we, the media

The Bahrain ferry disaster

2006-03-31T12:34:00.000-08:00

This just in from a friend in Bahrain.

I am extremely angry with the kind of shallow, superficial and senseless 'reporting' that seems to go on. Yesterday, a ferry capsized in Bahrain and among the 62 dead were, almost, 17 Indians. And yet... none of the Indian new channels that we get here (NDTV, Star News, Zee News) bothered to even give it the kind of saturation report that CNN and BBC and Al Jazeera did.

Ofcourse, while questions were raised about the safety of the boat and Bahraini officials were grilled to reveal the nationalities of the victims... what do you thiink the Indian channels were showing? Some conclave of some BJP legislators and some other shenanigans of the folks from Delhi. Oh yes, Star News had this interesting story on a little girl who was trying to stand on her feet or something. Very touching but I sat there with my mouth wide open.

Now I am not much of a fan of these Indian news channels, and so I checked the websites of some of the newspapers... and what do I find? The news is tucked right under some very important news like the next cricket lineup, political party soap operas, Gandhi-Bachchan shenanigans... and it was 'agency' news as if the newspapers wouldn't even be bothered by the death of 17 Indians.

Contrast this with CNN and BBC, and it was amazing to see how they picked up the story, followed the threads, asked the right questions, brought clarity, embarassed a few people, and in short... made us, residents of a small country, feel that our disaster was not insignificant at all.

As Gulf based Indians, we are more than aware of the indifference and apathy we experience at the hands of the Indian establishment. Just because the bulk of Indians in our part of the world are the labour class, it is assumed (I guess) that we don't matter in the wider scheme of things. But when it comes to investments in real estate, mutual funds, or just plain seeking money from us, then, they remember us with such devotion that one would want to weep with joy.

We are expected to be loyal and to remember the country at ALL times, especially when there is natural disaster, war or any other calamity but when something hurts us... complete indifference.

The irony is that the same Indian media and 'personalities' are the ones who cry hoarse against CNN, BBC and other multinationals using words like 'imperialism' and other kind words. And yet when the time comes to establish their own credibility they are found seriously wanting.

It is easy for them to accuse CNN or BBC to be western oriented but that doesn't explain why the Indian media choose to ignore and sideline the deaths of 17 Indians. I am, also, upset that a close friend died in this disaster and it pains me to see that his death and that of other Indians would remain a mere footnote and not the tragedy it really was.
Ashish Gorde at http://www.ashishgorde.org and http://ashishgorde.blogspot.com

Ashish just sent me revised figures:
22 Indians have died so far and 13 British, 5 south Africans, 4 Singaporeans, 5 Philippines, 4 Pakistanis, 2 Thai, one each from Germany, Ireland and South Korea.

Also:

World Wide Help stalwart and pal Angelo Embuldeniya has more on the disaster here, here here, here and here.

Update: Angelo and Ashish will continue to blog about this on CSF II

Your comments on Ashish's take on the Indian media?

"Inflaming communal passions"

2006-02-21T03:18:00.000-08:00

Naresh Fernandes, Editor, Time Out, is unhappy about the recent arrest of a TOI reporter for "deliberately injuring religious sentiments." He'd like to get a discussion going on the matter. Here's his letter.

Dear Editor,

I’d like to call the attention of your readers to a cynical attempt by political workers to inflame religious passions in Mumbai over the last week, harnessing the eager assistance of the authorities to turn the press into the scapegoat.

The chain of events went into play with the publication of a report on Feb 19 in the Times of India, detailing the arrest of one of its reporters under 295A of the IPC (deliberately injuring religious sentiments). The article says that the reporter, whom it does not identify, was arrested on the complaint of a local municipal corporator, who claimed to have taken offence at an article written one month ago about pets owned by Bollywood stars. It goes on to state that the arrest was carried out even though the paper had already apologised for details in the article that were later found to be inaccurate  the very details to which the complainant had taken offence.

A subsequent report in Mid-Day on Feb 21 casts more light on the episode. Though the Mid-Day report makes no mention of the arrest of the Times reporter, it says that the actress Manisha Koirala has been provided police protection “after her dog’s name sparked protests among Muslim fundamentalists.” The report says that “members of the community lodged a complaint at Versova police station saying that the dog’s name, Mustafa, was same as that of their spiritual head and had to be withdrawn immediately.”

While the Times management has forbidden the reporter from speaking to the press about the incident, her colleagues have identified her as Meena Iyer, a reporter on the Bollywood beat. They say that she was arrested by the plain-clothes policemen, who appeared at her home at 9 on the morning of Feb 18. At first, they even refused her permission to change out of her night-clothes and they jostled her, her colleagues say.

The episode raises troubling questions. To start with, since the report was published a month before the journalist’s arrest, the police have no real grounds for claming that it had inflamed communal passions. Instead, it is obviously the complainant who is seeking to stoke the fires. It seems baffling that the police would arrest the reporter, instead of the complainant. Considering that the police have in the past failed to act on complaints against hate speeches by such figures as Bal Thackeray, the alacrity with which they arrested Ms Iyer is perplexing.

This is further evidence the Maharashtra government’s willingness to cave in to the demands of fundamentalists, a sentiment that it demonstrated earlier in February by issuing a non-bailable warrant against the editor of the Mumbai Mirror under the same section of the IPC, for printing a photo of an allegedly offensive tattoo. The editor had to obtain anticipatory bail to avoid arrest. In January, the Maharashtra government banned the translation by American academic James Laine of a praise poem, “The Epic of Shivaji”.

Episodes like this greatly compromise our ability to effectively function as journalists, and must be countered with strong condemnation.

Yours faithfully,
Naresh Fernandes

More speculation about blogging and MSM

2006-01-16T05:29:00.000-08:00

Found this article concerning blogging and mainstream media... yeah, another.
Is blogging a threat to newspapers? Is it going to have a major impact on MSM? etc? etc?

Valid questions all. Though I do think it's a little silly trying to pit MSM and blogosphere against each other all the time - it's not a war, you know. It's not even a battle. It will be - when blogging begins to pay, and when MSM can imagine itself without being paid-for.... besides, there are so many people who're doing both. In fact, I can guarantee that almost all bloggers who aren't already in print/on TV/ media of some sort, would love to get there. For money, perhaps, but not just the money.

