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...
The good news--if you look hard enough, you can find some--may be that the events of September 11 produced both sterling journalism and a higher sense of journalism's purpose. After a summer of Gary Condit and man-eating sharks, acts of domestic terrorism and the specter of an international war against it shook the public and the media from their mutual embrace of the trivial, their romance with...
Money. It cannot buy the most valuable things in life. And sometimes, not even the not-so-valuable things. Like a few more readers for your paper, or magazine. Business houses venturing into publishing have met different fates. Some are dead. Like the Ambani-owned The Business and Political Observer and Vijaypath Singhania's The Indian Post. Others are just cruising along like The Asian Age. Some...
CPJ mourns the tragic deaths of our colleagues Anju Sharma of the Hindustan Times; Sanjiv Sinha of the Indian Express; Ranjan Jha of the television news channel Aaj Tak; and Gopal Bisht, cameraman for Aaj Tak. All four journalists were killed on September 30 when their chartered plane crashed during a flight between New Delhi and Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh State. Four other passengers, including the...
