The heroic courage displayed by Indian soldiers while combating their Chinese counterparts on June 15, the day 20 of their brethren were killed literally at the hands of the Chinese, is now a project fully underway. Across platforms—a news portal (Rediff.com), an English newspaper (Deccan Chronicle), a Hindi newspaper (Prabhat Khabar), a news channel (India…
Tag Archives: Rediff.com
J-POD || A podcast on journalism || ex-Rediff and Yahoo editor Prem Panicker on what journalists facing an uncertain future due to #Coronavirus can try to do on the digital front
Indian journalists have been doing a heroic job of reporting the #Coronavirus pandemic even though it has thrown the print media sector into a massive tizzy. The “lockdown” has caused havoc to advertising, transportation and distribution of newspapers and magazines—and ignorance has spread the fear of contamination among the “educated”. Job losses and salary cuts…
‘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…
When Shekhar Gupta met Dawood Ibrahim
In his Saturday column in The Indian Express, editor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta recounts his encounter with India’s most wanted man, the Bombay-born underworld don, Dawood Ibrahim, when he was at India Today: “I had had one long, and partly on-record conversation on the phone with Dawood Ibrahim before the Bombay blasts, set up through my colleague…
Africa-watcher Hari Sharan Chhabra is no more
On the pages of The Times of India in Delhi, the grim news of the passing of an Indian who looked at a part of the world most of the media doesn’t: Hari Sharan Chhabra, editor of Africa Diary and World Focus and a frequent contributor to the Economic & Political Weekly (EPW). Chhabra’s elder…
Time, Sandesh and the six degrees of separation
As the row over Time magazine’s “Underachiever” cover line on prime minister Manmohan Singh engulfs primetime news, Mail Today cartoonist R. Prasad cuts through the post-colonial clutter. New York Times‘ India website IndiaInk has a gallery of past magazine covers on India, while Rediff compiles a slideshow of previous Time covers on Indians. Meanwhile, Prasad…
‘Media doesn’t figure in society transformation’
Sheela Bhatt, senior editorial director of rediff.com and India Abroad: “Where do the media figure in this turbulent transformation of Indian society? The plain truth is: Nowhere. “Making loud noises is not journalism. There are over three million cases pending in India’s 21 courts and 26.3 million cases in the lower courts and a quarter…
Indian Express ‘C’ report: Scoop, rehash, spin?
PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from New Delhi: The front-page, full-page report in the northern editions of The Indian Express this morning, that two units of the Indian Army moved towards Delhi on January 16, 2012—the day the Army chief V.K. Singh‘s petition before the Supreme Court on his date of birth was coming up—has sent New…
So many reporters, so little info on Sonia Gandhi?
Nothing has exposed the hollowness of so-called “political reporting” in New Delhi, and the fragilility of editorial spines of newspapers and TV stations across the country, than the Congress president Sonia Gandhi‘s illness. Hundreds of correspondents cover the grand old party; tens of editors claim to be on on first-name terms with its who’s who;…
Scam-buster Josy Joseph gets Prem Bhatia prize
Josy Joseph of The Times of India, who authored the paper’s big scoops on the Adarsh housing and CWG scams last year, has bagged the 2011 Prem Bhatia award for excellence in political reporting. He shares the award with J. Dey, the crime reporter of Mid-Day, who was slain in Bombay recently. Joseph, whose career…
Mint deputy editor bags Shakti Bhatt book prize
Samanth Subramanian, a deputy editor at the business daily Mint, has won the 2010 Shakti Bhatt First Book prize for his debut book, Following Fish. There were six books in this year’s shortlist but the three-member jury found Subramanian’s pursuit of fish curry round coastal India “a delightful read, adventurous and unabashedly fun”. “Subramanian brings…
How come no one saw the IPL cookie crumbling?
The collapse of the Indian Premier League (IPL) pack of cards is identical to the unravelling of the Satyam fraud in 2009, from a media perspective. Namely, no media organisation—newspaper, magazine, TV station or internet website—saw it before it happened. Or wanted to see it coming. The player auctions, the franchise bids, the television rights,…
Express declares ceasefire; brothers declare war
The tussle between The Indian Express and The Hindu following the former’s reports (Part I and Part II) on the boardroom happenings in the latter has predictably and understandably gone cold after N. Ram‘s belligerent announcement of “criminal and civil defamation proceedings”. Express bossman Shekhar Gupta is said to have instructed staff to go easy…
Journalist Rahul Bedi pedals 40-50 km a day
Sheela Bhatt of rediff.com reports that Delhi-based journalist Rahul Bedi, longtime defence correspondent of Jane’s Defence Weekly, and an occasional contributor to the The Daily Telegraph, London, and Irish Times, Dublin, has abandoned his sport utility vehicle and now cycles all around town. “I have taken to cycling since the last three to four years.…
An example to emulate for Indian journalists
Not too many working Indian journalists are in the book-writing habit. At least not in English. Pesky bosses who don’t give leave from work, the effort involved in finding a publisher, the commitment entailed in pursuing a different form of writing, not to speak of the fear of failure, etc, all play a contributing part.…
Is economic downturn the best time for redesign?
It’s the season for the redesign of websites. In just the last three weeks, Rediff.com, The Times of India and Hindustan Times have gone in for a overhaul of their home pages. Outlook*, the weekly newsmagazine published from Delhi, has just joined the pack. Above is the new home page created by editor Sundeep Dougal…
Less is better for the new, redesigned rediff.com
India’s pioneering news, views and e-commerce portal, rediff.com, has unveiled a brand-new, minimalist home page that is a far removed from its earlier “busy” homepage (screenshot below), and is almost a replica of the beta version of its world homepage. The NASDAQ-listed site, founded in 1996 by adman and entrepreneur Ajit Balakrishnan, is edited by…
Don’t laugh: Do journos make good politicians?
PRITAM SENGUPTA in New Delhi and SHARANYA KANVILKAR in Bombay write: The stunning defeat of the BJP in the general elections has been dissected so many times and by so many since May 16 that there is little that has been left unsaid. What has been left unsaid is how the BJP’s defeat also marks…
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…
Blogger breaks into India’s most powerful list
Businessweek magazine has compiled its latest list of the “50 Most Powerful People in India”. There are four media people on it—a pioneer-entrepreneur who founded an advertising agency, a software company and an internet portal; a publisher who inherited the world’s biggest selling English language newspaper; a writer who founded a pathbreaking webzine turned magazine—and…
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