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 Expresseditor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta) are pure-play journalists.
The chairman of the press council of India, Justice Markandey Katju, is a new entry at No. 50, just as Gupta is at No. 45, Hindustan Times bosswoman Shobhana Bhartia at No. 39 and Star India CEO Uday Shankar at No. 26.
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No. 1: Mukesh Ambani, chairman, Reliance Industries and “virtual owner” of TV18 (up from No. 3 in 2012)
No. 4: Kumaramangalam Birla, chairman Aditya Birla group, and 27.5% stake holder in Living Media (up from No. 5): “sings Hindi film songs, although only in close family circles”
No. 28: Kalanidhi Maran, chairman and MD of Sun Group (up from 49 last year)
No. 31: Mahendra Mohan Gupta and Sanjay Gupta, chairman and CEO, Dainik Jagran (No. 31 last year)
No. 35: Subhash Chandra, chairman, Zee television and DNA (No. 35 last year)
No. 39: Shobhana Bhartia, chairman and editorial director, HT Media (new entry): Her home in Friends Colony (West) in Delhi was acquired from the erstwhile royal family of Jind.
No. 50: Justice Markandey Katju, chairman, press council of India (new entry): The Ph.D. in Sanskrit asked Lucknow lawyer S.K. Kalia who entred his court, ‘Ab tera kya hoga Kalia‘?
There is something about the Union budget, a dreadfully dreary two-hour affair (interspersed with cliches and couplets that owe their origin to the origins of the respective finance minister) that unleashes the wildest, orgiastic spirits in Indian print newsrooms—and art cubicles.
The morning after, readers are greeted to the marvels of PhotoShop, some to good effect, most not, many quite offensive.
Take your pick from the 2013 edition—courtesy The Times of India, The Telegraph, Hindustan Times, Hindustan, The Economic Times—in which artists manage to do the finance minister P. Chidambaram what most reporters and editors would like to but will never be able to.
Thankfully, DNA gets it.
Its lead photograph on page one has jokers from a circus catching the budget proceedings on a TV screens..
Aditya Sinha, the editor-in-chief of the Bombay newspaper DNA has resigned, within weeks of former Times of India response chief Bhaskar Das joining the Zee group, which now wholly owns the paper. (Sinha’s departure had been preceded by the exit of K.U Rao, the long-serving publisher of DNA.)
Coming at a time when the Zee group is involved in a messy battle with Jindal Steel, with two of the television channel’s editors behind bars for alleged extortion and the group’s own Subhash Chandra and his son Punit Goenka being interrogated, Sinha’s exit has set tongues wagging.
On his microblog account, Sinha has tweeted that he left the paper he edited for two years to concentrate on writing novels. But in an interview with the media website MxM, he leaves little to the imagination as to why he moved on (update: an inference since denied by Sinha).
On the timing of his resignation: “It could have been done at some other time, but why should I follow other people’s timelines?”
On his replacement: “Ravi Joshi, the recently appointed Mumbai resident editor, suddenly finds himself incharge. Bhaskar Das may find an alternative if he can convince someone from his old place of employment to join.”
On DNA‘s upcoming redesign: “The paper is going through a slight redesign because Bhaskar Das wants to change the look-and-feel of the paper to a template that is familiar to us all. He is keen on an edit page, so I guess my departure strengthens his hands in some ways.”
On his lowpoints as editor: “The only lows were realizing that people working in the company did not even read your newspaper! It shows you that most non-journalists in the media industry have zero passion for their jobs.”
The perils of cross-media ownership are obvious and the Bombay daily DNAdemonstrates it in ample measure today on its business pages.
The news-you-can-use story is ostensibly aimed at empowering TV viewers on the various options before them as the country’s four metros go digital from July 1. It lists the comparative advantages of Tata Sky, Airtel and Videocon D2H settop boxes.
But the “news” item carries what amounts to an advertisement for Dish TV, which costs the least, which allows unlimited recording, and which of course is owned by Subhash Chandra, who started DNA in collaboration with Dainik Bhaskar but is now said to be inching closer to taking complete charge.
On the day the world economy was in a tailspin and the rupee was tanking, much of the media led with a spat between Shah Rukh Khan and a security guard at the Wankhede stadium in Bombay.
Much of the blame for this warped worldview rests with the Bombay media, says DNA editor-in-chief Aditya Sinha:
“Whereas everyone moans about how Delhi runs things, it is actually Mumbai which sets the agenda, and nowhere is this more manifest than in the media…. after all, this is where the media began getting corporatized, where news became a commodity, and appeal to the lowest common denominator became a badge of honour.
“To put it in perspective, when American matinee idol George Clooney recently hosted a fund-raiser for President Barack Obama — a legitimate political event — the serious US news outlets gave it prominence, but did not make it lead….
“You could claim that the traditional media is booming in India and not in the US, but it is also true that more innovation, both in areas of content and revenue, is happening over there rather than right here.”
“There was a telephone call from my father, who lives abroad, a few days ago. He wanted to know if it was true that the Army had planned to attack Delhi back in January, as reported in The Indian Express. Don’t worry, I said, no such thing. If the Army Chief had planned a coup to ensure he spent another year in office, then he wouldn’t have filed a petition on his date of birth in the Supreme Court.
