In the mid-1980s, when it still saw itself as a newspaper in the news business, The Times of India launched a annual contest for advertisements created by advertisers and agencies not for profit but in service of the public. The shortlisted entries—on keeping families small, streets clean, etc—were published in a separate pullout, along with…
Tag Archives: M.J.Akbar
‘Deccan Chronicle’ owed lenders Rs 8,180 crore. An arbitrator tells BCCI to shell out Rs 8,000 crore for cancelling its IPL franchise. Will Venkattram Reddy be back in control? Take a wild guess.
Deccan Chronicle, Hyderabad’s oldest and biggest English newspaper, has been under the pump for quite some time now, but the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has provided a windfall boon for the premature termination of its IPL franchise. Rs 4,800 crore, if you read Mint, or Business Standard. Rs 8,000 crore, if…
If a fake news website deserves freedom to concoct an alternate universe for bhakts, bots and WhatsApp uncles, why cannot legitimate media organisations probe and report a BJP candidate’s past?
Media organisations seem so tired and bored of (repeatedly) fighting for their freedoms that not one of them has publicly raised their voice against an extraordinary injunction issued by a Bangalore court barring them from reporting on troubling questions concerning the private life of BJP’s Bangalore South candidate, Tejasvi Surya. The only paper to have editorially…
Former ‘Science Today’ editor Mukul Sharma, the prose and puzzle whiz who found Satyajit Ray’s kisses “unconvincing” and counted the golden flecks in Rakhee’s eyes, is no more.
Indian Journalism Review records with regret the passing of Mukul Sharma, the former editor of Science Today magazine (and its later version 2001), who wrote the scintillating “Mind Sport” column in now-defunct Illustrated Weekly of India. He was 69. Mukul Sharma, who lived in Gurgaon, near Delhi, was previously married to the film maker Aparna Sen. The…
The ‘Sunday’ magazine sub-editor who secretly cooked her way to become the best known Indian chef in the world, after Gaggan Anand (if you believe food critics, that is)
In the Hindustan Times magazine supplement, Brunch, the food writer Vir Sanghvi writes about Asma Khan, the former Sunday magazine journalist whose hashtag could well be #SubKaChaatSubKaVikas. (Sunday, launched by the Ananda Bazaar Patrika group, is now defunct. M.J. Akbar was its first editor.) Writes Sanghvi: “It is a funny feeling when a colleague from decades…
‘The Sunday Guardian’ goes after its pet-hate (P. Chidambaram) for the ‘coup’ report in ‘The Indian Express’. But Rediff had reported the story 22 days earlier and the Army itself had held a briefing.
The Indian Express‘s front-page, full page, three-deck, four-byline, eight-column banner story in 2012—hinting at an attempted “coup” against the Manmohan Singh government, but without using the C-word—has come back to haunt the newspaper five years on, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi seemingly raising the issue in his last address to Parliament. Modi hinted at a report in The Sunday…
Kind attention: M.J. Akbar, Vinod Dua, Prashant Jha, K.R. Sreenivas, T.S. Sudhir, Gaurav Sawant et al
In October 2018, New York Review of Books (NYRB) published a piece by Jian Ghomeshi, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) host. Four years earlier, i.e. before #MeToo, Ghomeshi had been fired after more than 20 women had filed complaints of harassment and physical harm. Ghomeshi was subsequently acquitted of all charges which included hitting, biting,…
The investigative TV journo who now sells sarees
The state of mainstream Indian journalism, it can be argued, is somewhat reflected by the number of journalists churning out books; leaving for greener PR, corporate communications and “policy”) pastures; joining thinktanks; going on sabatticals, etc—and it is probably no different from the rest of the world. But nobody drives home the issue better than…
Jessica Lal, Tehelka, Bina Ramani & the media
It was in South Delhi socialite Bina Ramani‘s Tamarind Court restaurant that Jessica Lall, a “model who worked as a celebrity barmaid”, was shot dead in 1999 by Manu Sharma, the son of Congress politician Venod Sharma. Initially exonerated of the charges, the case turned full turtle for Sharma following a sting operation by Harinder…
‘International Herald Tribune’ becomes INYT
The legendary International Herald Tribune (IHT) has published its last print issue today with its current mastead. From tomorrow, 15 October 2013, it will be sold under the name-plate “International New York Times” (INYT). IHT’s name-change isn’t the first. The New York Herald, launched in 1887 in Europe, became the New York Herald Tribune, which…
How corporate ownership shapes TV news?
Virendra Kapoor, former editor of the Free Press Journal, in his column in M.J. Akbar‘s Sunday Guardian: Money speaks The growing intrusion of corporate money into the media is beginning to show in myriad ways. For instance, ever since a big industrial group made a huge investment in a multi-channel television group, its news channel…
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…
Salman Khurshid, India Today & Sunday Guardian
Salman Khurshid, the Oxford-educated Union law minister, has taken the India Today group to court in Delhi, Bombay, Lucknow and London claiming damages of Rs 243 crore following Aaj Tak‘s sting operation that accused the trust run by his wife, former Sunday magazine journalist Louise Khurshid nee Fernandes, of a discrepancy of Rs 71 lakh.…
The new kid on the block announces an eclipse
The front page of Ei Bela, the new Bengali tabloid launched by the Ananda Bazaar Patrika (ABP) group in Calcutta, as a “buffer” to counter the launch of a Bengali newspaper from The Times of India group, on the day Mamata Banerjee‘s Trinamool Congress walked out of the Congress-led UPA. This is the second tabloid…
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…
‘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…
The TV anchor who’s caught Omar Abdullah’s eye
Nora Chopra, the diarist/ gossip columnist of M.J. Akbar‘s weekly newspaper, The Sunday Guardian, gives a delicious little rumour floating around in Delhi some more oxygen. “If the Delhi grapevine is to be believed, Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah and his wife Payal are getting divorced by mutual consent. “The reason behind the…
Jug Suraiya on MJ, SJ, Giri, Monu & Mamma T
PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from Delhi: Books about The Times of India are like city buses. There isn’t one for years, and then two come along around the same time. And on both occasions, punsters imported from Calcutta are the ones steering the wheel. Bachi Karkaria came out with Behind the Times, “a poorly structured, poorly…
The journo married to the Rs 100,000 crore heir
In all the wide-eyed reporting on the gold tumbling out of the vaults of the Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Trivandrum, reporters have (generally) missed out on one delicious fact: the fact, that one of our ilk is married into the erstwhile royal family of Travancore. That lucky somebody is M.D. Nalapat (left), former resident editor of…
‘The most prolific journalist of our times’
Khushwant Singh on his Illustrated Weekly of India protege M.J. Akbar, in The Telegraph, Calcutta, the “unputdownable” Calcutta paper founded by Akbar in 1982: “M.J. Akbar must be the most prolific journalist of our times. He heads the editorial board of India Today, edits The Sunday Guardian financed by Ram Jethmalani, and writes for many…
IJR 