ET’s advice to media: move on, let go

As a wave of earnestness sweeps across newsrooms over the Delhi gangrape, The Economic Times strikes a blow against the emerging political correctness:

“The media, the general press especially, must recognise that neither public purpose nor journalistic remit is being served by what sometimes appears to be a predetermined decision to find a ‘Nirbhaya headline’. Two unwelcome consequences follow whenever the media refuses to let go and move on in such situations. One, the lack of broader relevance of such stories becomes painfully apparent.

“Two, such stories begin, even if unwittingly, to trivialise the memory of the person and invade the privacy of those who loved her most. When such consequences become apparent, and they clearly are now, the media must self-correct . The bigger lesson here, one that the media should always remember , is that public discourse is inherently dynamic and many-layered.

“Changes, shifts, variety and multiplicity are its defining attributes. No single story, no single newsmaker, no single tragedy or triumph can really define public discourse. Therefore, efforts to impose a single narrative – no matter how well-intentioned – will always seem contrived. The sooner the general press realises this, the better it is for everyone and everything, not least the memory of Nirbhaya.”

Read the full editorial: ‘Media mustn’t force headlines’

What sustains our ‘free’ media is government ads

The advertising share of television, radio and digital is growing, while it is shrinking rapidly for newspapers and magazines. That is the bottomline of these graphics from The Economic Times, partially explaining why the media is in its current shape.

Stunningly, the top advertising category in 2012, both in print and on TV, is “social advertisements”, in other words government advertisements extolling the virtues of one or the other social welfare scheme. In 2005, it used to be toilet soaps and two-wheelers.

Read the full story: Trends in ad world

A twist in ET’s masthead ahead of elections

Back in the early 1990s, the Ambanis sought to take on the then market-leader The Economic Times with a newspaper which promised more than business.

It was titled at different times as the the Business & Political Observer (under Prem Shankar Jha‘s editorship) and as the Observer of Business and Politics (under Pritish Nandy). But neither formulation, OBP or BPO, set the newsstands on fire and the paper from India’s biggest business house folded soon.

Now, the Economic Times, which has boasted of strong political coverage from its revamp days under T.N. Ninan in the mid 1980s, has inserted “political” into its masthead ahead of a hectic election season.

Watch FirstPost chat: ET gets political

Meanwhile, Chidambaram on the morning after

The Times of India

The Telegraph, Calcutta

The Times of India, All Editions

Hindustan, New Delhi

Hindustan Times, New Delhi

The Economic Times, All Editions

Kannada Prabha, Bangalore

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..

DNA, Bombay

Fabindia, The Times of India and Trishla Jain

Trishla Jain, the artist-daughter of Times of India bossman Samir Jain, has teamed up with the ethnic store Fabindia for “a limited-edition collection of furniture, furnishings, giftware, ceramics, inspired by the young painter’s art”, and TOI and the group‘s business paper, Economic Times, are leaving no stone unturned to let the world know.

On Monday, page 3 of the Delhi Times supplement carried a quarter-page story on the launch of the line; on Wednesday, ET carried a six-column story; and the events section of the city-specific “Advertorial, Entertainment Promotional Feature” are replete with announcements of Kaleidoscopic Eyes.

The ET report notes helpfully:

“William Bissell, managing director of Fabinida, chanced upon the work of Trishla Jain, 28, at a Delhi art gallery.

“I saw the exuberance and joyous spiritedness in her work which I thought was great fun and Trishla also wanted to make her work accessible to lots of people,” said Bissell, whose father John Bissell founded Fabindia in 1960.

“Jain, a Stanford University graduate and a self-taught artist who started painting at the age of seven, said she had always wanted to create everyday objects inspired by her art. “Fabindia has greatly expanded the technical and aesthetic possibilities of my art. These art objects give my work a utilitarian aspect as well as allow me to reach a larger public.”

Also read: Power of the press belongs to those who own one

ET: a story and a clarification in age of PC

So, how seriously does the Union home minister P. Chidambaram take what the (English) media writes about him?

Very seriously, it seems.

A clarification appearing in The Economic Times provides some evidence:

“A story on the recent Chhattisgarh encounter, ‘No probe into encounter: home secy’ (ET, July 3), said: ‘Last week home minister P. Chidambaram while interacting with the media in the national capital, had patted himself on the back for the encounter.’

“These words were not actually used by the minister. Any offence caused by the use of figurative phrase is regretted.”

For the record, the said encounter which was initially seen as a major victory against, now stands exposed with the majority of the victims turning out to be innocent villagers, many of them below their teens.

How the media viewed Express ‘C’ report

Editorial in Deccan Herald:

“There is reason for deep concern over the report in a national daily, The Indian Express, about an ‘unexpected (and non-notified) movement’ of two army units towards Delhi on the night of January 16-17… To insinuate that General V.K. Singh would attempt a coup to settle scores with the government is downright slanderous. It is an insult to the Indian Army, which has an unblemished record of being an apolitical force. There are enough safeguards in our system to ensure the supremacy of the civilian government over the military.

“It does seem that the newspaper read too much into what was a harmless and routine movement of army units. It should have exercised greater caution and responsibility in reporting the story the way it did.”

