As the old saying goes, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, thrice is enemy action. Or, as we say in journalism, a trend. In the space of just 20 days, two Members of Parliament have been found dead. The first, 7-time MP Mohan Delkar, was found hanging in his hotel room in Bombay in February.…
Tag Archives: The Pioneer
Chandan Mitra became owner of ‘The Pioneer’ without spending a rupee. The group is now in financial trouble.
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…
“Ambiguous. Beseiged. Confusing. Disappointing. Dismaying. Evasive. Frightening. Unpardonable. Unsatisfactory. PM should speak again”: editorials on ‘Surender’ Modi’s cop-out
The major English newspapers all have editorials on Narendra Modi‘s brazen lie, without taking the name of China, that “no one has intruded on Indian soil, nor is any one sitting on Indian soil, nor has any post been seized by anyone”, which made a total mockery of the killing of 20 Indian soldiers last…
Ravi Nair: the journalist who pushed the #Rafale deal into the national and political consciousness
Twitter in India today is mostly a platform to preen for loud Delhi gasbags—or a signalling system for has-beens trying desperately to stay on the right side of Tongue Parivar. Good journalism, therefore, gets subsumed by those who shout, scream and shriek—and then shout, scream and shriek some more when somebody, usually another gasbag, retweets…
Vinod Mehta, the Last Great Editor, 1942-2015
sans serif records with deep regret the passing of the Editorial Chairman of Outlook magazine, Vinod Mehta, in New Delhi on Sunday, 8 March 2015. He was 73 years old and had been ailing for some time. He leaves behind his wife Sumita Paul, their canine companion, “Editor”, two brothers and a sister—and legions of…
President speaks of paid news, dumbing down
The following is the full text of the speech delivered by the President of India, Pranab Mukherjee, at the inauguration of the platinum jubilee celebrations of the Indian Newspaper Society (INS) in New Delhi on Thursday, 27 February 2014: *** By PRANAB MUKHERJEE “Seventy-five years ago, the world was a very different place. Our country…
HT, Mail Today, and Kumar Mangalam Birla
On the morning after the central bureau of investigation (CBI) named industrialist Kumar Mangalam Birla in the coal allocation scam, the news is the page one, lead story, in The Times of India, The Economic Times, The Indian Express, The Financial Express, The Hindu, Deccan Herald, The Pioneer, Business Standard…. But not the Hindustan Times…
‘You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war’
Modern journalists not used to the thrills and travails of sending despatches on the telegram and the teleprinter and the telex machine from the back of beyond will not understand the hoo dash ha in today’s papers on the decision of the Bharat sanchar nigam limited bracket open BSNL bracket close to wind up the…
An Editor is never too old to learn a new trick
After 42 years of handwriting his columns, articles and books on scribblepads—at Debonair,The Sunday Observer, The Indian Post, The Independent, The Pioneer and Outlook*—and after hiding the vicious mouse behind his PC all his life, Outlook* editorial chairman Vinod Mehta writes his latest Diary on his new laptop, in New Delhi on Tuesday. “I found…
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…
‘Arnab Goswami is corrective to babalog media’
Bangalore, the home of City Tab, India’s original weekly tabloid, now has a new weekly: Talk. Edited by former Indian Express and Yahoo! staffer S.R. Ramakrishna, Talk also features a weekly satire page called Ayyotoons, illustrated by Satish Acharya. The latest issue features Times Now* editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami. *** At the turn of 2012, the…
Zee News, Jindal Steel & silence of the media
Swapan Dasgupta on the silence of much of the media on the Zee News-Jindal Steel extortion case, in which the editorial staff of the Subhash Chandra-owned channel allegedly demanded Rs 100 crore in lieu of advertisements from the steel major to not publish stories in the coal scam, in The Pioneer, Delhi: “The media didn’t…
No half-truths for New Delhi’s newest paper
Yes, Kumar Mangalam Birla is right: the media is a sunrise sector and further proof of it comes through the launch of New Delhi’s newest daily, the Millennium Post. The 16-page, all-colour broadsheet priced at Rs 3, boasting the tagline “No Half Truths”, was launched on May 2. (Click here to view the front page…
Did Chidambaram walk out of Express awards?
The grapevine is that some ministers boycotted events in which media houses had chosen members of Team Anna for awards last year. Now, this item appears in the gossip columns of The Sunday Guardian. Apparently home minister P. Chidambaram vamoosed from the Ramnath Goenka excellence in journalism awards function organised by The Indian Express after…
Anchors, editors, motormouths & other nuisances
It’s that time of year once again, when columnists crawl out of their quilts, double-dip their quills in vitriol and go for kill (yes, it’s a punny time of year, too). The veteran journalist Jawid Laiq—with Indian Express, New Delhi, Economic & Political Weekly on his resume—does the needful in Mail Today, with a list…
6 pages for Ambedkar; 393 pages for ‘The Family’
PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from New Delhi: For all the lip service it pays “dalits and the downtrodden”, for all the tokenism of a Dalit as speaker of Lok Sabha, and for all the buzz about a possible Dalit replacement for Manmohan Singh as prime minister, the Congress-led UPA government has issued a measly six pages…
Times, Express groups get most anniversary ads
PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from New Delhi: For the final anniversary of the year of India’s “Family No. 1”—the birth anniversary of the nation’s first woman prime minister Indira Gandhi—there are 70 advertisements amounting to 32 published pages in 12 English newspapers that have been surveyed through the year by sans serif. With this anniversary, the…
323 ads, nearly 160 pages to mark 5 anniversaries
PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from New Delhi: There are 58 government advertisements amounting to 26¼ pages in 12 English newspapers today to mark the birth anniversary of India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. In contrast, there were 108 ads amounting to 48 pages to mark his grandson, Rajiv Gandhi‘s birthday in August. All told, so far…
A tail-end tale in the paper of Kipling & Orwell
Once was a time when editors glared at sports subs who gave innocuous headlines like “Navratilova best on grass”. The Pioneer rather overenthusiastically heralds the arrival of offspinner Ravichandran Ashwin, who bagged nine wickets in his debut Test match at the Feroz Shah Kotla. Hopefully, the offie’s bride-to-be won’t take it amiss; Ashwin is slated…
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…
IJR 