News

As a one-man bureau covering a county outpost for Greensboro's News & Record, Ethan Feinsilver was always looking for The Story. He was willing to grind out dailies, but he came to the North Carolina paper to tackle more ambitious things, stories with some depth. He thought he found one in a press release from a local community college. The release announced a continuing education course, "North...

The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the shooting of Zafar Iqbal, a journalist for the Srinigar, Kashmir-based English-language daily Kashmir Images. Iqbal, who was shot by three unidentified assailants this afternoon, was seriously injured and is currently in the hospital in stable condition, according to journalists in Kashmir and Indian news reports. At about 3:00 p.m., three gunmen...

Will radio cut into print? Conventional wisdom is that it will. But, as with most questions that conventional wisdom tries to answer, the truth is a bit more complex. First, the costs involved. For example, for a one-time insertion in The Times of India, Mumbai edition, the cost is Rs 1,600 per cc. A 52-cc ad works out to Rs 83,200. And TV rates are astronomical. According to STAR India, a 30...

The average Mumbaikar has a lot of time to read. The city is the financial capital of India, and millions of people are on the move every hour. It is a city with a life that no other Indian city has - hectic, even frenzied. Yet, ironically, it is a city where a lot of people have a lot of time to read. In the Colaba cafes sipping strawberry- or mango-flavoured iced teas, or swilling generous jugs...

It's the dark horse in the battle for FM radio in Mumbai. It does not have the cross-media presence or heavy nationwide spread that Times Group's Radio Mirchi is counting on. It does not have the multi-media spread that Go 92.5, the FM radio foray of Mid-Day Multimedia, is hoping to bank on. What it has is programming, an advertising budget of Rs 1 crore, licenses for Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai...

If you are in the radio business, then this was one hectic week. The week saw the launch of WIN 94.6, a private 24-hour FM station, on April 29 by Millennium Broadcast. Entertainment Network India Ltd, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bennett, Coleman & Company, formally launched Radio Mirchi in Pune on Wednesday. The station debuted in Mumbai last week. As the stations ease into the new FM radio...

Some weeks ago television channels were hit with a rather glitzy advertising campaign with models sashaying down the ramp reading the new-look Sunday edition of The Indian Express. According to the company, the advertising blitz has seen initial success, and circulation figures of The Sunday Express have gone up. The question is: Will this help it overcome the formidable challenges that have...

The preamble to the Constitution says one of its purposes is to "provide for the common defense." Its First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press. Those goals are not contradictory, but there are times – especially times of war – when they tug in opposite directions. This is an instructive point for evaluating whether journalists have enjoyed sufficient access to the war on terrorism. The...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) today sent a letter of inquiry to Dr. Vishnu Kant Shastri, governor of Uttar Pradesh State, India, requesting information about the April 14 death of journalist Paritosh Pandey. Pandey, a crime reporter for the Hindi-language daily Jansatta Express, was shot dead at point-blank range at around 10:30 p.m. in his home in the residential neighborhood of...

Call it a contradiction, but the feeling that stays after watching the new 90-second television commercial for newspaper brand The Asian Age is a strange admixture of lingering despair and indomitable hope. Despair because there is a certain pain, a certain melancholy in the mood of the commercial… a kind of visual déjà vu that percolates through the senses and settles unsettlingly on the mind. A...