The following is the full text of the statement issued by the Press Club of India against Prasar Bharati Corporation intimidatory attack on Press Trust of India. *** “The government gives the impression of working for the dismemberment of the Press Trust of India (PTI), India’s premier news agency which has established a name for…
Monthly Archives: June 2020
When a business journalist—a former media advisor to the prime minister, no less—cannot buy a bottle of booze, it’s news
All the booze that’s fit to print. Former Business Standard editor Sanjaya Baru, the former media advisor to prime minister Manmohan Singh, and a policy wonk who has a solution for every problem on earth, falls victim to an online scam. Screenshots: courtesy The Hindu, Amar Ujala, Navbharat Times *** Sanjay Daru got cheated ₹24,000…
“Ironic that government has chosen to crack down on PTI, hours after marking the 45th anniversary of Emergency”: women journalists show the mirror to Narendra Modi
Below is the full text of the statement issued by the Indian Women’s Press Corps and Press Association on Prasar Bharati’s motivated threat to suspend its subscription to the news agency Press Trust of India for its “anti-national” reporting. *** The Indian Women’s Press Corps (IWPC) and Press Association express their deep concern over the…
“Stop showing satellite pictures of China’s incursion”: TV editors get a patriotic nudge as Army scampers to limit damage of Narendra Modi’s big lie
Hoist by its own petard—which was Shakespeare‘s way of saying “blown by your own bomb”—on China’s incursion into Indian territory, the Narendra Modi government has rolled out “headline management” on a war footing to control the political damage emanating from the prime minister’s naked lie (above). With hitherto “loyal” journalists covering the defence and external affairs…
24 things that happened to the media during the Emergency, besides the three you already know
The Emergency of 1975 is in danger of becoming a cliche, pulled out with rhetorical flourish around June 25 each year to remember Indian democracy’s darkest 21 months. It’s used so loosely as a catch-all scare-word—even by those who have much to hide, especially by those who have much to hide—that for the 81% of…
J-POD || Podcast || “No ruler would be so foolish as to openly declare censorship today. There are enough subtle ways to bring it in quietly” || Coomi Kapoor on the best-kept secret of the Emergency
https://soundcloud.com/user-311470525/j-pod-coomi-kapoor-author-of *** An acclaimed Indian Express journalist, whose husband was jailed during the Emergency of 1975, says governments no longer need to take Indira Gandhi’s route of introducing censorship to control the media or the message that reaches the people. “Parties have found enough ways to control the media without having to formally declare censorship.…
Nidhi Razdan says (maybe) it was a mistake to throw Sambit Patra out of her NDTV show ‘Left, Right & Centre’
Nidhi Razdan, the NDTV anchor who famously sent BJP spokesman Sambit Swaraj out of her 9 pm show Left, Right and Centre when he accused the channel of having an “agenda” three years ago, says she would not do it were it to happen again. In an interview with the writer and columnist Amit Varma…
A well-travelled story is one which goes from Rediff to ‘Deccan Chronicle’ to ‘Prabhat Khabar’ to ‘India Today’ to ANI in 4 days flat, with a fiction writer somewhere in between
The heroic courage displayed by Indian soldiers while combating their Chinese counterparts on June 15, the day 20 of their brethren were killed literally at the hands of the Chinese, is now a project fully underway. Across platforms—a news portal (Rediff.com), an English newspaper (Deccan Chronicle), a Hindi newspaper (Prabhat Khabar), a news channel (India…
The news of a declaration: Hindi magazine ‘Cricket Samrat’ has published its final issue
COVID has impacted the media in a myriad ways, and magazines, especially niche magazines, are collapsing under its weight. Mid-Day reports the closure of the pioneering Hindi cricket magazine Cricket Samrat after 42 years of publication. Sportstar, the weekly from The Hindu group, has already gone online. *** In the Indian Express, the paper’s sports…
“Ambiguous. Beseiged. Confusing. Disappointing. Dismaying. Evasive. Frightening. Unpardonable. Unsatisfactory. PM should speak again”: editorials on ‘Surender’ Modi’s cop-out
The major English newspapers all have editorials on Narendra Modi‘s brazen lie, without taking the name of China, that “no one has intruded on Indian soil, nor is any one sitting on Indian soil, nor has any post been seized by anyone”, which made a total mockery of the killing of 20 Indian soldiers last…
