Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Media Mafia/Desi Blogs/DNA review

I read a line in The Guardian which described the British media as a mafia that would stop at nothing to outdo each other for a slice of the pie, but without the code of honour. Now, until a few days ago I thought the Indian media was quite similar, despite Simon Long's rather elementary description of the Indian print media scene in this week's Economist. Journalists, who had long abandoned the concept of being people of honour would do anything to create a story, something made painfully obvious by the advent of a hundred and one TV-news channels. Then of course there was incident after incident - reported in one paper but not in another - HT and the Lodha-Birla battle, ToI and the Provogue matter (wonder what will happen now that people have started going to jail). However, sometimes strange things happen - like Sameer Jain going to congratulate Pradeep Guha in the DNA office! Sometimes honour exists. Of course, when it comes to getting away by paying your reporters next to nothing, all owners are great! Anyway, now I have call up a madman in Bangalore.
EDIT : I subscribe to Bloglines a relatively easy way of keeping up with all the blogs (or sites with RSS) that I read no matter where I am, very easy to configure, and if you aren't signed up, I suggest that you do. Anyway, back to the point, in a fit of madness I subscribed to this blog myself yesterday, and I found out that I am not the only person subscribing here. Fully expecting the other subscriber to be open-source blogger Naren, I clicked on Subscribers and I see that a certain Kaps also subscribes to this site. Going through his/her public profile however I found a veritable treasure trove of desi blogs. I know that blogging is big in India, but this was a huge surprise. Some interesting blogs here, expect the right column of links to grow rapidly.
EDIT EDIT : DNA has launched, break out the champagne, no wait Mumbai is still drowning. Well, Gautam Adhikari, the ditor of DNA wants to model his paper after The Guardian. Whats with The Guardian and Indian papers wanting to copy it, first HT and now DNA? So two Guardian clones in Mumbai? Well, I'll say this much - its got a silly masthead, but the rest of the paper is clean and the it does have a lot of news, because the adverts are not in still. Too much news, some might argue and a lot of it is rather pointless, but for example, Monday's DNA edition had a graphic showing the main train lines of the city and people writing in their experiences from various parts of the line. Now, DNA unlike HT Bombay could not launch with a bang thanks to the mega-leak the man/woman upstairs decided to take above Bombay, but my honest take on it is that DNA might end up spoiling HT's chances in Bombay. Plus DNA is perfectly poised to take on the Mid-Day crowd, as it is newsy but not terribly cerebral - OK so Swapan Das Gupta did have a column in today's DNA, but it is the perfect paper for vapid people who have blown their brains out with cocaine. No wait... That means that someone in Jain&Jain will love DNA.
EDIT EDIT EDIT : I'm trying to keep the number of posts per day as low as possible, this priority thing in blogging. Anyway, after some interesting groundwork, one of the latest MMS clips to hit the interweb features a News Anchor from a Tamil news channel. Journalists (ok, so i'll clasify anchors as journalists for a second) are making naked clips - now thats news!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

thanks for the DNA review and the gossip