I suspect we'd all like to be EVERYWHERE. MSM, if we can. Blogs, because we can. Introduce half a dozen other forms of communication, and we'd all like to play with it a little, even if we don't make a living off it.

Dear TR Vivek,

2005-12-28T08:23:00.000-08:00

You have the right to your opinion and Chintamani has the right to his. Just that I am a bit jealous of your blog URL being splashed as the headline in the article where you belittle SEA-EAT and similar blogs, as also the idea of citizen journalism at large. How many hits are you getting! And to be listed as a blogger beside such star bloggers as Amit Varma and Jai Arjun Singh - what wouldn't I do for that! So: congratulations!

Let's come down to business. In that short piece you write how blogs like Mumbai Help can't save lives in a disaster, and so can't be equated with heroes: "Thankfully, some of the saner bloggers agree that it is impossible to prove that blogs save lives or make a difference."

Now Outlook is a mainstream publication. Tell me, how many lives did Outlook save in any of the various disasters of 2005?

Now you would say Outlook's job is to report disasters and not become a disaster relief NGO.

Bang on! So why expect a blogger to be Hercules?

You write: "For Mumbaikars who were stranded without water and electricity for a almost a week it wouldn't have mattered much which paper said what. Helpline numbers of electricity and healthcare providers were reproduced on the Collablog from other newspapers. Astronomical web-page hits and Technorati.com searches apart, what citizen reportage are we talking about?"

Now you would know that web-page hits and Technorati searches are an indicator of popularity. They indicate that people are reading this, which obviously means they are finding it useful. Am I right?

You would probably also agree with me that the internet is a global medium. Indian bloggers' first sight of a statcounter is shocking in that more than half the visitors are from outside India. People from all over the world visited these blogs. One of the things the Tsunami blog did was to direct people to charities where they could donate: making a difference, did you say?

If a Mumbai Flood relief blog is not of help to someone stranded in the floods, the same goes for a newspaper or magazine, because you would remember their circulation too was hit for some time by the Mumbai floods.

Another point about citizen journalism is that a blogger does not see himself as a citizen journalist! That is a label that media academics have coined, and does have some basis - why else would blogging be so big in the US? But then you wouldn't know about US scene, because you think Dan Rather was a blogger! But anyway, the label of citizen journalist is also one that the mainstream media has popularised and now MSM wants the blogosphere to live up to the label.

Now you would agree that that's grossly unfair. Bloggers blog to blog, to communicate. A blog is a mode of online communication and could be used in any which way. As a blogger, Chintamani is not bound by rules of writing or editing or any imperative to be a citizen reporter.

Your last sentence is very interesting: "For the urban twentysomethings with intellectual pretentions and the hope of being spotted by the commissioning editor of a publishing house, it's the new P3, or rather the virtual world's own India International Centre."

About a commissioning editor seeing my blog and publishing my book, you have said this earlier as well, and let me tell you that no blogger blogs just for that hope. One blogger actually turned down such a request from a well known publishing house.

About India International Centre, what do you have against the place? I have attended so many illuminating talks and what not at IIC that it is a compliment for you bloggers to be compared to the denizens of IIC! As for intellectual pretensions, hmmmm, okay, another day.

I hope you will respond.

Best wishes,
Chintamani

CC: Vinod Mehta

Citizen journalism + a view from a skeptic

2005-12-27T00:55:00.000-08:00

Jane Perrone, in the Guardian newsblog, on The coming of age of citizen media (in which this blogger gets mentioned):

Perhaps most importantly of all, the TsunamiHelp blog has left a lasting legacy. The model of communication it forged has set the standard for web coverage of subsequent disasters, including Hurricane Katrina and the Pakistan earthquake, and many of the TsunamiHelp bloggers have used their expertise to launch similar projects on other disasters. And NGOs and academics are interested in using the TsunamiHelp model as a template for communication during future disasters.

And in the Outlook year-end special, two pieces by Jai and Amit on blogs and citizen journalism.

From Jai's piece

The reason for the impact of blogs like SEA-EAT (and later, Cloudburst Mumbai and Quake Help) was that they were run by teams of dedicated people who knew how to leverage the advantages of the internet—reaching a wide audience, pooling valuable resources from concerned people regardless of their location.

And from Amit:

It is true that in the hands of mediocre writers, the freedom that blogging affords can lead to self-indulgence. But I've found over the past year that the blogosphere is meritocratic, and readers are quick to sort out the wheat from the chaff. This is a new medium, and there's space for plenty more wheat.

And, this, from the in-house skeptic

The blog, a hero? You must be kidding. Maybe elsewhere in the world blogs and bloggers have made a difference during such natural disasters. But in India, over the past one year, where we have had a spate of natural calamities and bomb blasts, there is little evidence suggesting that this new medium, and its proponents have had any impact. Although a handful of bloggers have tried manfully.

I was tempted to just leave that without a comment, but I have to say this (and I'm quoted in Jai's piece and mentioned in Amit's, so you might say I have vested interest), but innit strange that two of India's most respected and widely-read bloggers write balanced pieces with no evangelistic statements, and it's the self-styled skeptic from mainstream media doing the ranting?

Cross-posted from my blog.

re-re-repeat funnies in Express, Delhi

2005-12-26T06:16:00.000-08:00

Will SOMEBODY please explain why the Delhi edition of the very-loudly-empowered Indian Express has had the same cartoop strip printed day, after day, after repetitive day?

There's the one about Calvin telling Hobbes that he's wondering if human being and tigers go to the same heaven, because if they did, then they couldn't eat people, who are all supposed to be happy in heaven. Then Hobbes says that if they couldn't then the tigers wouldn't be happy.

This particular strip has been there for a week, at least.

Also, there's one cartoon strip called Cathy, where Cathy is taking her husband shopping and the last panel has the word 'nanosecond', mouthed by the salesgirl.

All the other strips have also been re-re-repeated. I can understand one day of repetition. Oversight by the sub-editor who was making the page... but day, after day, after day?

Somebody please go and tell the sub concerned.

The DNA of sting ops

2005-12-25T07:02:00.000-08:00

A sting operation (or two!) is one of those things that gives media consumers rare insights into the fissures within the media. Over five years after India saw its first "candid camera" expose, we the media are still debating the ethics of sting operations: or we think we are, because I have not as yet seen a cogent argument which shows exactly how and why they are unethical.

