The financial status of new media resembles real estate development in the early 1980s, when tax laws supported huge debt that fueled extravagant building. When tax laws changed, however, the original business assumptions no longer supported the big, expensive projects, many of which went bankrupt. Most were purchased out of receivership at amounts supportable by new market realities, and they...
"I BELIEVE IN THE PROFESSION of journalism. I believe that the public journal is a public trust; that all connected with it are, to the full measure of their responsibility, trustees for the public; that acceptance of lesser service than the public service is a betrayal of this trust." --Walter Williams The Journalist's Creed 1914 "W E STAND FOR EXCELLENT service to customers and communities, a...
New channels, new programming genres, new marketing tactics - poll a random sample of media practitioners and they come out with these as the defining characteristics of Indian television in the recent past. I would like to add one, and right at the beginning, please - people. It's the new game in town - channel-surfing. It's partly due to new channels, partly due to the Net and partly due to the...
Consider this. In the world of off-line media in India, non-English media dominate English media and the penetration of language media is more than four times the penetration of English media (Indian Readership survey 2000). However, only 11.5 per cent of the estimated 8 million net users in India are aware of language sites. The current penetration of language Internet services? About 9.5 per...
Consider the various ways in which newspapering's fitful struggles with profit pressures set us journalists against ourselves, cause us to lose our bearings, and behave against type. They rob us, for one thing, of our reporting edge. If any other, equally important, business in town were downsizing as newspapers have been, we'd be all over the story. We'd never let other executives get away with...
Even on a clear, crisp Manhattan day, it was difficult to imagine the colossus about to take shape at Columbus Circle, at the southwest corner of Central Park, where three construction cranes hovered over the remains of the Robert Moses-era Coliseum. This hole in the ground is to become AOL Time Warner Center, the headquarters of the newly united company. The $1.7 billion complex will feature a...
Nearly six months back, the 67-year-old Nava Bharat Group, known mainly for its Hindi daily of the same name published in 11 editions, took an interesting step. It began constructing an FMCG-like distribution system in hometown Nagpur. Dividing the city into zones, it appointed about 400 company-controlled franchisees. Around the same time, it launched its first Marathi newspaper, Nava Rashtra, in...
"Now this guy has not given me ads, but I am going to ask him to advertise on his terms," says Eric D'Souza, general manager, Dainik Bhaskar. He is referring to a media buyer who is buying space for a big FMCG marketer for the forthcoming International Women's Day. D'Souza calls up his boys, collects some dummies, and turns to me: "Let's talk in the car". Seated inside, he shows me the dummies of...
You may as well get used to mistakes like those in that headline. If the résumés and cover letters that have come across my desk in the past year are any indication, we, the print media, are doomed. I have advertised four open editorial positions for my sports-related trade magazine in the past sixteen months. Every day during my search for qualified candidates, I'd open my mail with a quiver of...
The success of any investigative story or series rides or falls on how early the editor becomes a collaborator in the process. By editor, I mean the lucky soul who will be doing the manuscript editing at the tail end of the process. There are four points at which he or she can become involved: 1. At the initiation of the story itself; 2. During the reporting; 3. After the reporting but before the...
