The legendary New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling is credited with the aphorism that “the freedom of the press belongs to those who own one”. Meaning: he who pays the printer calls the shots. The Marathi newspaper Prahaar underlines the truth of that observation like no other. *** The 8-page Prahaar, published from Mumbai, Thane and…
Category Archives: People
Press Council of India invites applications for its 14th term
The Press Council of India (PCI), is inviting applications for the 14th Council with an amended set of rules. Advertisements inviting claims have appeared in at least 18 newspapers across the country. The Press Council is a quasi-judicial body that comprises 28 members, and a chairman, usually a retired Supreme Court judge. The current chairman…
‘The Telegraph’ sports journalist who is now the Chief Justice of Madras High Court
Madras High Court has a new Chief Justice, its 42nd: Justice Sanjib Banerjee. Nothing new there, all high courts have a first among equals. The interesting part comes through two tweets by The Hindu’s legal correspondent, Mohamed Imranullah, who reveals that Justice Banerjee, 60, began his career as a sports journalist with The Telegraph in…
Dr R. Krishnamurthy, the scholar and owner-editor of ‘Dina Malar’, who simplified the Tamil script, departs at 88
Dr R. Krishnamurthy, the former Editor of the Tamil daily newspaper Dina Malar, has passed on, aged 88. A full-page obituary adorns the front page of the paper in today’s issue. Dr Krishnamurthy was its Editor for 40 years. *** Dr Krishnamurthy was also a renowned epigraphist, as an obituary in The Times of India…
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…
#SuperhitGhotala: Arnab Goswami’s 80 MB of WhatsApp chats in 12 tweets, 7 screenshots and 2 YouTube videos
“He who lives by other people’s WhatsApp chats shall be judged by his own WhatsApp chats.”—old jungle saying *** For weeks, after the death of Sushant Singh Rajput, India’s TV news channels feasted on crumbs fed to them—leaked transcripts of WhatsApp conversations of stars and upstarts, hinting darkly at murder, extortion, drugs and sex, all in the run-up to the assembly elections due in…
Kamal Morarka, the politician who launched a newspaper, passes away
Kamal Morarka, the politician and businessman, who co-founded the now-defunct Bombay tabloid newspaper The Afternoon Despatch & Courier, has passed away at age 74. Morarka, a former minister in the Chandrashekhar ministry, helped Behram “Busybee” Contractor to launch ADC at short notice after the latter had walked away from the Evening News of India of…
Vague, arbitrary, unconstitutional, outdated: 9 reasons why journalists should want Section 2(c)(i) of the Contempt of Courts Act to go
The constitutional validity of the Contempt of Courts Act, 1971, has been challenged in the Karnataka High Court by Krishna Prasad, former Editor-in-Chief of Outlook; N. Ram, former Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu and director of The Hindu Publishing Group; Arun Shourie, former Editor of The Indian Express and former Union minister; and Prashant Bhushan, senior…
How Prabhu Chawla, Raj Chengappa and Sachin Kalbag are setting the “bar” higher for younger journalists
For the longest time, journalists and physical fitness could never be used in the same sentence except in jest. Long and irregular working hours, fat and oily samosas, slouching at the desk, smoking, drinking and other vices took their toll on the aspirations of the newsroom Adonis. The self-obsessed millennial lot which frequented gyms rather…
“In journalism, we can be in the heating business, or we can be in the lighting business”: Nicholas Kristof
“In journalism, we can be in the heating business or the lighting business”: @nytimes columnist Nicholas Kristof, who called out card companies for facilitating child porn, enunicates the profession’s core principle on @karaswisher’s superb podcast, Sway: https://t.co/unM8cvxE7S pic.twitter.com/UdsS3NscyG — churumuri (@churumuri) December 25, 2020 Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times opinion columnist who played a…
‘The New Indian Express’ reporter who dug up what the police and CBI tried to bury in the Sister Abhaya rape and murder case
The Sister Abhaya case has finally reached closure with a Catholic priest and a nun being pronounced guilty of the murder of the teenaged nun, 28 years ago, in Kottayam. It was the journalism of Sreejan Balakrishnan (in picture, above), then a reporter with The New Indian Express, that played a pivotal role in giving…
