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…
Tag Archives: Ramnath Goenka
“When Ramnath Goenka’s ‘Indian Express’ was raided, the reader felt choked. Today the reader doesn’t have that connect with much of the media”: Arun Shourie
What can the news media do when faced with vengeful rulers; scared and/or coopted owners and editors; advertising and circulation pressures; and a loss of trust and legitimacy among audiences distracted by digital and social media? In The Indian Express, the paper’s Magsaysay Award-winning former editor Arun Shourie expatiates the dilemma in questions posed by…
J-POD || Podcast || “No ruler would be so foolish as to openly declare censorship today. There are enough subtle ways to bring it in quietly” || Coomi Kapoor on the best-kept secret of the Emergency
https://soundcloud.com/user-311470525/j-pod-coomi-kapoor-author-of *** An acclaimed Indian Express journalist, whose husband was jailed during the Emergency of 1975, says governments no longer need to take Indira Gandhi’s route of introducing censorship to control the media or the message that reaches the people. “Parties have found enough ways to control the media without having to formally declare censorship.…
How can a journalist find the time to write a book every year? Nicholas Coleridge, who has written 12 of them, has an effective 3-step formula.
Exactly 25 years ago, Nicholas Coleridge, then a hot shot manager at Conde Nast publications, wrote a fabulous book called Paper Tigers, on the foibles, fortunes, eccentricities, influence and political manoeuvring of newspaper tycoons. In India, he met Samir Jain of The Times of India, Ramnath Goenka of The Indian Express, and Aveek Sarkar of The…
How ‘The Indian Express’ is covering the #Rafale scandal—and a scandal it is—compared to the way it covered #Bofors
The Congress president Rahul Gandhi has addressed five press conferences on the Rs 140,000 crore Rafale aircraft deal involving the Narendra Modi government and the bankrupt businessman Anil Ambani. These press conferences have been on 30 August, 22 September, 11 October, 25 October and 2 November 2018, and they have all been held in New…
Shekhar Gupta dedicates book to Viveck Goenka
Indian Express editor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta‘s much-awaited book, Anticipating India, a compilation of his Saturday columns, has seen a change of cover. At left is the original cover, with the tagline “If Modi wins on Sunday”. At right, is the actual book jacket, with the tagline now reading “The best of National Interest”. The 516-page…
A new paper in India’s most crowded market
With the South-based New Indian Express group of Manoj Kumar Sonthalia entering the Delhi market with the Sunday Standard, the North-based Indian Express group of Viveck Goenka has returned the favour by entering the Bangalore market with the National Standard. The 20-page daily, priced at Rs 4, has been launched on Independence Day with a…
V.N. Subba Rao: a ‘shishya’ remembers his Guru
There are few more misleading terms in Indian journalism than the phrase “national media”. Only those who flit around in the rarefied circles of Delhi and Bombay, rubbing shoulders with the high and mighty, qualify; everyone else is “upcountry”. Only the bold-faced names from big English media houses are supposed to be national; everyone else…
Kuldip Nayar on Shekhar Gupta, N. Ram & Co
Kuldip Nayar, 89, the grand old lion of Indian journalism—former editor of the Statesman in Delhi, former managing editor of the United News of India news agency, former correspondent of the London Times, former media advisor to the late prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, former high commissioner of India to the United Kingdom, and above…
The editor who said ‘no’ to Ramnath Goenka
The veteran journalist Kuldip Nayar pays tribute to V.K. Narasimhan, the legendary editor of the Indian Express during the Emergency in 1975, in a column in Deccan Herald: “The day Indira Gandhi was defeated at the polls Narasimhan was ousted to bring in S. Mulgaonkar. Ramnath Goenka explained that this was his obligation because Mulgaonkar…
Entries invited for Ramnath Goenka Awards, 2010
The Ramnath Goenka memorial foundation is inviting entries for the 2010 Ramnath Goenka excellence in journalism awards. Email rngf [at] expressindia [dot] com for further details. The last date for entries is 16 April 2012.
Conflict of interest in ‘Indian Express’ awards?
The Ramnath Goenka awards for excellence in journalism, instituted by The Indian Express, will be given out by the vice president of India, Hamid Ansari, on Monday, January 16. But the sponsorship of the awards has run into trouble, with a bunch activists and intellectuals raising questions of “conflict of interest”. Below is their full…
N.S. Jagannathan, ex-editor, Indian Express: RIP
sans serif records with regret the passing away of N.S. Jagannathan, former editor-in-chief of The Indian Express and Financial Express, in Bangalore on Saturday, 24 December 2011. He was 89 years old. NSJ, as he was known to friends and colleagues, succeeded Arun Shourie in the Express chair and held the post till 1992 after…
Vinod Mehta on Arun Shourie, Dileep Padgaonkar
“India’s most independent, principled and irreverent editor” Vinod Mehta has just published a memoir. Titled Lucknow Boy, the editor-in-chief of the Outlook* group of magazines, recaptures his four-decade journalistic journey via Debonair, The Sunday Observer, The Indian Post, The Independent and The Pioneer. With trademark candour often bordering on the salacious, the twice-married but childless Mehta reveals that he fathered a child in…
‘Arun Shourie: a Hindu right-wing pamphleteer’
There are few more polarising figures in Indian journalism than Arun Shourie. For many of his professional peers, he is everything a journalist should not be: a wonky-eyed, hired gun of the Hindu right, selectively and deviously using facts to push its ideological and political agendas. Arrogant, intolerant, abusive, dictatorial, . For multitudes more, he…
The saplings Usha Rai planted on our Fleet Street
Delhi is celebrating its centenary as the capital of India, and a number of newspapers led by the Hindustan Times have been using the opportunity to take a stroll down memory lane. The Hindu Business Line too is running a series, and the sports journalist Norris Pritam (left) turned his eyes on the Fleet Street of India—Bahadurshah…
‘Kannada Prabha’ is now Rajeev Chandrasekhar’s
Kannada Prabha, the Kannada daily established by Ramnath Goenka, has a new owner from today, 1 July 2011: mobile phone baron turned businessman and member of Parliament, Rajeev Chandrasekhar. Chandrasekhar’s Jupiter Media & Entertainment Ventures began the creeping acquisition of Kannada Prabha, valued at Rs 250 crore, through a “strategic business alliance” with Kannada Prabha Publications…
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…
Indian Express, NDTV & the “scoop” that wasn’t
*** PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from New Delhi: There has been a brief hiatus to the “crude and disgusting character assassination” of the father-son lawyer-pair of Shanti Bhushan and Prashant Bhushan, after the Union government made it clear the insinuations would not sway the composition or functioning of the committee to draft the Lokpal bill. Now,…
Is Indian Express now a pro-establishment paper?
PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from New Delhi: The Indian Express of Ramnath Goenka is an unputdownable chapter in the book of Indian journalism. Unlike many of its English counterparts—whose grammar was constricted by Wren & Martin, and the Raj—Express was the archetypal desi bully. “Anti-establishment,” was the Express‘ calling card. Its reputation was built on stones…
IJR 