Most arguments say that sting ops are money-making TRP gimmicks. This implies that they are, therefore, not in public interest. Chintamani does not understand why they can't be both, why we haven't discarded socialism here: Profit? I don't run my channel to make profit! That's a dirty word. I worship media ethics sir, not Mammon!

Now why can't good journalism be good business as well? Better than the Medianet way of making money, I suppose.

Another argument is that they "create" news rather than report it. This is a coservative stance which does not seem to appreciate that we live very much in a world of reality TV and market-driven journalism. In any case, news is always created at news desks, it does not appear on its own like the trees in the woods. Oops, even the trees are 'planted'.

K of Presstalk writes, "While I believe that such abuses of democracy need to be brought out into public, this was clear case of entrapment, which is illegal in certain countries." He does not make clear his stance on the issue of 'entrapment'.

You decide which is worse: entrapment or the acceptance of black money by a public functionary who is supposed to be working for the people rather than lobby groups. K also links to a DNA editorial which says, amongst other things: "It is troubling that the reporters of the website approached these MPs under false pretenses, by posing as representatives of an industry association. Why this subterfuge?" Do the edit writers at DNA know what a sting operation is?

The ethics about sting journalism are clearly debatable, and one can enter that debate only if it is shorn of the pseudo-socialist arguments about TRPs and profits. However, there are some basic media ethics which no one can dispute: like presenting both sides of a story. However, the Bombay newspaper DNA has been running a campaign against sting operations without presenting another side of the story (except one interview and one opinion piece by Prashant Bhushan). Even the tone of general reportage on Operations Duryodhana and Chakravyuh, like in this story, is negative.

Today it had Pioneer editor Chandan Mitra say, (you guessed it): "The TV shows that revealed our politicians in the raw, however, were not necessarily motivated the high ideal of cleansing the system contrary to the producers’ claims. They were primarily driven by the urge to make a quick buck or climb a few notches on TRP ratings. So, two wrongs don’t make a right."

So making money through advertisements on a TV sting operation is wrong.

He compares the breach of privacy in a sting operation showing corruption in the highest echelons of power with the ban of camera phones in a dandiya session in Gujarat! He does not mention the argument that it is impossible to "prove" an actual incident of a lobby group paying an MP to ask questions in the Parliament. What the cash-for-questions sting op showed, in my opinion, is the next best thing: MPs taking money for asking questions on behalf of a fictitious organisation. It proves what every journalist now says he knew for years.

It's not just this opinion piece by Mitra, but many other anti-sting operations articles by DNA that take a very similar stance. Here's a DNA Sunday special against stings. Here's one by Pankaj Pachauri of NDTV. Wait till you see a sting-op on NDTV, considering uncle Roy is one of the founders of a media school that will take just three months to train you to do hidden-camera stories. DNA also reports about the sting media school, without mentioning that Alka Saxena of Zee News is also on board. Every channel worth its salt will now have a 'sting cell', and you will see a sting op every weekend. Zee will not miss the bus, I bet. In which case it will be interesting to see DNA's coverage of Zee's stings, because Zee is part-owner of DNA! You think Chintamani is bullshitting? I have evidence:

Sting suggests you can buy clearances for medical college
[...]
This disturbing revelation was made by a Zee News team of Vatsal Shrivastava, Pramod Sharma, and Nikhil Dube, which worked its way through a chain of brokers and agents to negotiate a deal in which it would have to pay Rs20 lakh for two medical colleges.

The sting operation, which was telecast on Friday night, exposed some MCI officials, including Deputy Secretary Dr KK Arora. Though the Zee team did not take the process to its logical conclusion and actually obtain a certificate of permission, its investigation raises doubts about the functioning of the country's highest medical regulatory body.

So a sting operation by Zee does not raise questions of ethics extending to several editorial columns. One by Aaj Tak does. This example of a DNA report about a sting op on Zee belies ZEE's statement in DNA that it "has not been involved in any such operation, unlike other channels, which use it as a medium to create sensation." Note how, in that link, there are statements from Star and NDTV but not by Aaj Tak.

As I write this and dig more into DNA archives, I find they have a column by Rajat Sharma (of India TV, of 'casting couch' fame) defending sting-ops. And I haven't even got around to unearthing their coverage of Sting II on the MPLAD scheme by Star News and 'DIG'.

Finally, don't miss this funny legal angle they have. Lawyers are another tribe. More about the media's favourite lawyers in another post, another Christmas.

Yours,

Chintamani

Heart of Darkness

2005-12-09T07:36:00.000-08:00

On the Sarai Reader-List, Ananya Vajpeyi has made a long, angry posting about how she is disillusioned with her job as the editor of the Op-Ed page in a paper edited by a baldy, a paper which has been in relentless self-congratulation mode for months now. Her post reads like a rant with little substance, but it is worth reading for its Arundhati Royesque emotion - it tells you a lot about how the media is so full of talented people whose creativity is stifled because of 'organisational needs'. I'm pasting the full text here, the link is here anyway.

Heart of Darkness

By Ananya Vajpeyi

If it's not in the news, my editor says every single morning, then don't write about it. Or, if I'm writing something anyway, he wants to know what the "news-peg" is, on which I will hang my piece. But this article is not about elections. It's not about the economy. It's not about cricket. It's not about the Left parties. It's not about international affairs. I guess you could conclude, then, that it's not about what's in the news. It is about the news. Note, editor of mine: this article is about the news.

There are three fields about which I know a little bit, from my admittedly limited life-experiences: academia, the arts, journalism. I can tell you something about the way these spheres of activity function in this and a couple of other countries. I can tell you, after struggling for the past few years to find a way to contribute to these arenas of public life while making ends meet, in big cities and small towns all over India, that at the bottom of my heart I am beginning to lose the faith. Just like I was told I would, when I was younger. It's only a matter of time, young people are told, before the dying of the light. One doesn't believe it. Until one day the darkness is upon one.

