Tag Archives: J. Gopikrishnan

Chandan Mitra became owner of ‘The Pioneer’ without spending a rupee. The group is now in financial trouble.

In its hey day, The Pioneer counted Rudyard Kipling, Winston Churchill and Harivanshrai Bachchan among its star correspondents. But 155 years after it rolled off the press in Lucknow, the newspaper has run into serious financial trouble, with insolvency proceedings being launched against its publishing company CMYK Printech. *** Purchased by the Thapar Group in…

Ravi Nair: the journalist who pushed the #Rafale deal into the national and political consciousness

Twitter in India today is mostly a platform to preen for loud Delhi gasbags—or a signalling system for has-beens trying desperately to stay on the right side of Tongue Parivar. Good journalism, therefore, gets subsumed by those who shout, scream and shriek—and then shout, scream and shriek some more when somebody, usually another gasbag, retweets…

Did Chidambaram walk out of Express awards?

The grapevine is that some ministers boycotted events in which media houses had chosen members of Team Anna for awards last year. Now, this item appears in the gossip columns of The Sunday Guardian. Apparently home minister P. Chidambaram vamoosed from the Ramnath Goenka excellence in journalism awards function organised by The Indian Express after…

One more claimant for the 2G spectrum scam

It is the year of the lord, 2011, but it is still not too late to claim credit for the 2G spectrum allocation scam. Nearly a week after the disgraced telecom minister A. Raja was arrested, marking the end of the beginning of the scam, today’s Indian Express carries a five-ad campaign saluting its sister…

SMS IPUB4 to 51818* for Journalist of the Year

  The publication of the Niira Radia tapes by Outlook* and Open magazines has seen the usual clutch of usual suspects—and “suspects” many of them truly are—hog the limelight and shine in reflected glory. All, except J. Gopikrishnan of The Pioneer, the journalist who (aside from Paranjoy Guha Thakurta) kept pegging away at the 2G…

Everybody loves (to claim credit for) an expose

Indian television news channels, whose fortunes rise and fall each week, routinely advertise their ratings “victory” after each major event: the Union budget, the general elections, the Obama visit, etc. It looks like newspapers are quickly following in the footsteps of television in the 2G spectrum allocation scam, and this even as the Supreme Court…

‘The Pioneer’ journo who brought Raja to book

So, who gets the credit for the resignation, at long last, of Union telecommunications minister A. Raja in the 2G spectrum allocation scam? The Pioneer, Delhi, has put its hand up–first. Its front-page lead story today says: “Two years after The Pioneer first exposed the 2G spectrum scam, pegged at Rs 1.70 crore by the…