2005-2014

Yesterday's scheduled contempt of court case against journalist Vineet Narain has been postponed due to violence in Jammu and Kashmir State, the trial venue. It is not known when the next hearing will be held. Narain is the founding editor of the New Delhi­-based investigative journal Kalchakra. He faces contempt charges based on a December 16, 2000, Kalchakra article in which Narain alleged that...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply concerned about the safety of journalist Vineet Narain, whose contempt of court trial has been abruptly moved up to August 9. It was originally scheduled for September 3. Narain is the founding editor of the New Delhi-based investigative journal Kalchakra. He faces contempt of court charges in Jammu and Kashmir State, based on a December 16...

Around this time last year, Star News at Nine, a half-hour English news bulletin produced by New Delhi Television (NDTV) was moved from Star Plus to Star World. It was a step towards lending a total Hindi feel to Star Plus, and a more local feel to its estranged cousin Star World. While the first channel has rewritten success in Indian television history, Star World, which was targeted at the...

IN TV, the cable channel of IndusInd Entertainment Ltd (IEL), is in the process of formalising a contract for the supply of India-specific news content to Singapore-based Channel News Asia. "We had begun supplying content quite some time back but we will be coming out with a formal announcement to the effect some time soon," disclosed Rajiv K Bajaj, president, IEL. He also added that his company...

Four days back, Dainik Bhaskar, the Bhopal-based, 19-edition newspaper chain, relaunched its Bilaspur edition in Chhatisgarh. It replaced the old printing machinery, improved the production quality of the paper and added a four-page colour supplement on the city. But not before its survey team visited a claimed 20,000 households in Bilaspur city and converted over 9,000 of them to subscribe to the...

Jonathan Z. Larsen worked at Time magazine as an editor and correspondent from 1965 to 1973, was editor of New Times from 1974 to 1978, when the magazine died, and The Village Voice from 1989 to 1994. He has written for New York magazine, Manhattan Inc., and New England Monthly, as well as CJR. The press over the last forty years has been on a long roller coaster ride, at least in terms of quality...

The sins of the press -- and they were plentiful -- hardly went unnoticed in the early decades of the last century. The early critics -- Will Irwin, Walter Lippmann, Upton Sinclair, and George Seldes -- were biting, outrageous, irreverent, setting a standard of readability that later critics have been hard pressed to match. In 1911, Will Irwin, a former newspaper reporter and editor of McClure's...

Back in August, when I agreed to write a piece on the future of journalism, I figured that peering ahead to explore where we're going wouldn't be terribly hard for a journalism historian like me who has spent a lot of time peering back to explore where we've been. So much seemed predictable. More media companies would merge or expand, leading to more random acts of synergy and more blatant concern...

In a 17 May 2001 letter to Indian Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani, CPJ expressed its dismay over last week's brutal attack against journalists in Kashmir by members of India's Border Security Force (BSF). The organisation is, however, encouraged by the apparently swift and thorough BSF investigation, and hopes that it will yield concrete results. On 10 May, a group of seventeen journalists were...

Late last month, the Mumbai-based Chitralekha Group forged a unique alliance with the Maharashtra-centric Deshdoot group of publications. The Nashik and Shrirampur editions of the Marathi daily, Deshdoot, began carrying the weekly magazine, Chitralekha Marathi, on Sundays, virtually free of cost to the reader. Three weeks later, Chitralekha is poised to double its sales, claimedly, along with...