Monday, February 18, 2008

Outlook Heart Facebook

When you thought people were sick and tired of Facebook, Outlook does this. I'm still wondering if a cover story fell through at the last minute, because rarely have I seen a story that is so shoddy and for a design perspective has more white space than this blog. Of course, since it appears that all our celebrities are also idiots, which is fine given most of their brain sizes, they have the weirdest Privacy Settings. But, really, carrying a huge full-page picture of Sania Mirza and telling me that she has 115 friends, which we are then informed is a 'huge friends circle' is fucking lunatic. Not as lunatic as telling us that Harbhajan Singh's friends list has several women on it. Big effing deal! This story is lunacy, I mean this is more lunatic than carrying Arundhati Roy's insane research-free ramblings.
Well, this is Outlook, if research can be done in two clicks - as is evident in this story, what can I say! Guys, this is 2008, Facebook was 2007 and early 2007 at that. If you have good reporters you can do good-ish last-minute six page stories, not cover tripe. Somewhere in India Today, someone must be sniggering! This is a online special story, or a two-pager at best, how this made the cover is remarkable. One thing my editor hollers while taking out his diamond encrusted Uzi and shooting down the paper airplane that was made using a print-out of my story idea is "Why this, why now?" and "Does the reader give a flying fuck?"
Anyway, I was hearing that Deccan Chronicle has gone on overdrive to recruit a bunch of fallen angels for their new business paper. Said people are glad that they can carry on wheeling and dealing. Also heard a couple of remarkable stories about people in the middle-ranks at large business papers who organised their own junkets and disappeared without informing their editos. All I can think of is what my editor would have done to me with said dismond-encrusted Uzi in case I had done something similar. Anyway, I must move on to batter out a few stories on my keyboard, so till later...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It seems a steady stream of fallen angels have been coming, crying and then leaving DC, Hyd, since Feb 2007.

About Facebook, you forgot to add one of the 10 Fuck yous. Third on the list is somebody having 300 pals on their friend's list. "Are you mad? Who're you fooling? Go play in the traffic.".. sums up Sania's condition.