Below is the full text of the “global” email shot off by Indian Express editor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta on Monday, August 26, in which he formally announces his decision to relinquish his managerial functions at the newspaper group. *** Dear All, Looking at the flurry of communication from me over the past few weeks, mainly on…
Tag Archives: Business Standard
‘Licensing journos: recipe for total state control’
The following is the full text of the statement issued by N. Ravi, president of the Editors’ Guild of India, on the proposal mooted by minister of state for information and broadcasting, Manish Tewari, on a “common examination” for student-journalists and a “licence” for journalists to perform their function: “The suggestion of the Union minister…
When Madhuri Dixit’s ghagra is ‘breaking news’
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar in the Business Standard: “When Madhuri Dixit danced to the song “TV pe breaking news hai re mera ghagra,” I wanted to hide. Her sizzling dance number in a red-light area from the latest hit Yeh Jawaani hai Deewani roughly means, “My skirt is the breaking news on television.” “…Many Hindi films now…
When Roger Ebert wrote to an Indian critic
On his blog, the bibliophile Jai Arjun Singh writes of his online encounters with Roger Ebert, the iconic Chicago Sun-Times movie critic, who passed away in the middle of the week. “In a somewhat surreal turn of events, I found myself in correspondence with him around six years ago, after he mailed to say he…
Is news TV becoming a ‘national security hazard’?
Editorial in Business Standard: “It should go without saying that the media has a role in informing and educating a citizenry about the issues of the day, providing background, context and holding the powerful to account. A case study in how not to go about this is currently being provided by the electronic media in…
Nehru fellowships for T.N. Ninan, Harish Khare
Two top journalists, T.N. Ninan of Business Standard, and Harish Khare, formerly of The Hindu and The Times of India, have been awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru fellowships this year.
Who wrote the Prime Minister’s TV address?
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh‘s televised address to the nation on 21 September, the day the Trinamul Congress withdrew support to his Congress-led UPA government over the hike in diesel prices and FDI in retail, has set tongues wagging about its authorship. In her column in the Indian Express, Coomi Kapoor suggests that the media advisor…
‘Darkest hour for media since the Emergency?’
Is it a good thing that the Supreme Court of India has not announced guidelines for media coverage of court cases? Or has it opened the floodgates by introducing a “neturalising device” that underlines the right of the accused to seek postponement of coverage on a case-by-case basis? And, by introducing a “constitutional principle” has…
Financial Times takes on The Times of India
The Times of India group’s two-decade long fight with the Financial Times over the use of the FT trademark in India has taken a fresh twist with the Times group announcing the launch of a new edition of a “supplement” titled Financial Times in the Delhi national capital region (NCR). Launched in the early 1990s…
The curious case of David Davidar & Vikram Seth
David Davidar, the Gentleman magazine journalist who became the face of Indian book publishing, is back in the news with a writer, Sivasundari Bose, alleging that Davidar plagiarised from her work, The Golden Stag, for his debut novel, The House of Blue Mangoes. Bose claims similarities between the locale (south eastern tip of India), the…
Sacrilege! Mihir Sharma takes on P.Sainath
As he exited the Indian Express last year as its most acerbic pen, the Harvard-educated economist Mihir S. Sharma launched into “adman” Suhel Seth in a long review of the latter’s book in The Caravan. Now, at the Business Standard as the editor of its opinion pages, Sharma trains his guns at the Magsaysay award…
How the media viewed Express ‘C’ report
Editorial in Deccan Herald: “There is reason for deep concern over the report in a national daily, The Indian Express, about an ‘unexpected (and non-notified) movement’ of two army units towards Delhi on the night of January 16-17… To insinuate that General V.K. Singh would attempt a coup to settle scores with the government is downright…
Will RIL-TV18-ETV deal win SEBI, CCI approval?
PRITAM SENGUPTA in New Delhi and KEERTHI PRATIPATI in Hyderabad write: Media criticism in India, especially in the so-called mainstream media, has never been much to write home about. Operating on the principle that writing on another media house or media professional means exposing yourself to the same danger in the future, proprietors, promoters and…
The sudden rise of media mogul Mukesh Ambani
Mukesh Ambani (left) went to sleep last night as India’s richest man and woke up this morning as also India’s biggest media mogul. That, in a nutshell, is the sum and substance of the dramatic announcement by Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) that it was getting into a tie-up with Raghav Bahl‘s Network18. The tie-up means…
Rajeev Chandrasekhar picking up Eenadu TV?
For a paper which turns its nose at news about the rest of the media, The Times of India has a strange item on its business page, news of the mobile phone entrepreneur turned member of Parliament, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, evincing some interest in Ramoji Rao‘s Eenadu television chain in Andhra Pradesh. The ToI report comes…
‘Business journos deserve credit for reforms’
India’s second oldest business magazine, BusinessWorld, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this month. A special issue to mark the occasion features all the  editors of the fortnightly turned weekly magazine from the Ananda Bazaar Patrika (ABP) stable talking about their respective tenures: Dilip Thakore (now editor, Education World): I served as editor of BusinessWorld for seven years…
All the news that is fit to cook, serve and eat
Although his reputation as a political journalist lies in tatters after the Niira Radia tapes, Vir Sanghvi is still a marquee food name in the Hindustan Times‘ Sunday magazine, Brunch. When not reporting for his paper’s hunger project, former HT managing editor Samar Halarnkar whips up a food column in the business daily Mint, titled…
6 pages for Ambedkar; 393 pages for ‘The Family’
PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from New Delhi: For all the lip service it pays “dalits and the downtrodden”, for all the tokenism of a Dalit as speaker of Lok Sabha, and for all the buzz about a possible Dalit replacement for Manmohan Singh as prime minister, the Congress-led UPA government has issued a measly six pages…
Suhel Seth shows why he is such a cute Tweetiya
Those who live by the media shall die by it, was not what the editor-in-chief of the Harijan said. But he would well have had he been around in the era of Suhel Seth. The adman cum image consultant cum lobbyist cum columnist cum TV regular, who counts media bigwigs and gasbags among his many…
Times, Express groups get most anniversary ads
PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from New Delhi: For the final anniversary of the year of India’s “Family No. 1”—the birth anniversary of the nation’s first woman prime minister Indira Gandhi—there are 70 advertisements amounting to 32 published pages in 12 English newspapers that have been surveyed through the year by sans serif. With this anniversary, the…
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