2005-2014

While the world's largest democracy is in the midst of elections, there are 72 other nations around the world that have already hit or would soon be hitting the election trail this year. In fact, 2004 can easily be called the Year of the Elections. While Indian news and current affairs channels have already come up with innovative ways of keeping viewers glued to television sets during the Lok...

The tremor of battle between Hindustan Times and The Times of India will soon be felt in Mumbai too. Hindustan Times is marching towards the nation's commercial capital with carefully calibrated strategic plans that would undoubtedly have a long-term effect in both the Mumbai and Delhi markets. Preparations for the much-anticipated clash have already begun at Hindustan Times, in fact. While the...

It's been a topic that has elicited a fair amount of discussion in publishing circles for a while now, but the Times Group had been characteristically tightlipped about it. Now, finally, the Indian media conglomerate has officially announced its 50:50 JV partnership with electronic media giant British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which has a considerable stake in the publishing business as well...

The exponential growth of the language media in the past few years has made media planners to take them into consideration while selecting medium for publicity. Not only have there been additions in the number of publications, language dailies have shown a formidable increase in the readership and circulation, which is much higher than the English counterparts. According to the latest round of IRS...

Five months after being acquired by the Sakal Group of Newspapers, Maharashtra Herald, the oldest English daily in Pune, will be relaunched in a new avatar on April 5. The broadsheet, which had a miniscule circulation (just about 5,000 copies) prior to its acquisition on November 20, 2003, will see a print run in excess of 40,000 copies on relaunch, says Abhijit Pawar, joint managing director...

At 4 a.m. in the January freeze of the Rocky Mountains, producers and hard-luck interns started scraping the snow off the two-story platforms for the camera crews. Soon reporters bundled in parkas scrambled from the warmth of rented mobile homes to shiver in the cold, waiting to report that in just a few hours Kobe Bryant would stroll into the Eagle County Courthouse for another pretrial hearing...

I once worked for a newspaper that covered a place where nothing ever happened. Or so I thought. The paper was called the Suburban Trib. It was born in 1967 and died in 1985 when its parent, the Chicago Tribune, shut it down and posted guards at the doors. We covered the suburbs. We were young and eager and bored beyond all imagining. Most of us did not own homes or have children or in any way...

As Iain Calder tells it triumphantly in The Untold Story, his memoir of thirty-three years at America’s best-selling supermarket tabloid, most of them at its helm, "The National Enquirer changed the face of American journalism." That journalism, which in his analysis had gotten "dull and gray," suddenly began to boil under the competitive pressures of the Enquirer. The press’s purview widened from...

For many journalists, the proper relationship between government and the news media begins and ends with the First Amendment’s charge that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." In this view, government is an adversary of the press – a source of censorship at worst, corruption and disinformation at best. Paul Starr’s profound and illuminating The...

Political satire, it appears, is the flavour of the month on news television. Be it Aaj Tak, STAR News or ZEE News, news channels are falling over one another to rope in popular actors and comedians to add eyeballs and boost their TVRs. While Aaj Tak has inked a deal with mimic and anchor Javed Jaffrey for its show JBC (Javed Broadcasting Corporation), STAR News has brought in gag-bag Shekhar...