In the seventh anniversary issue of Outlook Business*, Zee TV bossman Subhash Chandra offers seven rules for success in the media: 1) Don’t take your position for granted: Even if you’ve been No.1 for a long while, always remember to guard your turf 2) Don’t ignore the rural market: Through its direct-to-home business, Zee reached…
Monthly Archives: June 2013
Steve Forbes named in Forbes India legal notice
Three of the four Forbes India editors, who were forced out of the fortnightly business magazine allegedly for demanding that the promoters fulfill their contractual commitments on employee stock options (ESOPs), have shot off legal notices to Network 18 and Forbes Media, demanding immediate reinstatement and settlement of dues and damages for loss of livelihood,…
Is BBC playing around with Mandela’s stature?
As Nelson Mandela, the icon of South Africa, gasps for life in a Johannesburg hospital, M.S. Prabhakara, the veteran Hindu correspondent in Guwahati who served as the newspaper’s first correspondent in South Africa, has a letter to the editor: “It is disgusting, but not surprising, that the BBC in its online world news bulletin should…
India, Pakistan and the foreign correspondents
From Delhi Confidential, the gossip column in The Indian Express: “There is never a dull moment in India-Pakistan relations. Just when it seemed that a positive environment was on the horizon, comes the news that there might not be any Indian journalist based in Pakistan after this month. “The only two journalists that are allowed,…
Dicky Rutnagur, an ekdum first-class dikra: RIP
SHARANYA KANVILKAR writes from Bombay: After three days of parsimonious one-paragraph obituaries, the tributes have started coming in for Dicky Rutnagar, the Bombay-born cricket and squash correspondent of The Daily Telegraph, London, who passed away on Friday, 20 June 2013, at the age of 82. Rutnagur, who covered 300 Test matches before he retired in…
Former TOI group vice-chairman no more
sans serif records the demise of Rustom Cowasjee Cooper, a former non-executive chairman of The Times of India group, in London on Tuesday, 18 June 2013. He was 91. Mr Cooper, an accountant by training, won the bank nationalisation case in 1971 and was a general secretary of the Swatantra Party, C. Rajagopalachari‘s party that…
Poems on news anchors: this week, Barkha Dutt
In Open magazine this week, Madhavankutty Pillai continues his occasional series of poems on news anchors. This week, the face of NDTV 24×7: Barkha Dutt, the host of We the People and The Buck Stops Here. Ye destitute widow, acid attack victim Forgotten spy, despairing cripple Who was once trapped in rubble And ye burnt…
‘UFO’ sends South Indian papers into a tizzy
PALINI R. SWAMY writes from Bangalore: Two south Indian newspapers, the Malayala Manorama (in picture, above) and the New Indian Express, have reported the sighting of an unidentified flying object (UFO) in Kannur district in Kerala. According to Manorama, the picture was taken by Major Sebastian Zachariah, an Indian army officer serving on the UN…
An open letter to media from Koodankulam
The People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE), based in Idinthakarai in Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu, has shot off an open letter to the Indian media on its collective silence on the imminent commissioning of the Koodankulam nuclear plant. Below is the text of the press release. *** Dear friends Greetings! Please allow us to bring…
When ‘Indian Express’ gave ‘The Hindu’ a story
In October 1989, when The Hindu‘s then associate editor, N. Ram, was stopped in his tracks by his uncle and editor, G. Kasturi, from publishing the third part of an investigation into the Bofors gun deal, Ram found a novel method of getting the story out. He called a press conference and handed out the…
A national newspaper goes ‘local’ in Bangalore
The Hindu has unveiled a new hyper-local look in Bangalore with the tagline “Bringing Bangalore Back to You”. Writes the paper’s editor Siddharth Varadarajan in a front-page note: “Why you might ask. After all, Bangalore has known The Hindu for its credible, fearless and unfettered reportage. For never dumbing down. For vanguard journalism that brings…
Karan Thapar says ‘sorry’ to L.K. Advani (twice)
It isn’t often that journalists, especially the bold-faced names, descend from their ivory towers to admit they may have hurt a politician’s feelings. It’s even rarer to hear them say ‘sorry’ for having done so. But twice in the past week, the interviewer Karan Thapar has found the inner reserves to publicly do so, and…
‘Can the media find a middle ground on Modi?’
CNN-IBN editor in-chief Rajdeep Sardesai in his nationally syndicated column, in the Hindustan Times: “The mainstream media has always had a more uneven relationship with Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi. Modi’s acolytes would like to suggest that the mainstream media has always been anti-Modi and has hounded the BJP’s rising star with a ferocity that…
‘You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war’
Modern journalists not used to the thrills and travails of sending despatches on the telegram and the teleprinter and the telex machine from the back of beyond will not understand the hoo dash ha in today’s papers on the decision of the Bharat sanchar nigam limited bracket open BSNL bracket close to wind up the…
‘TV doesn’t want debate; it wants whipping boys’
The dastardly ambush of a Congress party convoy by Maoists in Chhattisgarh on May 25, in which 28 people including the founder of the Salwa Judum movement Mahendra Karma perished, led to the by-now ritual witchhunt of human rights activists on television—and their ostracism by newspapers. On one level, in a Pavlovian sort of way,…
If The Economist looks at Tamil Nadu, it’s news?
In a bleak advertising scenario, Indian magazines have been pushed into running cheap and ugly advertisements, advertorials, and other intrusions dressed up as thinly disguised “innovations”, like a bit of editorial here for an ad elsewhere, to keep the ship afloat. But The Economist, too? The latest issue of the “newspaper” (as the magazine calls…
An Editor is never too old to learn a new trick
After 42 years of handwriting his columns, articles and books on scribblepads—at Debonair,The Sunday Observer, The Indian Post, The Independent, The Pioneer and Outlook*—and after hiding the vicious mouse behind his PC all his life, Outlook* editorial chairman Vinod Mehta writes his latest Diary on his new laptop, in New Delhi on Tuesday. “I found…
Forbes purge is a ‘freedom’ issue: Editors Guild
The editors guild of India has reacted to the “termination” of services of Forbes India editor Indrajit Gupta, and the “resignation” of his colleagues Charles Assisi, Shishir Prasad and Dinesh Krishnan. The guild has termed Network 18′s summary decision as lacking in “elementary courtesy” and that it cuts at the “very root of editorial independence”.…
Bombay Press Club blasts ‘Forbes India’ purge
The Press Club of Bombay has reacted to the “termination” of services of Forbes India editor Indrajit Gupta, and the “resignation” of his colleagues Charles Assisi, Shishir Prasad and Dinesh Krishnan by the magazine’s India franchisee, Network 18. The Club has termed the manner of the dismissals of the four journalists “nothing short of shameful”,…
‘The question tonight is conflict of interest’
Rohit Iyengar pays tribute to “the nation”. Just.
IJR 