Bangalore and New York: the connection

The word in Bangalore three days ago was that the City’s oldest English newspaper was up for sale and that the possible buyer was a listed newspaper company looking to come to Bangalore.

NDTV Profit quickly put the news on the air, and then faced with denials from the company, equally quickly pulled it off. But the damage had been done, and the word was out.

But such poor reporting is not an Indian speciality alone. CNBC in America reported yesterday that a billionaire investor named Maurice Greenberg was planning to buy the NewYork Times Company.

Immediately, the NYT’s stock price shot through the roof, closing 7.4 per cent up, its biggest jump in six years. But after the markets closed, Greenberg’s spokesman denied he was planning a buy.

As Le Monde said in its marvellously evocative 9/11 headline, “We are all Americans today.”

Journalists v Academics

Should journalists be generalists—writing about all and sundry but giving readers a snapshot of the world without boring the pants out of them? Or should they be like academics, specialising in one or two subjects and writing with gravitas and authority even if the readers gets lost in the thickets of cliches and jargon and? Or should they be, as it was said of Timothy Garton Ash, have “a foot in both graves”? These are old questions, and Hassan Suroor provides some new insights in today’s Hindu. Check it out.