J-POD || Podcast || “Pakistan took foreign journalists to Balakot a month after India’s strike. India is still to take its own journalists to Galwan six months after the Chinese incursion” || Sushant Singh
Exactly six months ago, on the intervening night of June 15-16 this year, the lives of 20 Indian soldiers ended—literally at the hands of the Chinese in the heights of Ladakh. For several weeks, large sections of mainstream media were in denial, dishing out the sarkari view that there was nothing abnormal on the border.…
J-POD || Podcast || “Some journalists are too close to power; coopted and corrupted by money. That and the libel laws”|| former ‘Financial Times’ editor Lionel Barber on why the business press in India sucks
Becoming a digital-first operation, and getting readers to pay for content, is the battlecry on every media manager’s lip across the world. But the Financial Times of London has been there and done that, a long time back, without going click-bait. At the centre of the transformation of the pink newspaper was Lionel Barber, the…
In the Samir Jain era, the ‘Times Group’ has shut down 26 newspapers and magazines. ‘Mumbai Mirror’ was a death foretold.
The pandemic and the economic slump may have given the Times group the cloud cover to pull the trigger on Mumbai Mirror, but the tabloid’s fate was probably decided when it was hived off from The Times of India’s parent company a couple of years ago seven months ago. Launched in 2005 with a Bennett…
“There was still an edge of menace about the man”: ‘Financial Times’ ex-editor Lionel Barber after his second meeting with Narendra Modi
Narendra Modi‘s allergy for unscripted media interrogation is evident from his all-too-few interactions with professional journalists, not propagandists and actors, and the BJP government’s increasing opacity with official data. There are those few minutes with Karan Thapar in 2007 (above) before he felt an urgent need for a glass of water. Then there was the sight of…
Four reasons why more journalists must start podcasts, and not just in English: views you can use from Amit Varma, the ‘Govinda of Podcasting’
A baffling splitscreen stares at journalists, especially middle-aged and experienced journalists, in a post-COVID world ravaged by falling revenues, plunging profits and growing irrelevance. Those who have a job worry about when they might lose it, or how much their salaries will be cut next, or about being rendered obsolete by younger whipper-snappers adept…
‘Biblio’, the books’ magazine launched by three ex-TOI intellectuals, with a colon in its masthead, turns 25
Biblio, the little magazine devoted to books, founded by three former staffers of The Times of India, has turned 25, and the Hindustan Times has a feature on it. Biblio was founded by Dileep Padgaonkar, Arvind Narain Das and Darryl D’Monte in 1995 shortly after they left the paper as it dumbed down to managers…
‘Sub ka haath’: A typo in ‘The Indian Express’ that is a textbook definition of a ‘Freudian Slip’ in l’affaire M.J. Akbar
In the mid-1980s, when it still saw itself as a newspaper in the news business, The Times of India launched a annual contest for advertisements created by advertisers and agencies not for profit but in service of the public. The shortlisted entries—on keeping families small, streets clean, etc—were published in a separate pullout, along with…
Seven heart-warming tweets of HuffPost India staffers to understand what Indian journalism has lost
The closure of an organisation, the loss of a job, brings out the worst in employees. As uncertainty over the future looms, all the pent-up workplace frustrations against owners, bosses, managers and co-workers burst forth in a veritable torrent. In Delhi, where the city’s cottage industry, politics, intersects with everything, newsroom politics can rival political…
Salman Ravi, the BBC Hindi reporter who gifted his shoes to a barefoot migrant, is honoured with an Asian Media Award
Remember the BBC Hindi reporter who lent his shoes to a migrant worker walking home barefoot after his footwear had snapped along the way, at the height of the COVID lockdown in May? Well, the journalist has been recognissd for his humanitarian gesture. The reporter, Salman Ravi, has been given an Asian Media Award in…
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