And the news, again? What does the news have to do with this sense one gets, of fighting a losing battle, of being aboard a sinking ship, of – choose your own metaphor – not being able to discern a ray of light by which to find one's way? This is my hypothesis: the news enacts, performs, dramatizes, and exemplifies everything about our society that reeks of cynicism. News takes the darkness that lurks on the edges of our sight, like an impending loss of consciousness, and writes it bright across our television screens, or black on the white of newsprint. If news is an index of our collective life as a nation, a symptom of what ails us, then our sickness is clear, we suffer from that terminal disease of the soul: cynicism. I think I'm in the early stages of infection myself, truth be told. Nothing else explains the dead weight in my heart every morning. It became considerably heavier when I started working for a newspaper.

Here's the landscape: A war zone gets hit by an earthquake. A clutch of cats, the last of their kind, is shot, skinned, sold. A young man doing his job is murdered in the back of his own car. People go shopping before Diwali, and come home without fathers, children, wives, limbs. Liars seize power. Villages are crushed under the slow-turning wheels of the perpetual revolution. A man from Kerala is kidnapped and killed in the badlands of Afghanistan. Sportsmen perform miserably, unable to master either game or ego. Girls are raped, gays treated like lepers, and no one has time for the poor and their never-ending poverty. Tribals face extinction. Cities rot, inundated with water from the sky, flooded with water from the rivers. Forests are a fading memory. Yet another Muslim woman takes the consequences of double minority. A deadly mafia don proves photogenic, his moll even more so. Workers are beaten within an inch of their lives.

Alright, so there's no appeal against natural disasters, and terrorism is practically a force of nature nowadays. Armies will do what they're supposed to do: make war. Human beings are destined to suffer, and in such calamitous times, when there is little protection for human life, who will save trees and animals? Surely it's not the fault of news that all news these days seems to be bad news?

But no, what ails us is not that there is, as the Buddha stated in his very first axiom, suffering in the world. Dukha is old news. What makes it all so unpalatable is the shameless voyeurism, the mindless reiteration, the immorality, the unscrupulousness, the insensitivity and the downright dishonesty which characterise the workings of the media, of politics, and of their unholy nexus, news. If it scares you to watch this dance of death from afar, then it would turn your stomach, trust me, no, worse – it would wipe out your faith, gentle reader – to inhabit belly of the beast.

For hundreds of years in our part of the world, people wrote of things real and fantastic in the genre of the Purana. Many of these texts contained descriptions of the chaos and corruption that would mark the world in the Kali Yuga, the last of the four great ages of humankind. Teachers will lead their students away from knowledge, rulers will drive their subjects to perdition, truth will vanish, beauty perish, and righteousness meet an inglorious end. The bull that is Dharma, they claimed, will be left standing on its last leg. The ancients got it right, apparently. Somewhere in their incoherent prescience of apocalypse, in their alarm about the fast-attenuating moral center of their society, they threw us a map with which to navigate our own nightmarish times.

Kali Yuga: the society of the spectacle. Life on TV. For a civilization that has produced some of the truest, most beautiful texts, artefacts, theories, ways of life and modes of being, we have arrived at a sorry pass indeed, the nadir of ignorance, inanity and unethical consumption, an infernal mish-mash of breaking news-page three-advertising-globalisation in our faces day and night, killing us, killing us, killing us. We rob the poor, we rape the weak, we cheat the helpless, we steal from the blind. And then we broadcast it, live, 24X7.

As though this can go on much longer. It is not possible to have a political life without ethics. It is not possible to do work when its only object is destruction rather than creation. It is not possible to use language without respect for the truth, to editorialize without commitment, to preach when your real objective is to obfuscate, to lead when you are headed straight to hell.

At the heart of darkness, incessantly generating its meaningless commotion, a television set.

Bad Mid-Day?

2005-12-04T08:55:00.000-08:00

Now, we don't think we're a prude - we're usually accused of being way too liberal - but we were more than a little scandalised to see in today's Sunday Mid Day a double spread feature on the Bad Sex Award. Not just a short mention (which would be okay, IOAO, considering there was an Indian angle with Aniruddha Bahal taking it two years ago, and Salman Rushdie and Tarun Tejpal on this year's shortlist), but, erm, extracts. Not just this year's winner, but the winners all the way from '94. Plus, in a mild attack of originality, an add-on feature on Bad and Good Sex in the Indian film industry.

And yes, we know the Lit blog world has covered this, and that's in the public eye too, but there seems to be a line being crossed here.

A newspaper lands up in our homes, has puzzles for the brats, etcetera. Are you comfortable with the kiddos finishing the Jumble and then turning to a page of rather descriptive text, even if a few perfectly normal body-part type words are *******ed out?

Cross-posted from my blog.

The Hindu gets 'inspired'

2005-11-28T23:50:00.000-08:00

Consider this paragraph:

Stone has always made stories about men for whom ordinary life is impossible by accident or by choice. As a storyteller he has long made a habit out of extreme personalities, a preoccupation that during the 1990s was matched by one of the most playfully expressive styles in American mainstream pictures.

Well, it appears in Gautaman Bhaskaran's review of the film Alexander, published Feb 11, 2005. It also appears in Manohla Dargis's review in the New York Times, published November 24, 2004. It's evident who has plagiarised from whom.

I got this information via an excellent expose by Nina from Chennai, in which she also provides many other links that reveal that Gautaman Bhaskaran has been doing this for a long, long time. (Link to Nina via email from Mridula.) Somewhat like what Nikhat Kazmi, another MSM film reviewer, had been doing when Jai Arjun Singh exposed her.

In that case, the Times of India took no action against Kazmi. In this case, one can argue that the Hindu wasn't aware of this until now. Well, let us see what they do.

Cross-posted on India Uncut.

Update: Ravi Ratlami has another expose here.

Will The Real Author Please Stand Up?

2005-11-26T01:30:00.000-08:00

I am an avid listener of GO 92.5FM, a radio station in Mumbai. Every day, through the day, they have news updates... One of these is the morning 9 am one "Sports Talk with Annie".

