sans serif is pleased to announce the winners of the inaugural T.S. Satyan Memorial Awards for Photojournalism, instituted by India’s first web-based photosyndication agency, Karnataka Photo News, in association with churumuri.com, in memory of the legendary photojournalist who passed away two Decembers ago. The awards will be presented by the governor of Karnataka, H.R. Bhardwaj,…
Category Archives: Blogosphere
‘The New York Times’ calls Sibal’s Facebook bluff
Indian politicians are long used to happily denying what they said on record (and in front of cameras) without ever having their versions contradicted. Union telecommunications and information technology minister Kapil Sibal is learning the hard way that The New York Times isn’t write-your-pet-hate-newspaper-or-channel-here. Last Monday, an NYT story which said “Big Brother” Sibal had…
Without you, where would we in the media be?
In 2006, Time magazine declared that the person of the year was you, yes, you—a smart way of acknowledging the rise of Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace and other crowd-sourced media avenues in the internet era. In 2011, Web18, the internet arm of Raghav Bahl‘s Network18, which has launched a heavily promoted website called First Post—an assemblage…
Why a ‘serious’ Reuters journo reads a tabloid
Although India’s print media market is booming, be it in English or the languages, the truth is that it is still the broadsheets that get bowels moving in the morning. Despite the best efforts of managers, there is a palpable resistance to smaller sized newspapers, regardless of whether they want to call it a tabloid,…
Kannada Prabha uses reader-generated headlines
“Interactivity” has been the buzzword in the English media for over a decade now. Readers have always written letters to the editor in the past, but now they also do film reviews, shoot and caption pictures, draw cartoons, ask and answer questions from other readers, take part in citizen journalist shows, post realtime comments by…
CNN-IBN in row over “fake” Twitter comments
Every single media implosion in recent months—be it Barkha Dutt‘s response to criticism of her 26/11 coverage or her response to the Niira Radia tapes, or Rajdeep Sardesai‘s defence of Vir Sanghvi and Dutt as president of the editors’ guild—has only underlined how cut off old media is from the new and how it is…
‘I couldn’t go to the US as my name is Zia Haq’
In October 2009, Siddharth Varadarajan of The Hindu reported that three Muslim journalists who were part of prime minister Manmohan Singh‘s official media delegation to the G-20 summit Pittsburgh were denied US visas. The passports of all three were returned with yellow slips stating they had been found ineligible to receive a visa and that…
Larry Summers, YSR, the Ambanis & Mark Ames
Mark Ames, the expat American editor of eXiled (“Mankind’s only alternative since 1997”), whose blog speculation on an Ambani hand in the helicopter crash that killed Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy caused rioters to attack Reliance properties in that State last wek, is baffled by the “class war” that has broken out in…
His Master’s Voice varies from his Man Friday’s
Minister of state for external affairs, Shashi Tharoor, is a) the son of a journalist of The Statesman, Calcutta, b) a longtime columnist with The Illustrated Weekly of India, The Hindu and The Times of India, and c) a career diplomat who spent a good part of his life at the United Nations writing books…
Ours is not to ask why, but Venn it struck us
Photograph: courtesy despair.com Link via Alfred Satish Jones
Jug Suraiya takes on the mighty Big B
The reverberations of Amitabh Bachchan‘s blog comments on the Academy Award-winning movie Slumdog Millionaire are now being felt in the “cesspool” of Indian journalism. In his reaction to the movie, Bachchan wrote in January: “If SM projects India as [a] third-world, dirty, underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let…
A cartoon for every journo-blogger’s dashboard
Courtesy: David Horsey of Tribune Media Services Link via The Week
Every journalist’s essential guide to Twitter
Twitter, twitter everywhere. Journalists are signing up to the micro-blog site. News organisations are launching Twitter feeds. Events are being covered live on Twitter. But what precisely can journalists achieve with Twitter? What are other journalists reading, writing and following on Twitter? Who are the journalists who are using Twitter around the world? How can…
‘Stifling speech is a losing strategy with bloggers’
Salil Tripathi in the Far Eastern Economic Review: “Most Indian businesses are growing accustomed to criticism from bloggers. Yet there are still some that, instead of mounting a PR offensive, send in their lawyers and try to stifle speech on the Internet. What they’re finding is that this approach is counterproductive—they may succeed in silencing…
Will NDTV and Barkha Dutt sue Facebook next?
If there is anything that l’affaire Barkha Dutt versus Cheytanya Kunte holds a mirror to—besides media hypocrisy, thin skins, forked tongues, and such like—it is: a) the quality of legal advice media behemoths receive and act upon, and b) the mainstream media’s bottomless ignorance of the wired world and how it works. Even the spitting-image…
Messy desks, and items # 22 and # 69
The runaway success of Stuff White People Like has spawned plenty of imitations, including Stuff Asians Like. So, it was just a matter of time before somebody came up with Stuff Journalists Like. Let the whole world know that, besides messy work stations, we like: #3 Free Food #9 Coffee #10 Drinking # 14 Bylines…
Past, present, future of civic/citizen journalism
NEWS RELEASE: What should the modern press do to reengage with its communities? How do principles and practices from the public journalism movement address that need? How could representative journalism work? What are some newer media formats being used by hyperlocal journalists? These are some of the questions that will be addressed at three 75-minute…
These are a just few of my favourite things…
Blogs like Stuff White People Like have spawned a variety of clones. 10,000 words comes up with an imaginative and startlingly accurate 27-point list of Stuff Journalists Like: 2. All the President’s Men 5. Seinfeld 6. AP Stylebook 9. Correcting bad grammar/typos 13. Exclusives 16. Debates 21. New York Times 22. Coffee 25. Lists 26.…
The tenth life a cat has is on the ratings chart
There’s never a dull moment when “breaking news” meets a “live” update on Indian television. Gautam Roy of Aajtak is the anchor, as India’s premier Hindi news channel, owned by the respected India Today group, chronicles the travails of a cat caught on a parapet for over six and a half hours. Link courtesy Anupama
Why blogging is more interesting than reporting
The jury is still out on blogging—and if left to the mainstream media, it will remain out for ever. Is it good, is it journalism, does it have the “institutional” checks and balances, do bloggers go out and report a story… questions like these have been hurled for very nearly a decade without hurting anybody.…
IJR 