News

6 April 2004

Language dailies posing threat to English media

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...

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2 April 2004

Revamped Maharashtra Herald to hit stands on April 5

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...

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1 April 2004

Trial and Error?

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...

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1 April 2004

No News Is Good News

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...

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1 April 2004

Ephemera

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...

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1 April 2004

In the Beginning

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...

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23 March 2004

Political satire: A new fad on television...

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...

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21 March 2004

Ifra helps Indian newspapers standardize printing profiles

A group of eight Indian newspapers are participating in an 18-month project aimed at creating common printing standards among them. Ifra, the worldwide publishers’ association, is conducting the project. The goal is to help the newspapers in India improve their color quality while harmonizing their printing profiles, which are what the page designers use to tell the printers what to print. The...

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13 March 2004

Express campaign to motivate youngsters to cast their votes

The Indian Express group has initiated the ‘Black Ink on your Nail’ campaign to motivate and mobilise today’s youth to cast their vote. This two month long mammoth campaign will run across nine cities in India. The campaign is aimed at educating youngsters about their right to choose their representative and the processes involved during elections. It will attempt to engage them in a discussion...

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10 March 2004

Vaarttha launches three new editions; touches 19

On the occasion of Women's Day, that is, March 8, Vaarttha, the No 2 daily in Andhra Pradesh, launched three new editions from Guntur, Srikakulam and Tadepalliguddam - located along the coast of the Bay of Bengal - taking its total tally to 19 editions. The objective, as chief executive officer of Vaarttha, KRK Prasad states, is to increase its spread in the region and cater to every district...

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