In his Saturday column in The Indian Express, editor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta recounts his encounter with India’s most wanted man, the Bombay-born underworld don, Dawood Ibrahim, when he was at India Today: “I had had one long, and partly on-record conversation on the phone with Dawood Ibrahim before the Bombay blasts, set up through my colleague…
Monthly Archives: March 2013
BCCI’s 8-point list of media don’ts for IPL
Giving the kind of brand equity cricket commands, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has been majestically proactive in protecting its rights (and the rights of rights holders) over the game. Result: representatives of Cricinfo, which is now owned by ESPN, cannot file from the press box and have to watch the…
How the Press Council of India took shape
As the fulminations of the chairman of the Press Council of India, Justce Markandey Katju, swing from the ludicrous to the ridiculous, time to look at the day—50 years ago—the PCI took seed, not for its quixotic chief to plead for a convict’s sentence to be commuted or for a sovereign nation to be declared…
‘Business journalists are PR mouthpieces’: Bahal
Last week, Cobra Post, the website run by the investigative journalist Aniruddha Bahal made public “Operation Red Spider”, its sting operation into alleged money-laundering by HDFC, Axis and ICICI banks. This week, in Open magazine, Bahal answers a couple of questions on the media treatment of the story. The story is significant, but failed to…
Yes, Kofi Annan is a dish, Teesta* is an actress
The veteran journalist and former Reader’s Digest assistant editor V. Gangadhar, who taught journalism for over a decade in Bombay’s colleges, agrees with the press council chief Justice Markandey Katju “order” that journalists do need “some legal qualifications.” He writes in The Hindu: Some years ago, the journalism entrance test at a career development institute…
ET’s advice to media: move on, let go
As a wave of earnestness sweeps across newsrooms over the Delhi gangrape, The Economic Times strikes a blow against the emerging political correctness: “The media, the general press especially, must recognise that neither public purpose nor journalistic remit is being served by what sometimes appears to be a predetermined decision to find a ‘Nirbhaya headline’.…
‘Bak-bak on FM radio captures spirit of new India’
Adman and columnist Santosh Desai in The Times of India: “Perhaps no medium captures the crackling sociology of the surging new spirit of cities, particularly that of small-town India, better than FM radio…. What it does is give voice to the city in all its liquid stream-of-consciousness currency. It lives in the ever present, and…
ʎlısɐǝ sıɥʇ pɐǝɹ plnoɔ noʎ ɟı ‘suoıʇɐlnʇɐɹƃuoɔ*
Since its sesquicentennial 25 years ago, under bossman Samir Jain’s helmsmanship, The Times of India has pioneered several editorial and marketing “initiatives”, all of which are scorned at first by the competition and then quietly copied. On the eve of its dodransbicentennial, after brother Vineet Jain told The New Yorker last year that he was…
Another substandard post by unqualified journo
He hasn’t quite spelt out which colleges we should go to, what subjects and courses we should take, in which language, or what pass-percentage is OK. At least not yet. But Press Council of India chairman Justice Markandey Katju‘s “order” on “some legal qualification” before one can enter the profession of journalism has been met…
What sustains our ‘free’ media is government ads
The advertising share of television, radio and digital is growing, while it is shrinking rapidly for newspapers and magazines. That is the bottomline of these graphics from The Economic Times, partially explaining why the media is in its current shape. Stunningly, the top advertising category in 2012, both in print and on TV, is “social…
A twist in ET’s masthead ahead of elections
Back in the early 1990s, the Ambanis sought to take on the then market-leader The Economic Times with a newspaper which promised more than business. It was titled at different times as the the Business & Political Observer (under Prem Shankar Jha‘s editorship) and as the Observer of Business and Politics (under Pritish Nandy). But…
Poems on anchors: this week, Sagarika Ghose
In Open magazine, Madhavankutty Pillai continues his occassional poems on news anchors. This week, his ode is directed at Sagarika Ghose, the host of Face the Nation on CNN-IBN: Salutations, mistress of the echo Blest with the force Of eyes widening until they greet the other Of eyebrows leaping like trampoline artists together Reveal to…
‘3 out of 4 women’s mags are bought by men’?
On international women’s day, the newspapers are replete with advertisements and supplements marking the occasion. Rajya Sabha TV, however, takes the cake with an advertisement (above) in most newspapers that shows the faces of all 42 women employees of the channel, from peon to boss, from reporters to editors (and guest co-ordinators). *** In the…
‘Indian TV is like nautanki, a real-life soap opera’
Malvika Singh, whose parents Raj and Romesh Thapar started Seminar magazine (and whose attempt to start a news channel for Ashok Advani‘s Business India magazine in the mid-1990s is the stuff of media lore), in The Telegraph, Calcutta: “An intellectually lazy press corps that controls and operates the electronic media in India, drowning us all…
A newspaper ad without SRK, MSD or AB
Brand ambassadors for media companies usually tend to be celebrities—a Shah Rukh Khan for Zee, a Mahinder Singh Dhoni for NDTV, an Amitabh Bachchan for The Times of India, etc—or faces of newsmakers. In other words, usually upper class or upper caste. Loksatta, the Marathi daily from the Indian Express group, bucks the trend with…
‘Budget coverage was better before 24×7 TV’
The veteran business journalist and Business Line deputy editor, T.C.A. Srinivasa-Raghavan, in The Hindu: “Having covered, in one way or another, 33 budgets since 1980 and, furthermore, having written their potted history since 1947 for the finance ministry, there are three things that I can assert with confidence. “First, budget analysis was much better before…
What we can learn from ‘The Daily Telegraph’
In the modern era of Indian journalism, editors come and go, reporters get hired and fired, and there are even publications who have lost the grace to record the passing of their foot soldiers. How amazing, therefore, that The Daily Telegraph, London, should run an editorial on its cartoonist Matt Pritchett on his completing 25…
Meanwhile, Chidambaram on the morning after
There is something about the Union budget, a dreadfully dreary two-hour affair (interspersed with cliches and couplets that owe their origin to the origins of the respective finance minister) that unleashes the wildest, orgiastic spirits in Indian print newsrooms—and art cubicles. The morning after, readers are greeted to the marvels of PhotoShop, some to good…
IJR 