Redesign

I liked the latest iteration of HT, this is the 'fourth' look of HT in the past decade but this new Guardian-esque redesign does seem to have a lot going for it. Still next to no business coverage and alarmingly little coverage on several other areas, but HT is the best looking paper in town. At least for the time being. The problem with any design, as layout artists will tell you is maintaining the design. And the problem there is that reporters, who have little clue of the english language to start with have next to no understanding of design. To work to a design (rather than a word-count) is a fact of life for many of us, it makes life rather unbearable when you have to juggle bits and pieces of your story around but a 'pretty' looking story might just get read in a mainstream publication rather than a dull one. So nice redesign, but why on earth do you still have the silly front-page 'shoulder' advert, and now to work on content.
A few friends often lament the death of long form (there is The Hindu, but extreme communism is no-one's cup of tea) in mainstream publications in India. Well, there never was a New Yorker or its ilk in India (Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic et al.) and that is tragic, but that just says more about the population at large (we are already an Idiotcracy if not very far from being one) than anything else. That said, ToI is still on-course to launch a 'thinking' paper soon. Given that the last launch from Bennett was ET Now which I feel is in danger of believing its own hype about its greatness - why did they go overboard on Nusli Wadia for crying out loud, and I will reserve my comments on the quality of the interview. Anyway, I'm not sure if I want long-form from the ToI, and even less sure if it will work, but maybe it will. Don't get enthusiastic and think that India needs a long-form magazine now, readers here are too cheap to pay, only grade-A morons like me end up spending a bomb on magazines and papers.
Now back to work and figuring out how to figure something out.

Again and again...

HT launched their all-new bloggers today. That said, only one post is any fun, but what fun! Previous posts on the issue - the start of the matter, my crappy analysis, someone else wades in feeling indignant about something and there will be peace, no wait, that blood, right?

And this is a nice afaqs piece on the adverts for equity model being followed. Surprisingly, HT Media also announced in their last quarterly results that they'll be doing exactly the same thing.

EDIT: Afaqs link corrected

Counterpoint

Dude, there are websites and then there are websites but The V's website is not as good as it could have been (it cost five lakhs to develop supposedly) - it went live today. The most interesting snippet so far - Vir's fusillade at Mint - this is a no-holds barred attack on Suku (more fun soon? But also read Suku's esoteric but excellent blog here) EDIT: The site is back up (up, down, up, down - WTF?) in case it goes down again - view it here and the piece that wasn't carried here.
Also read Outlook Groups response to Monika Halan's resignation letter, they call Monika's charges baseless and defamatory. This could shape up to be quite good fun, stay tuned for more. The morning papers seem to have drunk the Obama Kool-Aid and overdosed on it, five, six pages to what was a rather ordinary speech but one that sounded like the Sermon on the Mount - though you can read Mihir's counter-argument to Obama-mania in the Express today. Obama sounded messianic yesterday according to my mother with whom I watched the speech and I must agree with her, and that frankly scared me - the man is an extremely intelligent man and extremely intelligent people are as scary as extremely dumb people. Talking about pomp and pageantry, I was thinking of going down for the R-Day celebrations on Rajpath, it has been at least a decade since I went to my last R-Day parade and while security has always been insane, if the weather holds, it should be fun.
Also, since the morning I've been getting text messages talking of lots of lay-offs at HT Media (read Nikhil's post on HTM's Q3 results and the immense amount of cash sunk into FireFly) companies and from what I've heard is that there have been lay-offs at all major media groups in the marketing, printing and distribution functions. In editorial functions there have been lay-offs in some media houses, but to the best of my knowledge there have been no lay-offs per se. at EchTee. I believe that several people might be, and this is not just in EchTee, taken 'off the rolls' where they become consultants rather than full-time employees.
Listen times are bad everywhere (I believe at Times Life, SToI's supplement is down to one or two adverts, this was until a few months ago an advertising supplement for all intents and purposes) and employee costs have soared over the past few years. fair enough people were being paid jack till the media boom, but there are far too many examples of rather lacklustre people getting paid quite a lot. Some people will lose their jobs in editorial, and one hell of a lot of interns will not get jobs. I've seen a couple of message boards with 20-somethings crying about their lot in the media, but this is the current economic reality.