I am also an avid follower of Cricinfo.com and follow all their articles regularly. So when the twain do meet, and without any plan, I do have some questions. This is the newsreader profile and this morning, I swear I heard her read this out:

The abandonment of the Chennai match thanks to rain, after a strong South African win in the first one-dayer, and India's emphatic response in the second, has only served to keep this series on an even keel longer, setting up the fourth ODI at Kolkata deliciously. Whoever wins here knows they are guaranteed not to lose the series, and that brings its own pressure on both teams not to lose.
The talk in the series has been tough to read from both camps, as no clear trend has emerged, no team has seized the initiative, as was the case when India drove down Sri Lanka into submission. Graeme Smith has relentlessly talked his team up, and occasionally taken a dig at the Indians. Smith didn't reveal much about the composition of his side for the match and said that South Africa "have 15 to choose from for the game". Rahul Dravid has been understated as ever, and any statements from the Indian camp will come through bat, ball, or result in the Kolkata match.

Nothing wrong in the content or anything else, just that this is the same content available in the preview by Anand Vasu on Cricinfo.com.
The reason I remember this at all is the use of the following: Abandonment, Submission and "no clear trend has emerged..."
Ideally, I would like to hear from both parties as to who was the original author. If this indeed was a newswire story, why has Cricinfo.com attributed it to Anand Vasu? If this is his original story, why is GO92.5FM reading out stuff verbatim?
One way or another, there is something fishy... unless we don't know of a content-sharing agreement.
Can either party answer?

Update: I have e-mailed Go 92.5 FM to an e-mail ID on their site (the producer) and to the Feedback section but no reply. Ditto for Cricinfo.com.

Also posted at Scribbler On The Net.

Mistake? Yes, ok. Apology? No

2005-11-25T21:32:00.000-08:00

The Indian Express has carried a "clarification" today with regard to what they had done yesterday. The clarification, which I couldn't find online, states:

Some of the comments carried yesterday were sent to us by Manjunathan's IIM batchmates. These comments were originally posted on a blog. All of today's letters come directly to The Indian Express. If you want to share your thoughts with us ... [their email id, etc]

This is a poor explanation. Firstly, the wording might make it appear that the people whose words were stolen, including me and Rashmi Bansal, were Manjunathan's batchmates, and we sent our stuff to them, both of which are untrue.

Secondly, consider this: if I send them a link that leads to an editorial in the Telegraph about Manjunathan, and they lift the content there and later claim that that it was sent to them by "Manjunathan's IIM batchmates," that explanation clearly won't hold. Well, the same copyright protection that applies to the Telegraph applies to Rashmi's blog. (For more, do read my post, "Copyright and the internet.")

In any case, one could excuse it as a mistake in good faith if an apology accompanied the clarification. No such apology does. Ethically, they owe an apology to:

a] Indian Express readers, who were lied to about the origin of this content.

b] To all the people, including Rashmi and me, whose editorial content was used without their permission, and in contravention of fair-use conventions. (Click here and go to point 4 for more.)

DNA, the Mumbai paper, gracefully issued such an apology when they were implicated in a similar case recently, and enhanced their credibility in the process. It is a shame that despite its talk of journalistic integrity, the Indian Express hasn't yet apologised for its obvious mistakes.

Cross-posted on India Uncut.

Copyright and the internet

2005-11-25T09:34:00.000-08:00

Consider this hypothetical example: Jerry Rao writes an Op-Ed in the Indian Express. It appears on, say, a Wednesday. It is about the License Raj. Two days later, the Times of India carries a piece about the License Raj. The strap of the piece says, "We have received an outpouring of letters from readers in India and overseas about the License Raj." It carries a selection of these 'letters.' The first of them is by Jerry Rao, and carries the first three paras of the piece he had written in IE. There is no mention of IE.

It would be a big deal, wouldn't it? IE would be justified in getting their knickers in a twist, as would Mr Rao, who sent ToI no letter at all. ToI would almost certainly carry an apology and a correction. Now, here's something I want to emphasize:

The copyright protection Rao's column in the Indian Express enjoys is exactly the same as that a post by Rashmi Bansal on Youth Curry enjoys, or a post by me on this blog.

Everything that appears on any internet site is protected by copyright, unless the author chooses to give it away. Click here for more on this. (Do read Point 4 of that to see what constitutes "fair use." ToI's use of Rao's article in my hypothetical example would not.)The practice that some Indian newspapers have adopted, of taking content freely from websites at will, ignores this truth. That needs to change.

PS: Let me stress that the above example was hypothetical. But this is not.

Cross-posted on India Uncut.

Indian Express steals from Rashmi Bansal's blog

2005-11-24T22:37:00.000-08:00

The Indian Express has a massive feature, taking up two-thirds of a page in the print edition, featuring letters from people regarding the sad death of S Manjunathan. The strap on top says, "We have received an outpouring of letters from readers in India and overseas, many of them former classmates of the slain Manjunath."

The thing is, the Indian Express is lying.

These are not letters they have received, but excerpts from blogposts and comments. The first few "letters," in fact, are from a post Rashmi Bansal wrote on the subject here, and comments left on that post. That's right, they even stole the comments. In the print edition (and left off the online page, oddly), they also have a letter supposedly written by me, quoting the headline and the first line of this post, which sound rather stupid taken out of context.

IE is a newspaper I've admired for their editorial probity, and I am certain that this is just the work of some lazy sub-editor. I'd love to see what action they take against him or her. Also, they owe an apology to Rashmi, and to all the people they claimed wrote letters to them. This is out-of-character behaviour, and I hope they set the record straight.

Cross-posted on India Uncut.

Update: The Indian Express has changed all the content on the page I linked to. Heh. Anyone living in India can see it in the print edition, however. I shall scan it and post a jpeg if it becomes an issue.

Update 2: Do read this post of mine: Copyright and the internet.

Update 3 (November 26): The Indian Express has accepted its mistake in a strangely half-hearted way, and has not apologised. Do read my post: "Mistake? Yes, ok. Apology? No."

Update 4 (November 29): Dance With Shadows writes on this subject.

Naughty, naughty, naughty

2005-11-24T01:36:00.000-08:00

I recently received an email from a gentleman named Sach Kohli, in which he pointed out how three pieces that had appeared in the Times of India appeared remarkably similar to pieces that had appeared in Cosmopolitan. He included an email that he had sent Jaideep Bose, an editor at the ToI, bringing this to his attention. I emailed Jaideep myself to ask if there was any innocent explanation for this that I was missing. (Perhaps a content-sharing arrangement with Cosmopolitan, though the content would then surely have been attributed to them.) Two days have passed, and I have received no reply. Thus, with Sach's permission, I'm reproducing the mail he sent Jaideep, as well as the incriminating pictures.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sach Kohli <[email id snipped]>
Date: 30-Jun-2005 19:36
To: Jaideep Bose <[email id snipped]>

Dear Editor,

I wish to report a striking similarity between three articles that
appeared in Monday's and Tuesday editions of Bombay Times, and those
that appeared in the June 2005 issue of the US edition of Cosmopolitan
magazine.