“When we rang off, it seemed that there must be many ordinary Indians far and near who were scared by this story. What a shame. And the author tried to camouflage the cynical timing of the story (immediately after the government’s ugly spat with the Army Chief) by saying the story took 11 weeks to materialise.
“That would be credible if the story was loaded with data or fieldwork, like a story on child malnutrition in Maharashtra, for instance; it wasn’t. Even an RTI application gets answered in less time (though no RTI request would have generated such a cock-and-bull story).
“At the end of the day, a well-regarded journalist (he reported on the Nellie massacre in Assam nearly 30 years ago) was used by a cynical government. Guess who emerged from this looking diminished….”
“Too many editors in India (mostly the post-superannuation lot) who would never dare publish irreverence because they believe themselves to be part of the ruling class, and that it is their job to steer the country…. [Here] the editor not only values his friendship with the powerful over his devotion to his profession, but never hesitates to make himself the centre of the story.
“Compare men of letters (like Kingsley Amis and Edmund Wilson) with those in India who today have no ideology other than the service of power. Instead of the watchdog of democracy they would rather be the lapdog of crony capitalism.”
A full-page advertisement on the back page of the Bombay newspaper, DNA, hitting out at you-know-who:
From luring the brands with incentives to no-escape clauses in their advertising contracts, the industry is stooping to newer lows for gaining advertising revenue. However, at DNA, we still hold a torch to some old-fashioned traditional values. Our principles guide us.
# We have no qualms if you choose to advertise in other publications along with DNA.
# You are free to decide how much of your communication budget you want to spend with us.
# With whom do you want to advertise first is absolutely your call.
# There is no clause to lock-in ads with us for any particular duration of time.
# The ownership pattern of your company is exclusively your domain and is most sacrosanct to us. We are not going to barter the ad space in DNA for stakes in your company’s ownership.
sans serif records with deep regret the passing away of Ethiraj Raghavan, an Indian Express stringer who rose to be Editor of the largest selling Kannada daily newspaper, Vijaya Karnataka, in Bangalore on Saturday. He was 61 years old, and is survived his wife Kumuda and their daughter Swathi.
After stints with the Express in Mysore, Bangalore and New Delhi, E. Raghavan, as his byline went, joined the newly launched The Times in Bangalore in 1984.
That newspaper launched with a truncated title to circumvent labour laws in pre-liberalised India later became The Times of India. He later came its resident editor. In the mid 1990s, he shifted next door to be resident editor of The Economic Times, Bangalore, and eventually for all the southern editions of ET, till his retirement three years ago.
After a short spell as editorial consultant to DNA, Bangalore, Raaaa-gha-van (as he sonorously pronounced his name on the phone) returned to The Times group, first as consulting editor to Vijaya Next, a weekly Kannada newspaper launched by TOI, and then as editor of Vijaya Karnataka, that had been acquired by ToI six years ago.
Raghavan was co-author with the academic James Manor, of Broadening and Deepening of Democracy, a study of Karnataka politics.
An obituary in The Times of India, Bangalore, captures the essence of the man:
“You have got to get the drill right… Then things will naturally fall into place.”
That was Raghavan’s standard line on a big news day.
He would pump himself with an extra mug of coffee and call the reporters and the desk into a huddle. Every small news deveopment would be examined.
“Reporters need to overreact. The desk needs to see it in balance.”
# “Arnab Goswami is the only person in the country to whom every Indian is answerable.
# “Our politicians, at any rate, hold him in higher regard than Parliament. No matter how provocative the questions posed to them, they won’t dream of staging a walk-out from Arnab’s chambers like they do every 13 minutes in the Lok Sabha.”
# “Arnab has mastered the art of being outraged. He is the only person I know who can be more outraged than outrage itself. And that is a talent that our current crop of politicians sorely lack. Nothing fazes them.”
The only contender on the horizon is Rajnikanth.
“While Rajini might vaporise Arnab with his laughter, Arnab might pre-empt it by unleashing on Rajini his finger-wagging verbiage of infinite outrage. In which case, Rajini, whose compassionate heart melts at even the tiniest, teeny weenie injustice, would collapse instantly into a heap of sand, and Arnab would emerge the winner. But it would be a close call.”
It is never a pretty sight when a giant wakes up after a nice, long slumber.
After snoring through the thinly veiled insinuations of The Times of India that it was a sleeping inducing newspaper, The Hindu has woken up with a jolt through three TV, super-aggressive commercials that are already airing on television channels in the South.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that while the young and ignorant reader of The Times of India fed on the 5Fs—fun, frolic, froth, fashion, and fornication—-is clearly its target, The Hindu‘s TVCs seem like a direct assault on ads issued by The Times‘ competitor in Bombay, DNA, for its city supplement, After Hours, last year.
Worse, as longtime media watchers will remember, Stay Ahead Of The Times is a cliche as punchline which several of Times‘ competitors have used, including Hindustan Times in Delhi in the mid 1990s.
