A giant pack of 61 journalists—each told to carry at least $800 in foreign currency for their hotel stay—is accompanying Indian minister of external affairs, S.M. Krishna, on his much-ballyhooed visit of Pakistan. But Praveen Swami, the deputy chief of bureau of The Hindu in Delhi—who did a brief stint as diplomatic editor of The…
Tag Archives: Roy Greenslade
Who wins, who loses when it’s Gandhi vs Gandhi
When the Mail Today juxtaposes the Congress scion Rahul Gandhi with the father of the nation Mahatma Gandhi, who should feel more offended, Gandhi junior or Gandhi senior? The Guardian‘s media critic, Roy Greenslade, sees the promo in conjunction with Mont Blanc trying to sell pens in the name of Gandhi and Telecom Italia trying…
Cursor on screen is edging out ink on paper
Philip Meyer says the last newspaper will be printed, packed, sold, (and hopefully) bought, read, crumpled and thrown in the first quarter of the year of the lord 2043. That’s 35 years from now, but The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, has acted before that eventuality could take place. The six-days-a-week newspaper has ceased ink-and-paper…
Can people like us cover people like them?
Of all the reasons proffered for the current state and priorities of the media, Indian and otherwise, one of the most obvious ones has got the least amount of attention: the changing demographic profile. To some of the key charges—celebrity-obsessed, headline-driven, trivial, titillatory, hit-and-run—the media has no option but to plead guilty. The “real problems”…
If print is dying, why did they have to build this?
It is the size of 23 football pitches. It is built with enough steel to build the Eiffel Tower twice over. Its 12 presses can roll out 86,000 copies every hour. It will eat up 330,000 tonnes of newsprint every year. Rupert Murdoch calls it a “printing cathedral”. Roy Greenslade calls it the most amazing…
New, improved news: 80 per cent fact-free
The traditional media love to paint themselves as journals of record, with institutional checks and balances to check facts, separate the wheat from the chaff and print only the news fit to print because the truth involves us all, because the truth shall prevail, etc. But how much of that claim is real and how…
Have you signed the petition to Save Pervez?
Pervez Kambaksh, a 23-year-old Afghan journalist is facing execution after a religious court in that country found him guilty of downloading material from the internet which is said to question the role of women in Islam. The Independent, London, has launched a campaign to save Pervez, and Roy Greenslade says every journalist must sign the…
‘A newspaper that’s a genuine viewspaper’
Its current circulation is 1.3 million. Its operating profits are up 25 per cent; revenues up 4 per cent in the first six months of this financial year. It is a magazine that calls itself a newspaper. It is sober yet witty and carries only a few bylines. Yet, with more than half its copies…
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