Yes, they used to take out full-fledged adverts, and now they are obviously buying editorial space. I think after the 'ban The Budget' fiasco singed Ponytail, he needed a come-back. And the strange thing is that it isn't the usual suspect - The Times of India that is guilty, but rather EchTee, which used to shout from the rooftops that while the Times trashed it in readership and ciculation, they were better editorially. But this has a screaming puff-job on Page 9 (Delhi, Metro Edition) today morning. There are several small stories in all papers which are puff-jobs, but the timing of this could not have been weirder, it is placement season and the stories about super-high salaries going to IIM grads are all over (One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six) . I'm sure the Ponytail is desperate, but my god, this stinks! Pity, there are irritating bloggers like me who notice such things!
I know editorial respectability matters, but on the same day HT went to town on how they won a prize for good journalism. Seriously, I was more than a bit taken aback on the loo today! Taking a holier than thou attitude is not a safe thing to do. Admitting fallability is sensible, you win prizes but you also take money for editorial space. Everybody has to be a hooker in the media nowadays, because newsprint is getting expensive!
Another blog reader points me to this post on Poynter, which accuses LiveMint of stealing from the NYT! And to MetroNow, please for god's sake, we know you are the bastard child born out of a relationship between two high-class hookers, but that does not mean you can't have a searchable website! And everybody else who reads this blog, please do keep on sending in your comments, emails and text messages. Everything adds up! And sorry if this post looks all awkward I'm using Opera 9.26 for some strange reason and formatting is all over the place.
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You don't want the enmity of my friendship!
9 comments:
I would not be surprised if the editorial space was part of a package deal that was forced down HT's gullet with the full page ads that every newspaper loves so much. ToI has been carrying a lot of full pagers for Ponytail. No doubt marketing kids from HT were under pressure from bosses to make a deal, even if it meant peddling their ass to the fellow. Happens all the time in smaller newspapers.
A
Here is Raju's rebuttal to the accusation:
http://poynter.org/forum/view_post.asp?id=13197
I think if they won a prize they better let me know. I'm a reader and i dont belong to the bunch of self obsessed journalists.
In my opinion they deserve it. You even know why they won it 'K', but you won't mention it coz obviously you can't take their side at least not now, you are anti-HT you see.
I respect your need not to privacy, but your need for invisibility, thats because you are doing no good to any one any way. Ech Tee or HT, know they deserve the recognition because they know they could have made a difference to at least one life through that award winning series.
By the way i'm a media student and have been reading your blog for a year now.
But yes i need to thank you for informing me about MetroNow, in Mumbai we have a bunch of tabloids and i think MetroNow's destination next will be mumbai.
Pony wants to go global? Ha ha ha. Sure sweets. He'd better not mess around with an NY campus though.
In this notorious litigation happy country, he'll find himself in a hella soup if he tries to pull off the shit that he pulls off in India.
check out this hilarious exchange on thehoot.org: http://thehoot.org/web/home/story.php?storyid=2989&mod=1&pg=1§ionId=10&valid=true
Poor raju, he certainly seems to have a point in his rebuttal.
Having said that, a bigger pity that around the same time, they do the piece on Chaudhuri.But this man's relative success and refusal to be laid low really amazes me. takes a lot of shameless chutzpah, and perhaps somewhere, there is actually a worldview build around doing things in a certain way. With the key words: "As long as you can fool most of the people all the time in it somewhere"
While I tended to go along with the general sentiments on 'ponytail' expressed in this blog, an incident in the past fortnight has altered by view considerably. we media professionals are pretty used to benign neglect at best from our management and promoters; exceptions merely prove the rule. Consider this then: when a senior staffer landed in ICU with multi-organ failure due to a rare and virulent malaria after returning from a reporting assignment in chhattisgarh, not only was ponytail there every day in person but also told the docs that money was no object: import meds and docs if necessary. so the docs used the very latest meds and literally pulled him back from the brink. and ponytail was there every step of the way, as was his organisation, with money and manpower. and moral support. maybe the good karma he gets from this very genuine concern, is the key to his success?
who's ponytail?
This has nothing to do with anything strictly current. But Vir Sanghvi was not worth the trust/faith that people joining INX had placed in him. His best employees cannot now say they worked for him nor use him for a reference because he never bothered to know them the few times he came to office. Save some of the women he hired himself of course. He's not going to be an Alpha Male forever. And what went around will come around. Despising him is easy. There is no moral dilemma to it.
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