It ain’t so cute when hunters are hunted, is it?

“This is Sunidhi reporting! It’s Dr Prannoy Roy. He just got down from his Merc close to Khan Market. I can’t believe my luck. The aging ‘Father of Indian television’ is still so handsome! He has started walking towards Khan Market. Prannoy’s car is driving past the market. Wait! What do I see? A sweet little thing wearing a scarf and goggles has just got down around 100 metres past the market, crossed over to the other side, and is now walking  back. My God! Wait till you hear this! The curvaceious beauty waved to Prannoy who is already there waiting for her. They have gone inside. This is exciting stuff. A story is breaking right here! Over to you.”

Studio anchor: “It definitely is! Who is this mystery girl? Can you describe her to our viewers?”

Reporter:”It is already dark here and you know how the streetlights near Khan Market are!! She is wearing a pair of Levi’s Jeans and a Versace blue top. She looks like the Delhi socialite who was seen with the Roys last New Year Party. I am not sure. It’s possible she could be the Bengali Bollywood heroine. Only she has the guts to wave from a distance in public.”

Studio anchor: “Keep a watch and get back if you see anything interesting.”

After a few hours…

“Sunidhi again from the Sheraton parking lot. They have just entered the coffee shop. Still I can’t make out who she is. She is wearing a cashmere shawl now. She also looks like Maharani Gayatri Devi’s grand daughter- I am not sure though.”

Studio anchor: “Get the dope on all the three girls and check them out. Must beat other channels and splash it at 9 pm headlines.”

Reporter:”Okay. Meanwhile you can go ahead and splash it along. You can interpose some of Dr. PR ‘s earlier shots with coffee shop pictures and run it.”

Studio anchor:”We are already on air with Breaking News. Get us juicy stuff and some close-up shots.”

***

E.R. RAMACHANDRAN writes: How will this “juicy story” be if it is run, say on CNN-IBN and Times Now all day with headlines screaming ‘Father of Indian TV sowing wild oats’, interspersed with shots of his residence and family?

How will it sound if Vinod Mehta, Suhel Seth and Ramachandra Guha sit around in their Sunday best discussing it threadbare with Rajdeep Sardesai in ’Face the Nation’?

Will Roy & Co at least now understand how Rajesh Talwar and family felt when supposedly juicy details of the Aarushi-Hemraj murder were tapped by every half hour, for days and nights on end, with a scurrilous mixture of news, innuendo and insinuation?

Prannoy Roy’s name here is only for effect, and no offence is meant. Change it to Rajdeep Sardesai and run it on NDTV and Headlines Today. Or change it to Arnab Goswami walk and splash it on NDTV and Zee TV. The basic thrust of this fictitious story remains the same.

How will Radhika Roy or Sagarika Ghose feel if their husbands are tailed and ‘Breaking News’ stories made up and splashed in a hurry? Real and mostly imaginary tidbits discussed by a ‘panel of studio experts’?

Get the picture, gentlemen?

That is what is happening every hour by the hour for days and weeks at a stretch on Indian TV channels. You wear your TRPs on your sleeve and to get the magic numbers a combination of sex, sleaze, innuendo, trespassing, concoction is being whipped up.

When you are caught in the act of hurting innocent citizens, there’s not even an apology. There is just more discussion when the buck is passed on to the police bungling the case.

Is this journalism?

Why are the most prominent TV journalists in the country involved mostly in scoops and sensation-mongering? Have our TV whiz kids not heard of Darfur and Zimbabwe? Why are we always talking cinema, cricket and crime?

Can’t they come out with a couple of solutions for the Kashmir problem or the Maoist problem to solve it once and for all? Can’t they take up weightier issues of inflation and price rise that is affecting the common man? Etcetera.

Indian television are mostly busy with froth-in–mouth journalism chasing stars while the ordinary people are facing destiny’s cruel fate. Hunting has become a vicarious national game transgressing all borders of decency.

