There was plenty of buzz about the Washington Post building being sold to shore up the books. But when the paper’s staff was convened for a meeting on the afternoon of August 5, they were in for a shock: the family-owned newspaper itself was being sold. The sale, to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com,…
Tag Archives: New York Times
Ex-IHT journalist goes missing from Rishikesh
Mail Today, the tabloid newspaper from the India Today group, on Jonathan Spollen, the 28-year-old Irish journalist formerly with the New York Times-owned International Herald Tribune, who has gone missing from Rishikesh. Read the full article: Irish journalist goes missing
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…
NYT, WSJ weigh in on Tehelka’s Goa controversy
The controversy surrounding Tehelka magazine’s Goa conference, ThinkFest, had so far been largely confined to sections of blogosphere, which used an editorial page piece in Hindustan Times by the theatreperson Hartman de Souza, and Tehelka editor Tarun J. Tejpal‘s response to it, as a trigger. Only Deccan Herald among the large English dailies gave any…
How ‘New York Times’ stumped India’s censors
Foreign publications usually get into a kerfuffle with superpatriotic Indian authorities over the depiction of the geographical boundaries of India in maps and infographs. Publications like The Economist, for instance, have noisily run afoul of censors for (corrrectly) showing parts of Kashmir as belonging to Pakistan and China. The New York Times which recently launched…
When Manu Joseph met Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
Manu Joseph, editor of Open magazine, in The New York Times: “Nine years ago, I was invited by the Art of Living Foundation to interview Mr Shankar. “Mr Shankar was in the house of a wealthy businessman in South Mumbai. “In the living room he sat on a large, embellished, thronelike chair as about 50…
‘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…
Barkha Dutt breaks silence in NYT interview
For 15 days, as the media storm over the Niira Radia tapes raged around her, NDTV’s star-anchor Barkha Dutt opted to speak to the world through an official press release, an online essay, and a pre-recorded inquisition by print editors. Dutt declined to appear on a Karan Thapar show and in a Headlines Today debate,…
In the dosa joint where ‘our beloved father’ ate
New Delhi’s most famous media canteen—the one at the news agency United News of India (UNI)—finally steps out of the margins into the gossip columns. Facsimile: courtesy Mail Today Also read: Why the Indian media doesn’t take on Ambanis Sorry brother, we got a few million dollars wrong How media hyped up the Reliance Power…
The ‘troubling nexus’ doesn’t trouble too many
Several Indian newspapers which have tie-ups with the New York Times have re-run Heather Timmons‘ piece on people of Indian origin returning to the United States because they find it difficult to work in the motherland. Surprise, surprise—or perhaps no surprise, no surprise—almost all of them have excised former Mint editor, currently Washington Post managing…
Why did the editor cross Kasturba Gandhi Marg?
So, why did Raju Narisetti suddenly leave Mint, the business Berliner launched by the Hindustan Times group, in December 2008, less than two years after the newspaper’s launch, and return to the United States? *** # Was it because he was opposed to staff and salary cuts as proposed by the management, as insiders claimed?…
William Safire’s 18 steps to better writing
It’s not known if William Safire, who wrote the “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine for 30 years till earlier this month, was conversant with the ways of social media, but it is safe to presume that he would have been horrified at how his demise last night was coveyed to readers…
Six questions for Stephen Farrell and NY Times
Tunku Varadarajan, the former foreign correspondent of The Times, London, currently a professor at NYU’s Stern Business School, asks some excellent questions on the abduction and rescue of Stephen Farrell, the “seemingly reckless” New York Times journalist, by the Taliban in Afghanistan, at Forbes.com. 1) Did not Farrell assume the risk of some harm befalling…
Speak out. Sign the petition. Free Maziar Bahari.
Newsweek contributor Maziar Bahari, a 42-year-old awaiting the birth of his first child, has just spent his 81st night in solitary confinement in Iran. Ahead of Iranian President Ahmadinejad‘s visit to the United States, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham makes a plea for Bahari’s freedom in The New York Times: “If Iran wants to be taken…
Move over Irving Wallace. Wallace Souza is here.
In Irving Wallace‘s 1982 thriller The Almighty, the protagonist Edward Armstead inherits from his father a newspaper called the New York Record (and his mistress). But the former comes with a rider: the Record will become his if and only if he can overtake the circulation of the New York Times in a certain timeframe.…
Sorry, brother, we got a few million $$$ wrong
The battle between Dhirubhai Ambani‘s children—Mukesh Ambani and Anil Ambani, and children they truly are—also has a small but remarkable media subtext. Both “camps” scour through news reports with a fine toothcomb, and both “camps” are not unknown to plant a few saplings in fertile newspapers and magazines to score points. This clarification appears in…
When an Indian journo shouted at Prabhakaran
Dozens of journalists have written on the leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Velupillai Prabhakaran, whose death was announced to the world by Sri Lanka on Tuesday, May 18. On rediff.com, Athimuthu Ganesh Nadar writes of his encounter with Prabhakaran seven years ago when he was among 350 international journalists who attended…
‘The only award I want to win is from my readers’
It is routine to hear super-achievers claim that the ultimate stamp of approval of their achievement comes when they are recognised and rewarded by their peers and compatriots. Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman, in a discussion with the editorial staff of the New Delhi-based Indian Express, strikes a…
An all-expenses-paid African safari with NYT
For the third year in a row, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is offering journalism students an all-expenses-paid vacation to travel with him to Africa to bring “fresh eyes” on the problems and solutions of global poverty. And to bring back stories that will appeal to younger readers. “This won’t be a day on…
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…
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