An artist and an interviewer: former ‘Mid-Day’ and ‘Sportsweek’ art director Ataullah Khan falls to COVID
From Jeddah, the news of the death due to COVID, of Ataullah Khan, the well-regarded former art director of the Bombay tabloid, Mid-Day, and its sister magazine, Sportsweek. He also did interviews with movie stars for the group’s Urdu daily Inquilaab. Mr Khan’s brother Masiulla Khan was the art head of The Sunday Observer, both…
The two veterans who unmasked the Chinese incursions “with the tenacity of the NYT reporters who broke the Pentagon Papers”
Mainstream media’s preferred posture on the Chinese ingress in Ladakh, simmering since early May, had been one of denial bordering on wilful neglect, till it exploded in the face with the killing of 20 Indian soldiers on June 15. In Business Standard today, Rahul Jacob, the former Hong Kong bureau chief of the Financial Times,…
Where should journalists park their money for a rainy day? News you can use, courtesy the travails of a retired ‘Times of India’ scribe and his wife
Can even a savings scheme floated by the Prime Minister be trusted any more? Vidyadhar Date, a fine byline from The Times of India of yore, invested Rs 30 lakh with his wife, Hemlata Date, in March. Their investment instrument: the Pradhan Mantri Vaya Vandana Yojana (PMVVY), a assured returns scheme for senior citizens, which…
J-POD || Podcast || Data journalism as a career option for young journalists || Advice from Rukmini Shrinivasan, former data editor, The Hindu & Huff Post India
https://soundcloud.com/user-311470525/j-pod-data-journalist-rukmini *** Rukmini Shrinivasan, host of ‘The Moving Curve‘ podcast, and former data editor of The Hindu and Huff Post India, on what India’s #COVID numbers mean—and #DataJournalism as a career option for young journalists. Also read: “India’s official COVID numbers are an undercount”
‘The Hindu’ virtually sounds the death knell for its Mumbai edition, tells 25 ‘elite’ staffers to leave, as COVID wreaks havoc to revenue streams
*** The Mumbai edition of The Hindu, launched with much fanfare five years ago, has run into serious turbulence with over two dozen staffers being asked to leave the 142-year-old organisation at less than a fortnight’s notice. The indicated last date is June 30. Almost all those whose resignations have been sought, orally, had been…
A sacked ‘Rajasthan Patrika’ journalist’s social media post that shines the light on all that is going wrong in the media, in India in 2020
These are tough times for the media: to own it, to run it, to work in it. A nationally advertised political allergy towards media freedom; a global pandemic that is hurting businesses; and a delicate balancing act that is required just to keep the boat afloat, illustrate the key challenges. Nothing captures all this better…
Barkha Dutt’s father and the Netflix founder Marc Randolph’s father have one thing in common: a hobby that hooked them for life
Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph‘s father was a nuclear engineer who, after returning home every day, would slip into overalls, head into the basement and assemble toy trains. The paragraphs above appear in Randolph’s book That will never work. *** In today’s Sunday Mid-Day, there is a similar story of TV journalist Barkha Dutt‘s father, S.P.…
J-POD || Podcast || “Twitter has not followed due process in withholding account. FIR on a retweet had details very few people know. BJP tends not to focus on quality of content but punishment they will try to inflict” || Aakar Patel
https://soundcloud.com/user-311470525/j-pod-aakar-patel-on-twitter  On J-POD, a podcast on journalists and journalism, Aakar Patel, columnist and former journalist who headed Amnesty International, discusses what he makes of Twitter withholding his account, and who he suspects might be behind it—and why. *** # Twitter emailed me that they had received a “legal removal demand” from the government, that my…
How do English newspaper readers look? And how do they compare to their Hindi brethren? A visual representation.
What is the profile of readers of English newspapers compared to those who consume newspapers in the languages? Over the last week, as distribution has eased in its key market, Bombay, the Times group has run a campaign on its news pages in The Times of India and Navbharat Times, to “reclaim the city”. The…
Everybody loves Rashid Irani: When a fine movie critic—a restaurant owner who doesn’t own a stove or a fridge, and can’t cook—gets stuck at home
How did a Bombay film critic who lives alone, without a cooking range, TV or fridge, and who has eaten all his meals outside for 35 years, live through the 75-day lockdown? Rashid Irani, long time movie reviewer for The Times of India and then Hindustan Times, recounts his saga in Sunday Mid-Day. “Though I…
IJR 