Monday, June 27
BT: page 6, titled "Give yourself a Break", Gif Attachment:
BT_GiveYourselfABreak.GIF
US Cosmopolitan June Edition 2005: page 179, titled "Give Yourself a
Break", attached file COSMO_giveyourselfabreak.jpg

Tuesday, June 28
BT: page 6, titled "10 Clues He'll be Bad in Bed", GIF Attachment:
BT_10CluesHe'llBeBadInBed.GIF
US Cosmopolitan June Edition 2005: page 203, titled "10 Clues He'll be
Bad in Bed", attached file COSMO_10clueshe'llsuckinbed.jpg
and
BT: page 6, titled "Tap into his Guy Mind-set", GIF Attachment:
BT_TapIntoHisGuyMind-Set.GIF
US Cosmopolitan June Edition 2005: page 238, titled "Tap into his Guy
Mind-set", attached file COSMO_tapintohisguy.jpg

Note: the Cosmo pictures were scanned from a personal copy of the June
2005, US Edition. The Bombay Times pictures were grabbed from your
epaper (epaper.indiatimes.com) service.

Nobody has paid me to do this, nor am I doing this out of any malice.
I'm just a regular reader of the Times. However, the fact that I could
detect three cases of blatant plagiarism in your paper merely out of
buying a single copy of the June 2005 Cosmopolitan issue points to a
rot that a much deeper rot! I can understand that the Bennett
management may not care for the 'editorial integrity' of Bombay Times.
But, when in the period of two days, your esteemed paper blatantly
lifts at least three articles, with their layouts, out of a single
issue of Cosmopolitan US, with minor changes in copy [...]
it simply reeks of lazy incompetence. If this is the regular deal, I
wonder if Bennett Coleman appreciates the legal implications of this
practice??

Yours,
A regular reader, Sach

The pictures:

Read the full post

Ashok Malik on blogs and the media

2005-11-07T00:06:00.000-08:00

Way back in January, when the SEA-EAT blog was taking up all our (the SEA-EAT team's) time, we were coping with a lot of international media attention. International, that is, except for Indian media, who didn't seem to have a clue this was happening in their backyard. (Of course, they were busy covering the aftermath of the Tsunami, and most hadn't heard of blogs, but still.) Many of the journos we spoke to, barring the ones on a tech beat, hadn't a clue what blogs were, and we each evolved our own canned explanations; a kind of Blog 101 if you will.

Nilanjana Roy and Devangshu Datta, the friends whose hospitality and broadband connection I was abusing at that time, were, besides quietly helping me cope and pointing to sources, also evangelising the effort to their numerous media contacts. Ashok Malik called to wish them for the New Year, and DD quickly told him about tsunamihelp. Ashok spoke to me for a few minutes, asked a few searching questions (I distinctly remember the relief I felt at not having to explain what a blog was), and said someone would be in touch shortly. The Indian Express was, I think, the first Indian publication to write about SEA-EAT.

Last month, Ashok got in touch to get a little background for a talk he was to give at the Asian School of Journalism, Chennai, on blogs and what they meant for media. Here, with his permission, is the text.

My topic today is on blogs and, roughly, the challenges and opportunities the Internet has in store for traditional newspaper wallahs. We began yesterday on, I thought, a somewhat sombre note: with dire thoughts on where print is and still more dire thoughts on where it's headed.

I must say I offer a somewhat different perspective. I came into the profession 15 years ago, spending 10 of them as a journalist, until, at the turn of the millennium, somebody changed my name to "content provider". I've heard obituaries of print or of serious print if you prefer from, almost, the day I entered the newsroom for the first time. How valid are such fears? I would think they're exaggerated.

For a start, the invention of the Internet and the world wide web have made me more optimistic about the future of my calling, if I may use the word, than at any time since I became a journalist. Simply put, what it means is that every new print journalist doesn't inevitably have to throw his hands up at some stage and succumb to that job offer from television. He's got a fresh lease of life.

Let's not confuse the possible or even emergent longterm decline of print with the death of the written word. The first is happening; the second is not. The written format – or typewritten format – is only evolving, adapting to a new framework.

This change is visible in the way we present and consume news, views, ideas and all that is the stock-in-trade of journalism. It is changing, for instance, language, making it, depending on your point of view, more accessible or more low-brow. Yesterday, a speaker here pointed to the shortening of editorial page articles from 1,200 words to 800 words as an unfortunate example of new trends in journalism.

Frankly, I think we have to live with that evolution, live with the fact that attention spans are shorter, the Internet – where the future of the written word lies – is comfortable with concise pieces. If you can't say something in 800 words, don't pretend you could have said it in 1,200.

Again, not that is evolution in language is unique. In 1994, I remember, I moved to New Delhi and joined the Hindustan Times, Manoj Joshi's paper. Going through archival copies in the library, one day, I came across a paper from 1978 or 1979. The lead headline on the sports page read: "Miss Navratilova defeats Mrs Evert Lloyd". This was, of course, the Wimbledon final. Now if a sub-editor were to headline that story today, he would probably write: "Martina smashes Chris". The presentation and the idiom would be different; journalism ever needs new hooks to grabs its readers.

That evolution from stodgy to snappy headlines must have anguished old school journalists. It was, after all, part of a package that saw sports coverage leap from page 17 or 18 to page one, that saw a shake-up in the hierarchy of news. It made the good journalist's job that much harder. Yet did it finish him, do him out of work, lead to social catastrophe, end civilisation as we know it? Not a chance. Rest assured, neither will page 3 nor overenthusiastic stories on Sunjay and Karishma Kapoor.

Good journalism will always find a way, in newspapers and – after April 2040, if you go by Patrick Walters' sell-by date – on the Internet, on individual initiative-based newsites, and through the medium of blogs.

