Notwithstanding the glowing readership numbers, large sections of India’s news media industry are in choppy waters, battling a low rupee, high newsprint prices, and falling advertising revenues as Google and Facebook conquer the digital space. As if that weren’t enough, the Narendra Modi government has signalled its intentions with a 10% customs duty on newsprint,…
Category Archives: Etcetera
‘Don’t believe everything in the newspapers’
And what better way to start the new year than with a neat poem? SHIVANAND KANAVI forwards a poem written by his father, the Kannada poet Chennaveera Kanavi, during the 1970s—“either during the Emergency or just after”—that has an eerie resonance in 2009, thanks to the speedy despatch of footwear by an Iraqi journalist to…
Self-important humourless autofellating ass hats
Scott Adams, fellow blogger and the creator of the amazing Dilbert, has a lovely post on SHAAHs—Self-important, Humourless, Autofellating, Ass Hats—who misunderstand him and then get very angry about their misunderstandings. “Unlike most pundit-types, I don’t have a heavy investment in being right. I like to propose a line of reasoning and see what people…
What a dog can teach a journalist
Journalists are cynical and sceptical. It is supposed to be our stock in trade. Our motto is to question everything, suspect everything. But what happens when a child tells her journalist-father about what she read in a school textbook? Read V Sudarshan in Outlook: The Dogged Pursuit
A brief (but not necessarily easy) quiz-I
John Simon said, “A person who misuses the language is as bereft of good taste as someone who picks his nose at a party.” In that spirit, below are some sentences with common grammar and punctuation problems that trouble many people, least of all reporters and sub-editors.Can you spot the problems? 1) If I was…
