Becoming a digital-first operation, and getting readers to pay for content, is the battlecry on every media manager’s lip across the world. But the Financial Times of London has been there and done that, a long time back, without going click-bait. At the centre of the transformation of the pink newspaper was Lionel Barber, the…
Tag Archives: Financial Times
“There was still an edge of menace about the man”: ‘Financial Times’ ex-editor Lionel Barber after his second meeting with Narendra Modi
Narendra Modi‘s allergy for unscripted media interrogation is evident from his all-too-few interactions with professional journalists, not propagandists and actors, and the BJP government’s increasing opacity with official data. There are those few minutes with Karan Thapar in 2007 (above) before he felt an urgent need for a glass of water. Then there was the sight of…
‘Lone Wolf’: the former reporter who is now worth Rs 3.7 lakh crore
The Financial Times has a front-page anchor on Zhong Shanshan, the founder of a bottled water company, who has become China’s third-richest man, after his stock listed on the Hong Kong. His fortune is now estimated at over $50 billion. Shanshan was once a reporter who later sold pills to treat erectile dysfunction.
Timothy Franklyn, the cancer-surviving son of a former ‘Times of India’ executive, goes to Columbia University as an Obama Scholar
An internship or a job is for a journalism student. A book or a national seminar is for a journalism teacher. An Obama Foundation scholarship is for a journalism school founder. Timothy Franklyn, 40, who set up the National School of Journalism and Public Discourse (NSoJ) in Bangalore six years ago, is among 11 people…
Will readers pay for the digital content of Indian newspapers and magazines, when they can get PDFs of the world’s best offerings free on WhatsApp?
The folly of Indian print media being overly dependent on advertisements to sustain and grow the business has come into sharp focus during the time of the COVID crisis. An average 16-page daily newspaper costs about Rs 10 to produce. In the quest for circulation numbers, publishers have followed the “penny press” model propagated by…
12 gems from a response to a TOI legal notice
There’s something decidedly execrable when a media company thinks it is well within its rights to use its might to silence another media company or media professional with a fire-and-brimstone legal threat. Even more so, when a 175-year-old media giant like The Times of India group picks on a 22-year-old girl. In April, lawyers representing…
Now, The Times of India takes on Financial Times
First, Financial Times took out an advertisement, in the name of its CEO John Ridding, in response to an ad appearing in The Times of India promoting the desi “Financial Times” published by Times Publishing House. Now, the Times group has returned the favour with an an ad, not in the name of its CEO…
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…
‘Editors are lobbying on behalf of corporations’
Corruption in the media is as old as, well, Malabar Hill, except that stories of individual transgressions—journalists and editors seeking cars, houses, laptops etc—have now been supplanted by stories of institutional transgressions. Writing in the Financial Times, London, the historian Ramachandra Guha puts his finger on a newer and more insidious form of media corruption:…
The Indian Express, Reliance and Shekhar Gupta
The shadow of Mukesh Ambani‘s Reliance Industries (RIL) has hung heavily over the northern editions of the Indian Express for the last seven years, in a marked departure from the late 1980s when Ramnath Goenka‘s paper was seen as Dhirubhai Ambani‘s chief bully and bugbear. Tongues have wagged incessantly about how well paid Express staffers are…
2 new biz publications in 4 days of Cong win
New business publications are raining in India after the unexpected scale of triumph of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance in the general elections on May 16. On Monday, May 18, the Indian facsimile edition of The Wall Street Journal was launched in association with the Indian Express group with long-time WSJ man Suman Dubey at…
Which paper or TV station will do this story first?
After the hype of the launch of the Tata Nano yesterday, the reality check today. *** SHOBHA SARADA VISWANATHAN, in New Delhi, forwards a copy of an advertisement (above) taken out by Greenpeace in the Financial Times, London, and the International Herald Tribune, Paris, to draw the attention of the chairman of Ratan Tata, to…
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…
How the Sakaal Times dream became a nightmare
PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from New Delhi: Nothing is bringing home the seriousness of the global economic downturn to Indian media practitioners better than the breakneck speed with which media plans are being revised or revoked. Just a few months ago, it all seemed hunky-dory—a 20 per cent growth for the media and entertainment industry in…
All the business news that’s fit to be printed
Existing business papers are launching Hindi editions (Economic Times, Business Standard). Existing English dailies are launching business papers (Finance Chronicle from Deccan Chronicle). Hindi dailies are launching English papers (DNA from Dainik Bhaskar). New papers are selling their business sections as separate papers (DNA Money). Hindi dailies are planning Hindi business dailies (Dainik Jagran with…
Network 18 rejects no-poaching pact with Times
PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from New Delhi: In what is being interpreted as a sharpening of knives before the next round of The Great Indian Print Media Battle, Raghav Bahl‘s Network 18 is said to have summarily rejected a proposal for an informal “no-poaching agreement” floated by the country’s biggest media group, Bennett, Coleman & Co…
Why JoJo might want to leave The Times of India
SHARANYA KANVILKAR writes from Bombay: Well-placed sources in command central of The Times of India group confirm that the paper’s executive editor, Jaideep Bose aka JoJo, has indeed put in his papers as has been rumoured for the last couple of days, but not even editors who have his ear are in a position to…
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