Why am I so sold on blogs? I find them an awfully exciting phenomenon. A blog, as everybody here knows, is a sort of personal website on which the blogger uploads pretty much anything he wants – his views, a short essay, criticism of a social phenomenon, a dialogue with his pet dog, links to articles he may have read and liked (or disliked).

Increasingly blogs are emerging as:
• alternatives or complements to newspaper editorial pages;
• news sources on anything from the intensity of disaster in a particular area to stories not deemed "sexy" enough by the mainstream media;
• community platforms and networks, just as newspapers, particularly in smaller towns, once were, before the men in suits took over.

Lest I be accused of fabricating evidence, I'll give you a few examples of Indian blogs that I visit. Amit Varma is freelance journalist who lives in Bombay , writes on cricket for cricinfo.com and on libertarianism for the Asian Wall Street Journal. He also runs indiauncut.blogspot.com , a blog that has been variously described as the "second Mrs Varma" – that description came, interestingly, from the first Mrs Varma! – and an obsessive but harmless hobby, like say, stamp collection.

indiauncut is Amit's personal opinion page, his views – eminently readable ones, I may add – on cricket, society, economics, politics. indiauncut is his way of telling his friends what he's been reading and where, if they click on the hyperlink, they could find it on the Net. indiauncut is also, when Amit can afford it or is motivated enough, his personal news bulletin. Immediately after the December 26 tsunami, Amit spent about 10 days travelling through the worst hit regions of Tamil Nadu, blogging reports where he could, when he could, writing one paragraph or a 1,000 words, as the stories came to him.

Earlier this week, I called Amit Varma. How was your tsunami experience different from a newspaper reporter's, I asked. "There was no word stipulation," he said, "I could go above 1,000 or write below 200 words. I could quote one person, and not wait to get three other quotes to 'balance' the story. I could write as I saw it. It was a step up in my evolution as a journalist."

The media birth of the tsunami was, however, a qualitatively different blog: tsunamihelp.blogspot.com had a million and a half hits in a fortnight starting December 27, acting, as an insider put it, as a "giant clearing house of information."

Put together by an ad copywriter from Mumbai – he eventually had more than 200 people helping him, all online, ranging from a Sri Lankan TV executive to a web designer from Boston and an academic in Holland – this blog put volunteers in touch with agencies, reunited families by matching posts of those missing each other, provided links to where you could turn to for information, updated its news pages with its band of volunteer or citizen reporters.

In times of disaster, the town hall in ancient Athens must have played a similar role. tsunamihelp was classic newspapering, as the Americans would put it. It defined the public sphere Robin Jeffrey so thoughtfully reminded us of yesterday.

Funnily, reversing the traditional pattern, the team behind tsunamihelp provided the template for katrinahelp.blogspot.com, after the recent New Orleans disaster. An Indian media product, if that be the word, was the prototype for an American one; katrinahelp had a million visitors in two days.

Yesterday we heard of the many negatives of globalisation, and of how it skews the proverbial world information order. I would like to believe if offers us new opportunities. katrinahelp is my shining example.

It will be argued, correctly, that blogs often amount to desktop journalism: a bunch of opinionated people sitting before their computers and inflicting their opinions on the world. I first noted the phenomenon of blogs in early 2004, while attempting to follow the debate across election year America. This past year's presidential election was, as you no doubt know, a deeply ideological battle, fought between two very different ideas of America. The country was divided as it seldom has been.

In my estimation, the blogs reflected this better and faster than the newspapers. They were written by individuals, they were by definition fiercely partisan, even prejudiced: pro-Democrat, anti-Republican, vilifying Kerry, crucifying Bush. They gave you raw public assessment, without intermediaries and gatekeepers in the form of reporters, columnists and news editors. The blogs were a great barometer of America 's wrenching debate; they were also, if you were open-minded about these things, a huge resource for journalists attempting to understand the election.

Are blogs as accountable as newspapers? Not in a formal sense, I agree. Yet, in keeping with the anarchic framework of perfect competition, the blogosphere offers its natural corrective to factual errors – in the form of instant comments, complaints on other blogs. It's a society that monitors itself.

Isn't all this so reflective of the early practitioners of journalism? That initial "magic" of newspapers, to borrow Robin Jeffrey's evocative expression, owed so much to the fact that editors and proprietors, or editor-proprietors, spoke their mind. They didn't even pretend to be unbiased.

In the 17th century, around the time Daniel Defoe was publishing his Review, the early British newspapers were pamphlets. In America , a century a bit later, Hamilton and Jefferson were patronising newspapers that routinely backed one and ridiculed the other. Turn to Satyajit Ray's Charulata. Its editor protagonist, an enlightened 19th century Bengali bhadralok, saw his newspaper as a vehicle for his world view. Tilak's Kesri and Swaraj were no different.

That crackle and excitement used to be the lifeblood of newspapers. With blogs, are we at the cusp of a brave new age?

This may sound paradoxical, but the "say it as it is" school of newspapers ran into problems when they began making money, discovered "marketshare" and carved out cities between two or three survivors. Dumbing down and moderation are, after all, two sides of the same coin. A newspaper that wants to sell to all types of people, leftwingers, rightwingers, socialists, liberals, even, to use the current bugbear term, neo-liberals, tries to alienate none. As such, it often says nothing, takes no position – but makes lots of money.

I'm told at least one blogger in America attracts advertising worth $ 10,000 a month and others have got lecture and book contracts, as indeed have some Indian bloggers. In September, yahoo.com hired former CNN journalist Kevin Sites to travel alone to conflict zones across the world for a year-long series as a SoJo – solo journalist. In essence, Sites is being paid to write a blog.

Citizen journalists, with their text blogs and video blogs, were paid by British newspapers for reports after the July London bombings

Are these flickering exceptions or do they hold a beacon to a new treasure room that journalism is at the edge of? Honestly, I don't know. Someday the MBAs who pay people like me our salaries – and who in turn are paid their salaries by people like Mr N. Ram – will finally pronounce judgment on a possible revenue model for blogs. Who knows, they may even seek to tamper with the format.

Till then log on to the blogs. You might just be onto the biggest story of the rest of our careers.

Talk at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, October 15, 2005.

© Ashok Malik.

Bring on the outrage

2005-11-05T23:58:00.000-08:00

"If you steal from us we will cut off your hands," goes the excellent headline from a Sepia Mutiny post. Abhi is upset that DNA filched content off the fine blog he writes for, and rightly so.