How would it be if the channel heads were the Hunted instead of being the Hunter? If their family members were hounded everywhere and life made impossible for them to live?

***

The real story behind the juicy story:

When the rookie correspondent finally got the juicy stuff, it wasn’t even overnight sadaa hua dal. Prannoy Roy was going to Khan Market to buy some household stuff. The new slipper of his cousin, , who was with him, was rubbing against her toe-nail causing discomfort and she drove past to see if it could be mended temporarily. Unfortunately the mochi who sits near Khan Market had packed off for the day and she walked back to Khan Market to meet Prannoy! They went to coffee shop for a bite. End of story.

Also read: Should the media apologise?

Give them what they want, even if it’s rubbish?

T.C.A. Srinivasa-Raghavan in Business Standard:

“The media business is the only one where, in the standard demand function comprising price, quality and taste, the last-mentioned plays the dominent role (after price which is, of course, always important).

“If consumer taste is predisposed towards rotten quality, should what constitutes good quality be re-examined? This, I think, is the central problem confronting the Indian media, where consumer preferences point, in the limit, only to the production of rubbish.”

Read the full column: The economics of bad media

Award for reporting on victims of armed violence

The Press Institute of India and the International Committee of the Red Cross have announced the creation of the PII-ICRC awards for reporting on the fate of victims in situations of armed violence.

The article, or a series of articles on a single theme, should have been published in an Indian national or regional newspaper or magazine in any Indian language (with translation) or English.

Entries may be sent to editor.pii@gmail.com or posted to Editor, Press Institute of India, RIND Premises, Second Main Road, CPT Taramani Campus, Madras – 600 113 on or before August 30. Phone 044-22542344 for further details.

Three cash prizes will be awarded and presented in the last quarter of 2008 in New Delhi.

How the crude oil price spike spooked the media

Who’s to blame for the mounting crude oil prices? Oil producing countries? India and China for their voracious appetite? Speculators wanting to make a quick buck or ten?

In the latest episode of its media showThe Listening Post, hosted by Richard Gizbert, Al Jazeera English throws light on how the global media has failed to come to grips with a difficult but important issue.

Is India ready for a New Yorker style magazine?

Indian newspapers, television, magazines all seem to have unanimously decided that the attention span of the time-strapped reader and viewer has shrunk so much that stories should end before they begin.

So, is there place for long-form journalism, where every reporter and writer is potentially a short story writer, which Robert Benchley described magnificently in a 1925 New Yorker essay: “Up the dark stairs in a shabby house plodded a bent, weary figure”?

Yes, says Sandipan Deb, the editorial head of the newly launched magazine division of the Rs 14,000 crore RPG group which aims to bring out six magazines by 2010. The first one is due out in October this year, and Deb gives Mint a snapshot of what the flagship is going to look like:

“It’ll be a cross between the Time magazine and The New Yorker. The brief is to bring out a weekly free-thinking magazine. Our target audience is the discerning reader, who is well travelled and well-read, who enjoys reading the best global publications, and has the time and taste for good reading.”

Read the full interview here: ‘There are no second chances in publication’

Photograph: courtesy Mint

All the business news that’s fit to be printed

Existing business papers are launching Hindi editions (Economic Times, Business Standard). Existing English dailies are launching business papers (Finance Chronicle from Deccan Chronicle). Hindi dailies are launching English papers (DNA from Dainik Bhaskar). New papers are selling their business sections as separate papers (DNA Money). Hindi dailies are planning Hindi business dailies (Dainik Jagran with Network 18). Foreign groups are planning Indian editions (Financial Times from Pearson, Forbes, Fortune).

It’s all happening in India. Reasons: the economic boom, growing literacy, a burgeoning market.

“The overall globalization, the growing interest in India, and the sheer size of the India market is driving the foreign media interest in India. This is no different from players from any other industry. What all the global publications are probably looking for is to get an increasing mind share of the large Indian middle class, which is becoming [more and more] global,” Ravi Bapna, a professor and executive director of the Centre for Information Technology and the Networked Economy at the Hyderabad-based Indian School of Business, tells Knowledge@Wharton.