Editorial in The Hindu:

“The Indian Express is entirely within its rights to write about a sensitive matter like this, even if its treatment was overblown. Just as it is unfair for anyone to cast aspersions on the Indian Army, it is unfair to question the motives of the journalists who wrote the story.”

Jim Yardley and Hari Kumar in the New York Times:

“The article, splashed across the front page, created a sensation in the Indian news media, stirring a discussion on the country’s all-news channels and on Twitter, where many criticized the Express for, they said, sensationalizing the episode when relations between civilian and military leaders are already fraught….

“Uday Bhaskar, a retired Indian Navy commodore, agreed that mistrust between military and civilian leaders had deepened, partly because of the poisonous political environment in New Delhi, which he said was fueled by an increasingly sensationalistic media.”

Sandeep Bamzai in Mail Today:

“A leading daily may have unintentionally extrapolated from the website report and sensationalised the story. Or it may have got it right because as they tell us the event is dated January 16 this year. But to run a story of this magnitude may well be a disservice to media and to national interest. Because now it is not just the Army chief, but the Armed Forces which will be viewed with suspicion.”

Editorial in the Economic Times:

“The overall fallout of the story is to lower both the army chief and the defence minister in public esteem, as those who bumble into a messy civil-military standoff.”

Manoj Joshi in Mail Today:

“In journalism, there are dividing lines that define when a news report informs, analyses, titillates or sensationalises. But there is just one line which separates a report which serves national interest from one which does disservice to it. The report in a national daily, which talks about the movement of two crack Indian Army units towards New Delhi on the night of January 16, not only makes unwarranted conjectures, but in the process, damages the body politic of the country.”

Editorial in the Business Standard:

“A binary choice should not be forced on this discussion. Talk of a coup is absurd and the newspaper report may be alarmist; yet there are questions that must be addressed…. Anything less than direct engagement with the substance of the Express report would serve to further undermine public trust in the institution.”

News item in M.J. Akbar‘s Sunday Guardian:

“Sources involved in tracking sensitive developments claim that a senior minister of the UPA government was the mastermind of the April 4 front page item in a daily newspaper about a suspected coup attempt. The sources claim that the minister is connected – through his close relative – with the defense procurement lobbies gunning for Chief of Army Staff General V K Singh, and that the decision to “trick the newspaper into running a baseless report was to drain away support for General Singh within the political class”, who could be expected to unite against any effort at creating a Pakistan-style situation in India….

“According to these sources,the minister in question “is well-known to senior journalistic levels of the publication” that ran the coup report. A military source was “surprised that the newspaper in question ran such a story,in view of the high level of competence of its senior staff”, but added that ” a senior minister being the source of the initial information would explain their belief in the truth of the report”.

Also read: Indian Express ‘C’ report: scoop, rehash or spin?

Indian Express stands by its ‘C’ report

Ex-TOI, ET editor E. Raghavan passes away

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.”

TOI readers affluent, not middle class. Mind it.

R. Sukumar, the editor of the business daily Mint, wrote an article recently on the Hindu-Times of India ad war, saying:

“The Times of India has, over the past few years, become a good read … perhaps, driven by the realization that Page 1 of the country’s most-read English newspaper needs to reflect the sentiments of the English-speaking middle class…”

The Times of India, whose business daily The Economic Times competes with Mint in some markets, has taken offence—serious offence!—at this “slur” of its readers being middle-class.

In an unbylined piece on its website, a Times News Network (TNN) correspondent writes:

“TOI has a readership of 7.4 million…. [If] you compare it with the total size of the Indian population, which is approximately 1.2 billion… TOI‘s readers actually constitute 0.6% of the Indian population. And logically speaking, they obviously know English, which is still the language of the elite in India.

“The Asian Development Bank (ADB) stated that India’s middle-class—defined as those able to spend $2 and $20 a day in 2005 purchasing power parity dollars had expanded to about 420 million. By this definition, TOI readers are not only just 0.6% of India’s overall population, they also constitute barely 1.8% of its middle class.

“Interestingly, the report defined those who could spend more than $20 a day as affluent. India has approximately 26 million of them. It’s a safe bet that most of TOI’s readers would fall into this category. So, if at all a word has to be used to describe TOI readers, it should be “affluent”.

“Though perhaps it might be more accurate to dub them the creamiest of layers. Because when you compare their incomes and spending power with the Indian average, it is clear that they form the very peak of the pyramid.

“In any case, it’s the rare top industrialist/CEO/bureaucrat/politician who does not read TOI. Indeed, if you did a dipstick survey, you might struggle to find even one. TOI readers may be relatively small in numbers, but they wield disproportionate economic and political clout.

“They are decision makers, influencers, movers and shakers. Which is why it’s unfair to collectively club them under the omnibus term “middle class”.

Also read: How Times Hindu aimed at Hindu Times but shot DNA

External reading: A battle for the hearts and souls of readers

Times group, Hindustan Lever & Shrijeet Mishra

On Saturday, The Times of India carried on its business pages (top) news of a senior Hindustan Lever executive leaving the company, the second in a year. On Tuesday, The Economic Times followed suit on the front page of the third major exit from HUL in the last 18 months.

Fact: Shrijeet Mishra, one of the HUL worthies mentioned in both stories, joined The Times group as chief operating officer in July last year.

Just.

Images: courtesy The Times of India, The Economic Times