The less said about India’s business newspapers the better, but sometimes it has to be reiterated that they live in an alternate universe, all of their own making. Not one of them ever breaks a scam, although the state is seemingly receding from the lives of people and business houses are taking over. Most are…
Tag Archives: Financial Express
Why Shobhana Bhartia was late for PM’s breakfast
As is only to be expected, a number of journalists figure in former Economic Times, Times of India and Financial Express journalist Sanjaya Baru‘s book ‘The Accidental Prime Minister‘ (Penguin), on his days as the PM’s media advisor. But a few publishers and head honchos do too, including Prannoy Roy of NDTV, Samir Jain of…
‘Modi’s backers, media owners have converged’
Harish Khare, former media advisor to prime minister Manmohan Singh, in The Hindu: “During a recent three-week stay in the United States, I was often asked to explain the Indian media’s current obsession with Narendra Modi. The only reasonably cogent answer to give was the convergence between the corporate ownership of the electronic media and…
N.S. Jagannathan, ex-editor, Indian Express: RIP
sans serif records with regret the passing away of N.S. Jagannathan, former editor-in-chief of The Indian Express and Financial Express, in Bangalore on Saturday, 24 December 2011. He was 89 years old. NSJ, as he was known to friends and colleagues, succeeded Arun Shourie in the Express chair and held the post till 1992 after…
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…
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…
323 ads, nearly 160 pages to mark 5 anniversaries
PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from New Delhi: There are 58 government advertisements amounting to 26¼ pages in 12 English newspapers today to mark the birth anniversary of India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. In contrast, there were 108 ads amounting to 48 pages to mark his grandson, Rajiv Gandhi‘s birthday in August. All told, so far…
Indira: 64 ads, 32 pages vs Patel: 9 ads, 3 pages
PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from New Delhi: After the advertising blitzkrieg to mark Rajiv Gandhi‘s birth and death anniversaries, and the death anniversary of his grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru earlier this year, Union ministries and Congress-led State governments and departments have once again splurged heavily to mark Indira Gandhi‘s death anniversary today. In the 12 newspapers surveyed,…
Niira Radia, Mukesh Ambani, NDTV & Prannoy Roy
In conversation number #132 in the infamous Niira Radia tapes, the lobbyist whose name has become synonymous with the 2G scam, talks to M.K. Venu, then of The Economic Times, in July 2009: Venu: Is Manoj (Modi) is here (in Delhi) today also, no? Radia: Yeah, he is here, he is leaving in the afternoon,…
An intimation of mortality from Raghav Bahl
CNBC-TV18 bossman Raghav Bahl managed to secure the “first interview” with Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee after he presented his budget on Monday, although Mukherjee had appeared before Financial Express managing editor M.K. Venu for Lok Sabha TV hours earlier. At the end of the 30-minute pow-wow, Bahl dragged in his hobby-horse, China, and quoted…
‘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…
It’s all official about the return of Sanjaya Baru
For days and weeks, New Delhi was abuzz with rumours of the return of Sanjaya Baru (in picture). Would he go back to the Prime Minister’s Office, where he had served as media advisor? Would he be sent to the Planning Commission? Would he be in charge of programme implementation? Well, it turns out he…
Pyramid Saimira, Tatva & Times Private Treaties
SHARANYA KANVILKAR writes from Bombay: A nice little question mark hangs over Times Private Treaties, the controversial investment arm of The Times of India group, after India’s stock market regular yesterday barred 230 persons/entities from dealing in the securities market following their “prima facie” involvement in a forgery scam involving Pyramid Saimira Theatre Limited, an…
How come media did not spot Satyam fraud?
A requiem for Indian business journalism, in the delightfully breathless style of Juan Antonio Giner, founder-director, Innovation International Media: ‘Satyam’, meaning truth. India’s fourth largest software services provider. The darling of Hyderabad. An outsourcing company with 53,000 employees that serviced 185 of the Fortune 500 companies in 66 countries. A company which now says 50.4…
ToI food writer Sabina Sehgal Saikia is dead: RIP
sans serif records the passing away of Sabina Sehgal Saikia, the resident food writer of The Times of India, in the terror attack on The Taj Mahal hotel in Bombay. She was 45 years old. Her body was among the 100 recovered on Saturday, almost 60 hours after the hostage drama began, on the sixth…
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