Read the full story: Where Print still makes sense

Who is giving how much in the Karnataka polls

All the electronic voting machines have been sealed in the Karnataka Elections—and so are the fates of all the opinion polls, exit polls, pre-poll surveys, post-poll surveys, and table-top surveys. This, then, is how it all looks, as projected by newspapers, magazines and TV stations.

Even Al Qaida can’t stand frivolous journalism

Al Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri has kindly “answered” web questions in The New Yorker through the good offices of Andy Borowitz.

A magazine journalist in Manhattan is among those who get lucky.

Stacy in Manhattan asks: I am a journalist for the US publication Tiger Beat. When I heard you would be taking Web questions, I was like OMG, I have totes to write to him!!! Here are three questions we’re asking celebrities this month:

1. If you could be any character on “Gossip Girl,” who would you be?
2. Who would be a better friend, Lauren on “The Hills” or Ashley Tisdale in “High School Musical”?
3. Who is hotter, Zac Efron or Joe Jonas? (LOL)

Ayman al-Zawahiri writes: “May you and everyone at your magazine burn in Hell.”

Read the other questions and answers: Ask the Jihadist

Wife-beater? Freeloader? Menace to society?

Restaurants are now suing newspapers for bad reviews claiming “defamation” and loss of business. But how should authors respond to bad reviews? Should they just be thankful for the publicity? Should they get into a slanging match with the reviewer and hope for the best?

Should they, as Shobhaa De, the author of “Superstar India” has done, get personal?

De’s latest book has got a poor review in India’s leading English magazines, India Today and Outlook. India Today’s reviewer tore into the book calling it “the worst thing she has written” and said its subtitle “From Incredible to Unstoppable” made him wonder if it was commissioned by the ministry of tourism. Outlook’s reviewer called it “quite mediocre” and said it read like a “teenager’s diary”. Etcetera.

But De, former editor of the film magazine Stardust (and the shortlived Celebrity), and the woman who has won titles such as Sultana of Scuttlebutt and “Maharani of Muck” with aplomb, goes below the belt in response.

In an interview with Arathi Menon of Deccan Herald today, De is asked of the unkind reviews that have greeted the book in India. Her response?

“The particular review you are referring to (in a leading magazine) is a personal attack on me. The person who wrote it is a wife-beater; a freeloader; a frustrated has-been and a menace to society. There are other ratings that have already put the book on the best-seller list. So do I really care about that interview?”

As the pioneer of bitchy page 3 journalism, Shobhaa De of course doesn’t name the reviewer or the publication, but if the reviewer/s had given a good review of the book, would De have been enlightening the world with such vengeance in public?

Is the reviewer’s past or present relevant to the debate at all? Or should she be answering the criticism of the reviewer?

Photograph: cortesy Newsline, Pakistan

Read the India Today review here: De turns into night

Read Shobhaa De’s interview here: 60 years young

Also read: Singer Sonu Nigam accuses reviewer Subhash K. Jha of “sexual assault”

Vinod Mehta: Seven rules for young journalists

Vinod Mehta, editor-in-chief of Outlook magazine, delivered the convocation address at the Indian Institute of Journalism & New Media (IIJNM) in Bangalore on 3 May 2008, and laid out the ground rules for the graduating Class of 2008.

1) Be a professional journalist: Have a sense of mission and be proud to say your a journo.

2) Don’t be an intellectual eunuch: don’t be biased but don’t be afraid of holding a point of view.

3) Learn to exercise control over your writing whether you are a print journalist or a television journalist.

4) Be a sceptic, not a cynic: Do not be afraid to question, but do not try to doubt everything.

5) Stay away from corruption: Refuse blandishments for money, for access, for sources.

6) Avoid politicians: Know them but don’t be friendly. Don’t become buddies with them.

7) Avoid PR and ad men: Meet them, intereact with them but don’t be at their beck and call.