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: NYT
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…
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,…
A broadsheet battle as seen by a tabloid tycoon
An easy-to-understand animated film of the battle between Arthur Sulzberger‘s New York Times and Rupert Murdoch‘s Wall Street Journal, as interpreted by the Taiwanese tabloid tycoon, Jimmy Lai‘s company Next Media Animation. External reading: Tabloid sensation recreates the news
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…
‘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…
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…
Subs of the world unite. You’ve commas to lose…
On National Public Radio, Laura Conway invites readers to sharpen their red pencils for this paragraph from The New York Times: Yet deep down in his soul, the transplant will hold on to the notion that umbrellas are to be used only as protection against the rain, which is wet and, when it drenches the…
No news is good news unless it is bad news?
One of the hackneyed charges against Western hacks in India is that they diligently separate the wheat from the chaff and report the chaff. India’s successes, triumphs and achievements, we are told ad nauseam, are ignored by the “nattering nabobs of negativism” who can only see death, disease and despair; floods, famines and failure. KANCHAN…
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