Let me tell you why I like Abhi's headline -- it expresses outrage. Over the months, I have seen Indian bloggers' outrage at MSM behaviour change into apathy, as we have realised that the MSM giants couldn't care less about us little flies, and that we don't yet have the kind of readership we'd need to make a difference. (By my estimate, around 7000 readers every day for Sepia Mutiny and half that much for Kiruba Shankar and India Uncut, and less for most others. Negligible, even in an Indian context, compared to the influence US bloggers wield.)

So we've sort of given up. We see plagiarism, lazy journalism and all kinds of ethical transgressions from MSM (though this is the first such I have encountered in DNA, which is otherwise a promising paper), and while we rant about it once in a while, we let it pass. It has become a fact of life for us, like corrupt politicians and extreme poverty. We block it out.

Well, maybe there is something we can do about it. That's the spirit with Peter Griffin has launched this blog. He describes it in his first post, as a "critical, yet balanced view from people who understand both sides of the story. An open forum, of the media, by the media, for the media."

Will anybody listen? Wait and see.

Cross-posted, with some changes, as that's an announcement post, on India Uncut.

Should an online edition mean more money for the writer?

2005-11-04T10:34:00.000-08:00

Should journos who write for print publications that also have a web version get paid more for their work to appear online? That's an old debate, I know. What's your view?

And here, to seed the discussion, is the piece of news that brought the issue to mind.

Fourteen New Zealand Herald columnists (no, that one is not a relative) suddenly found themselves behind the "premium content" section of the paper's site.

They have been negotiating with APN management, initially for the columns to return to free access and subsequently for a share of the additional revenue reaped by the Herald from their work and/or new contracts in which the copyright of their work would rest with them. They have had no success in those talks and have chosen to release the statement to explain their position.

You can read the whole thing here.

Do come back and let us know what you think.

Schizophrenia, incest, moving in circles

2005-11-02T10:43:00.000-08:00

Have been thinking about the various little circles I find myself in, thanks to both my work and my interests.

First, there’s journalism, which as the cliché goes is an incestuous profession. There’s a lot of truth to that cliché. For a group of people who are expected (by the very nature of their work) to be an informed lot, sensitive to and aware about everything that’s going on in the world, it’s remarkable what a sniveling little bunch of myopic sneaks many of us really are. Many of the mid-level journos I’ve worked with spend all their free time bitching about others in the profession, trading conspiracy theories about why so-and-so left this newspaper and shifted to that magazine, and so on. (If you’ve been in the profession for at least four or five years and changed jobs even once, there will be at most two degrees of separation between you and practically any other journo in town. So there’s plenty of scope for frustration-fuelled gossip where you’re trying to impress younger colleagues with “insider knowledge” about another organisation.)

A subset is features journalism, about which the less said the better. And then there’s the literary circuit, a more bearable lot on the whole (though naturally I’m biased) – but lit-journos very easily become a part of the community they cover (through friendships with like-minded publishers, writers etc), and that leads to even more incest. More than once I’ve found myself at a get-together that includes a) a recently published writer and b) three to four people (including me) who have reviewed his/her book. On the surface it’s all very relaxed and comfortable, but I always find it a bit icky. Am probably being too conservative, but well...

And now, on top of all this there’s the blogosphere, which by comparison is a much more eclectic, dynamic group of people – except that most of the bloggers I interact with on a regular basis happen to be journos as well! So that’s what my life has become – one incestuous circle intersecting another to make a cosy little Venn diagram, and the upshot is that in the space of a single week I might easily end up meeting the same set of people (including some I’m not even very friendly with) in several different contexts. A book launch/reading. A press conference for a non-literary event. Film preview. Bloggers’ meet. A get-together at a mutual friend’s place.

People on the outside of these intersecting circles think all this must be such great fun, but those of us on the inside (even those who are a lot more social than I am) know how trying it can be. When it becomes too much for me to handle, the one surefire antidote is to catch up with old friends from my pre-journalism days - the ones who are not in any way associated with media (okay, a couple of them are in advertising), or blogging, or literature. They aren’t particularly interested in my work, most of them don’t know I blog (it would never even occur to them to Google my name) and most mercifully of all they never read – except maybe a Dan Brown or a Sidney Sheldon once in a while. It’s always a relief to meet them. Keeps me sane.

P.S. A couple of things got me started on this train of thought. First, a conversation at The Book Shop, Khan Market reminded me of how small and closed the literary circuit really is. I’d picked up The Complete New Yorker from the shop last month, and I asked the owner how the DVDs were selling. “Oh, they’re doing quite well,” he said, looking pleased, “we’ve sold three already.” Three. One of those was to me, another to Hurree Babu. And here I was thinking that everyone I knew had been rushing to The Book Shop (the first place the DVDs were available in Delhi) in droves to buy those delectable discs. It was quite an eye-opener. Now I’m wondering who that third freak could be.

The other thing is, I’m currently working on a biggish story on – you guessed it – blogging. I’m very ambivalent about such stories because they make me feel schizophrenic. On the one hand I have to be a good journalist and write a piece that will fulfill the requirements of mainstream media (explaining everything for the layperson, setting down facts and figures, etc). But on the other hand, as a dedicated blogger myself, I don’t like oversimplifying the concept for the easy consumption of readers who aren’t Net-savvy. The blogosphere is so varied and amorphous, it doesn’t feel right to define it in simplistic terms. Also, because it’s so vulnerable to being misunderstood or dismissed by those who are on the outside, I feel protective about it – which isn’t the best way to be if you’re writing an MSM story.

(Cross-posted on Jabberwock)

We, the media

2005-10-22T10:05:00.000-07:00

There are so many of us bloggers who straddle MSM and blogs, earning our livings in the media in some way - in newspapers, magazines and TV channels, in advertising and PR, as journalists, columnists, freelancers, writers, consultants, researchers.

And we know there's much that's wrong there. Things that need pointing out. Things that we, as insiders, wholly or part-time, can see just as clearly as those on the outside.

A watchdog, yes, but not just one person's views. A critical, yet balanced view from people who understand both sides of the story. An open forum, of the media, by the media, for the media.

Is there a place for this? A need?

This blog is an attempt to find out.

Watch this space.