The following is the full text of the internal communication sent out by India Today chairman Aroon Purie, announcing the suspension i.e. closure of the print edition of the group’s tabloid, Mail Today. *** Dear All, As you all know, the Group entered the newspaper space 13 years ago with great hope. We collaborated with…
Tag Archives: Aroon Purie
Why is BCCI rolling out the red carpet to one “ultra-friendly English news channel”—India Today TV if you really want to know its name?
Girilal Jain, the late editor of The Times of India, used to say that, in India, politics sets the pace and everything else follows in its wake. So, just like some news channels are completely in the thrall of some political parties, some news channels are also the go-to stations for cricket bosses. After the…
18 factoids in ‘Caravan’ profile of Shekhar Gupta
The December “media issue” of Caravan magazine has a 20-page profile of former Indian Express editor-in-chief and shortlived India Today editor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta. Authored by Krishn Kaushik, the profile is titled “Capital Reporter”, with the strapline “How profit and principle shaped the journalism of Shekhar Gupta”. *** # The son of a minor bureaucrat from…
Indian Express, India Today teach NYT a lesson
To say that the Indian media is in a tizzy of seismic proportions would qualify as the understatement of the year. So far. Editors are quitting, being sacked, or finding ever new ways of being quietly eased out. Promoters are exiting their dream projects after acquiescing to giant business houses. Reporters are making discreet enquiries.…
Aroon Purie and Vinod Mehta on Tarun Tejpal
As former Tehelka editor Tarun J. Tejpal faces imminent arrest for the alleged sexual assault of a junior employee at a conclave organised by the magazine, two veteran editors—Aroon Purie of India Today and Vinod Mehta of Outlook*—write about the callow Chandigarh boy who branched out to become a brand. At India Today, Tejpal was…
How to say ‘goodbye’ to a departing Editor
The following is the text of the internal email sent by Aroon Purie, editor-in-chief of the India Today group, to announce the exit of Business Today editor Chaitanya Kalbag. Like his 2010 letter announcing the exit of the group’s Bombay bulwark Mohini Bhullar, Purie’s letter is remarkable for its civility and graciousness in acknowledging the…
How Tavleen Singh fell out with Sonia Gandhi
The columnist Tavleen Singh has just penned what she calls her “political memoirs”. Titled Durbar (Hachette, 324 pages, Rs 599), the book charts Singh’s view of the corridors of power in Delhi from the inside out—from Indira Gandhi‘s Emergency in 1975 to her assassination in 1984; from Rajiv Gandhi‘s rise to his downfall and death…
The curious case of Karan Thapar & a flyover-II
After 17 articles on the City pages of The Times of India, Delhi, the 14 owners and residents on Palam Marg—including the media baron Aroon Purie and the TV anchor Karan Thapar—respond to the allegation that they objected to the expansion of a flyover becasue it threatened to eat into the service road in front…
The curious case of Karan Thapar and a flyover
One of India’s top voices, Lata Mangeshkar, earned a fair bit of negative publicity for opposing the construction of a flyover on busy Peddar road in Bombay because it threatened to disturb her peace of mind. Now, one of India’s top TV faces is threatening to follow in her footsteps in Delhi. On July 29,…
Good news: ‘Media sector is a sunrise sector’
What was bazaar speculation for quite a while is now a matter of record. Aroon Purie, the bossman of the India Today group, has divested over a quarter of his holding in Living Media India Limited, in favour of one of India’s richest men, Kumar Mangalam Birla for an undisclosed sum (Business Standard reports that…
‘Mail Today’ rises in the land of ‘The Daily Mail’
Making use of the five-and-a-half hour time gap, Mail Today, the tabloid daily from the India Today group, has expanded its footprint to the United Kingdom. Editor-in-Chief Aroon Purie explains the move in a note on page 3: “Targeting the large south Asian population in London, Mail Today wants to connect with the diaspora by…
Power of press belongs to those who own one!
It’s raining daughters in the Delhi papers—daughters of media barons, that is. Mail Today has devoted at least four full tabloid pages over the past month to herald the launch of India Today founder Aroon Purie‘s daughter Kalli Purie‘s book on weight loss. Today’s Times of India has a large story on the city pages…
Aroon Purie’s daughter Kalli has a story to tell
PhotoShop™ is a crucial piece of software in the laptops of Indian celebrities—and Botox™ a vital vial in their make-up kit—especially when they have to deal with a newspaper or magazine profile. And brave is the bold-faced name that appears in print with neither weapon having been deftly employed to perform its optical illusions. India…
Straight drives from the man behind Seedhi Baat
Former India Today editor Prabhu Chawla has taken his interactive “Ask Prabhu” column to The New Indian Express, which he recently joined as editorial director, answering questions on this, that and the other with earthy candour. Many of the media questions directed at Chawla and his responses are illuminating. Chawla confirms market rumours that the…
Radia effect on PM’s invitees for TV pow-wow?
Prime minister Manmohan Singh‘s much ballyhooed pow-wow with “editors” of television channels to clear the air over the scams dogging his government, was, as was to be expected, a typically tepid, bureaucratic affair. Only the national English TV channels—Headlines Today (represented by Aroon Purie), CNN-IBN (Rajdeep Sardesai), NDTV 24×7 (Prannoy Roy), Times Now (Arnab Goswami)—were…
Note to directors: It was Shammy not Barkha
No One Killed Jessica? Well, someone ‘killed’ Harinder Baweja. Raj Kumar Gupta, the director of last weekend’s multiplex marvel—in which Rani Mukherji essays the role of a single, bitchy, aggressive, passionate, foul-mouthed, investigative journalist probing the murder of the model Jessica Lal at a Delhi bar—may have made the world believe that his ‘wet dream’…
Prabhu Chawla: A post-dated announcement
A front-page notice appearing in The New Sunday Express, the Sunday edition of the Madras-based The New Indian Express, on 23 January 2011, announcing the arrival of former India Today editor Prabhu Chawla as the editorial director of the paper. Chawla, who also hosted the Seedhi Baat show on the Aaj Tak channel, has launched…
Why we didn’t air Niira Radia tapes: 2 examples
The publication of the transcripts of the Niira Radia tapes—in which the fixer of the Tatas and Ambanis talks to journalists Vir Sanghvi and Barkha Dutt (among others)—by Open magazine, Outlook* and Mail Today has sent the media world into a tizzy. Only a brave few have been able to avoid the temptation of…
Why Aroon Purie ‘elevated’ Prabhu Chawla
After being badgered left, right and centre online for his jetlag-inspired plagiarism, India Today editor-in-chief Aroon Purie finally gets some old-fashioned good press, courtesy the “dirty old man of Indian journalism”. Khushwant Singh uses a session on the couch with Headlines Today host Koel Purie Rinchet to throw light on her father and grandfather Vidya…
‘Plagiarists speed up the spread of knowledge’
R. Jagannathan, the executive editor of DNA, offers an extraordinary, pinch-yourself, hope-he’s-being-sarcastic defence of plagiarism in today’s paper: “Now that the buzz has died down, it is time to sit back and look at the whole issue of plagiarism with fresh eyes. I’m sure Aroon Purie, editor-in-chief of India Today, is embarrassed that his lines…
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