2005-2014

In the early summer of 1995, in a cramped, cluttered newsstand in Greenwich Village, I purchased my first copy of Lingua Franca: The Review of Academic Life. The headline grabbed me: "Inventing Wills: How an Ex-Jesuit, Sometime Professor Became America's Heavyweight Know-It-All." I was intrigued that Lingua Franca's writer, Adam Begley, had somehow convinced the brilliant and irascible Garry Wills...

GOOD WORK: WHEN EXCELLENCE AND ETHICS MEET By Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, William Damon, and Howard Gardner Basic Books 288 pages. $26.00 This intriguing book offers important insights for journalists, who all too often wrap themselves in their own cocoons, reveling in a specialness that sets them apart from other professionals. In an unusual collaboration that has lasted for five years and promises...

In a letter to Chief Minister of Karnataka State S.M. Krishna, RSF has asked to be informed of the exact reasons for the detention of a journalist named Sivasubramanian, who has been accused of supporting the bandit Veerappan. RSF fears that the journalist has been mistreated by the police in order to obtain a confession. "If Sivasubramanian's arrest is tied to his professional activities, we ask...

As the Indian parliament examines the Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance (POTO), RSF has sent a letter to Federal Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani, in which the organisation expresses its concerns about the bill's potential consequences for press freedom. "Sentencing a journalist to five years' imprisonment because he is suspected of not transmitting information about a 'terrorist' to the...

Suddenly the regional press has woken up to the virtues of tying up. Recently Chennai-based The Hindu extended its alliance with Andhra Pradesh-based Eenadu to offer advertisers greater reach and entered another pact with the Kannada daily Udayavani in Karnataka. The all-India circulation of The Hindu is 8.69 lakh, of which AP constitutes 2.13 lakh. According to the ABC figures for January-June...

(Continued from yesterday.) The virtual doesn't suspend the real rules of business. It destroys them. For decades, any media was the preserve of those who produced it, and more importantly, those who distributed it. Along came the Internet. Anybody could create. Download. And distribute. The whole edifice of limited supply, on which complex media empires had been built, would not work on the net...

In a world where everything is free, how do you sell? It's the challenge that sites that wish to become pay are grappling with. Last month, the Indore-based Hindi daily Naidunia, partly owned by Vinay Chhajlani of the Webdunia Network, began to charge a Rs 1,000 per year subscription fee. One more to join the bandwagon of the "sell-content-make-money" brigade was the Living Media group, that has...

Chennai-based The Hindu is getting aggressive on the marketing front. It has quietly initiated a three-pronged action plan. Earlier this month it kicked off the second phase of its alliance with Andhra Pradesh-based Eenadu to offer advertisers extended reach. Second, it has entered into a similar pact with Kannada daily Udayavani in Karnataka. And third, to provide better coverage in these markets...

Liberalisation has had many effects. Not the least, an upwardly mobile middle class, that aspires to international standards. It is a market that media companies have found fertile. Take Outlook Traveller, a full-fledged magazine looking to tap this market, or the feature pages devoted to hotels and travel in all major newspapers, and shows like Style South Asia on CNN, and Trend Mill on CNBC...

Since violence erupted in Israel and the Occupied Territories in late September, Palestinian radio and television have covered events with their own unique spin. On the government-run Voice of Palestine, Palestinians who die in clashes are described as "martyrs" and funerals are covered intensively. Israel, meanwhile, is deemed "wicked," and Prime Minister Ehud Barak is routinely referred to as a...