times makes a point on its front page in New Delhi, by including the time at which a story on chief minister Sheila Dikshit‘s health was broken on the world wide web the previous night. Image: courtesy Hindustan Times
How a martyr’s wife changed Arnab’s outlook
The bumper 318-page eighth anniversary issue of Impact, the media magazine from Anurag Batra‘s exchange4media group, features dozens of print, electronic, digital and radio professionals recounting their personal stories. Among them is the 2012 television editor of the year, Arnab Goswami, editor-in-chief of Times Now*: By ARNAB GOSWAMI In August 2007, Sanjay Dutt was being…
Will Britannia pay TOI for such ‘bad news’ in ads?*
Advertising innovations on the front pages of newspapers is a work in progress. Each morning turns up something new, something scarier, something educative—and we haven’t seen the end of the beginning. Yet. Today’s Times of India is one such morning. An “innovation” on the front page of the paper has gold biscuits floating happily all…
Nehru fellowships for T.N. Ninan, Harish Khare
Two top journalists, T.N. Ninan of Business Standard, and Harish Khare, formerly of The Hindu and The Times of India, have been awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru fellowships this year.
The TOI lensman who nailed Ajmal Kasab’s fate
Sebastian D’Douza, then photo editor of Mumbai Mirror, took 19 photographs on the night of 26 November 2008, including the iconic one of Ajmal Kasab striding across the corridors of Bombay’s Victoria Terminus station, spraying bullets. Now retired, “Saby”, as the lensman is known to friends and colleagues, testified before the trial judge, M.L. Tahiliyani,…
How Tavleen Singh fell out with Sonia Gandhi
The columnist Tavleen Singh has just penned what she calls her “political memoirs”. Titled Durbar (Hachette, 324 pages, Rs 599), the book charts Singh’s view of the corridors of power in Delhi from the inside out—from Indira Gandhi‘s Emergency in 1975 to her assassination in 1984; from Rajiv Gandhi‘s rise to his downfall and death…
Bal Thackeray’s banter at FPJ’s ‘Malayali Club’
T.J.S. George, the founder-editor of Asiaweek magazine, who worked under the legendary S. Sadanand at the Free Press Journal in Bombay, on their common-colleague and staff cartoonist, Bal Thackeray: “Spicy coffee-house theories spread that Thackeray had developed a personal grudge against South Indians. There was talk that he was jealous of R.K. Laxman who started…
Justice Katju ‘Sorry’ for calling journos idiots
Within days of his appointment as the chairman of the Press Council of India in October 2011, immediately following his retirement as a judge of the Supreme Court, Justice Markandey Katju ran afoul of his colleagues on the council with his sweeping remark that he had a “poor opinion” of most journalists. The “tendentious and…
What listening to the radio teaches that TV can’t
As her four-day visit to India, the first in 25 years, winds down, Aung San Suu Kyi has a series of interviews in magazines and on TV stations. In an interview with Pranay Sharma in Outlook* magazine, the Burmese leader whose only window to the world in the long years of house arrest was the…
30-plus, glamourous, sexy, brainy and seductive*
Raveena Tandon is playing Shobhaa De, the former editor of Stardust, Society and Celebrity, in the Hindi film Shobhana’s Seven Nights that is already doing the rounds at international film festivals. But quite clearly the journalist turned best-selling author is not amused. In an interview with Kavitha Shanmugham of The Telegraph last Sunday, Tandon says:…
What Aung San Suu Kyi learnt from a ‘Hindu’ man
The Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi is on a four-day visit to India. In her interview with Nirupama Subramanian of The Hindu, the Nobel laureate remembers her association with K. Rangaswamy, a political correspondent of the paper in Delhi, during her growing-up years in the capital. “I got to know [Mr. Rangaswamy’s] daughter at…
Look, who wants to play Christiane Amanpour!
Priety Zinta‘s role in Lakshya is rumoured to have been based on NDTV anchor Barkha Dutt. Now, Bollywood actress Kareena Kapoor is tipped to play CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour in Prakash Jha‘s next film, Satyagraha. Mail Today reports that Jha visualised Kareena’s role of a reporter who reports at the international level. “The director was…
When stringer beats up reporter, it’s news!
From the Delhi edition of The Hindu: News Channel Correspondent beaten up by stringer Staff Reporter New Delhi: A special correspondent with a television news channel was beaten up by a stringer working for the same media house at Baba Haridas Nagar here on Tuesday. The stringer, who has been arrested, has also been accused…
Will Barack Obama be page one news tomorrow?
Will Barack Obama‘s reelection be front-page news in your newspaper tomorrow? Not if your paper has a “jacket advertisement” in this Diwali season, in which case it will technically be on page 3. Not if your paper two jacket ads, in which case it will be on page 5. In many ways, Indian newspapers have…
12 media barons worth Rs 2,962,530,000,000
Twelve media barons in Forbes India‘s list of the 100 richest Indians are worth $54.6 billion, in other words Rs 2,962,530,000,000. There are five pure-play media barons in the Forbes list: Subhash Chandra of Zee (total worth $2.9 billion) at No. 22, Kalanidhi Maran of Sun ($2.8 billion) at No. 24, Indu Jain of The…
IJR 