A new son rises in the west. Anant Goenka, the scion of the Indian Express (Bombay) group of Viveck Goenka, and the grandson of Ramnath Goenka, has given an interview to the Mint on the digital future he has envisioned for the paper. The 27-year-old talks about his father’s superstitions, about growing up in a…
Tag Archives: Shekhar Gupta
When ‘Indian Express’ gave ‘The Hindu’ a story
In October 1989, when The Hindu‘s then associate editor, N. Ram, was stopped in his tracks by his uncle and editor, G. Kasturi, from publishing the third part of an investigation into the Bofors gun deal, Ram found a novel method of getting the story out. He called a press conference and handed out the…
Sudheendra Kulkarni ends his ‘Express’ column
Sudheendra Kulkarni, the former left-leaning Sunday Observer and Blitz journalist who became a close aide of former prime minister A.B. Vajpayee and BJP president L.K. Advani, has ended his column in The Indian Express. Kulkarni, who was jailed for his alleged role in the cash-for-votes scandal and wrote a book on Mahatma Gandhi and the…
12 gems from a response to a TOI legal notice
There’s something decidedly execrable when a media company thinks it is well within its rights to use its might to silence another media company or media professional with a fire-and-brimstone legal threat. Even more so, when a 175-year-old media giant like The Times of India group picks on a 22-year-old girl. In April, lawyers representing…
2,450 journos lost jobs in Chitty Chitty Bong Bong
Mail Today, the tabloid daily owned by the India Today group, reports that an astonishing 2,450 journalists (including non-editorial staff) may have lost their jobs after the meltdown of Bengal’s chitfund driven, politically backed newspapers and TV stations. Employees of Saradha group owned 24-hour TV news station, Channel 10, are reported to have filed a…
Shekhar Gupta storms into India Today powerlist
Thirteen out of India Today magazine’s 2013 ranking of the 50 most powerful people in India have interests in the media, but only two of them (former Indian Express editor Arun Shourie, Times Now editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami, Indian Express editor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta) are pure-play journalists. The chairman of the press council of India, Justice Markandey…
Will TV channels lose out to newspapers by 2050?
Before the reforms of 1991 prised open the doors of Indian journalism (and the minds and wallets of publishers and promoters), “Gulf” was the El Dorado journalists and editors chased. In Bombay and Bangalore and Delhi, dozens of journalists and editors attended road shows and group-interviews in the banquet halls of five-star hotels. Khaleej Times,…
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…
Why India Today had to shut Gujarati edition
Indian Express editor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta in his jottings on the Gujarat elections: “Narendra Modi and Gujarat defy simpler generalisations. Such as the idea that communalism in Gujarat rose with the arrival of Modi, and before that it was a state of perfect secular tolerance. “If the BJP hasn’t lost power ever since it first seized…
Brajesh Mishra, Outlook, Indian Express and DD
The passing away of the former national security advisor and former foreign service officer Brajesh Mishra last week has resulted in a welter of tributes, many very mushy, a few critical, but almost all of them throwing light on the uncomfortable influence that the Vajpayee aide held over the media—and the chummy friendship that some…
Samir Jain, Vineet Jain & TOI in The New Yorker
The October 8 issue of The New Yorker carries a nine-page article on The Times of India by its renowned media critic Ken Auletta in the clearest indication yet that the Times group is bracing for an IPO. Titled “Citizens Jain”, after the brothers Samir Jain and Vineet Jain, the piece examines why India’s newspaper…
How Shekhar Gupta busted the ISRO spy ‘scam’
The ISRO spy scandal of the early 1990s has come to an end with the exoneration of S. Nambi Narayanan, the scientist (wrongly) accused by the Malayalam and later national media of selling secrets of the satellite organisation to a couple of Maldivian women. The son of the then Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao‘s son…
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…
When Shekhar Gupta met Abdul Kalam
As the prospect of a “contest” for the President looms between the UPA nominee Pranab Mukherjee and the former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Indian Express editor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta writes of the latter in his weekly column: “I wrote two National Interest articles more critical of Abdul Kalam than any you have seen anywhere…. The second…
What they’re saying about Express ‘sue’ report
A 10-page defamation notice sent by the legal advisors of The Indian Express to Open magazine, over an interview granted to the latter by Vinod Mehta, editorial chairman of Outlook* magazine, criticising the Express ‘C’ report, is now in the public domain. The letter—on behalf of the Express, the paper’s editor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta, its reporters…
After the full-page report, the full-page ad
Mail Today‘s outstanding political cartoonist, R. Prasad, on the irony of newspapers running advertisements from the controversial truck maker, Tatra, when it is at the heart of a major corruption scandal involving the Indian Army. Among the newspapers which received the full-page ad is The Indian Express, whose controversial full-page report on the coup that…
Adolf Hitler reacts to Indian Express ‘C’ report
Just as the journalistic world was consigning the Indian Express ‘C’ report—the full page, three-deck headline, three-byline story of the coup that wasn’t—to the dustbin of history, the Fuhrer steps in. Also read: Indian Express ‘C’ report: scoop, rehash or spin? Indian Express stands by its ‘C’ report How the media viewed the Indian Express…
Time for focus-groups in Indian journalism?
Vidhu Vinod Chopra, the film maker and producer behind such big hits as Parinda, 1942: A Love Story, Munnabhai MBBS and 3 Idiots, is a big fan of focus groups—exposing a small audience to a film before its release and tailoring the finished product based on their reaction. In an interview with Shekhar Gupta of…
How the media viewed Express ‘C’ report
Editorial in Deccan Herald: “There is reason for deep concern over the report in a national daily, The Indian Express, about an ‘unexpected (and non-notified) movement’ of two army units towards Delhi on the night of January 16-17… To insinuate that General V.K. Singh would attempt a coup to settle scores with the government is downright…
‘The Indian Express’ stands by its ‘C’ report
Everybody from the prime minister to the defence minister have dismissed the Indian Express front-page story on the coup that wasn’t in Delhi on the night of January 16-17. Now, the paper has published a formal statement standing by the story on its website. Below is the full text: *** “The Indian Express report “The…
IJR 