Can India have a media, which is distinctly its own? By definition, media connects people with the country and the country with the rest of the world. Indian media cannot cut itself off from the rest of the world for if it does, it will be failing in its duty of keeping the people fully informed. Bu...
A recent report published by the Reuters Foundation in collaboration with Oxford University reveals that India has emerged as one of the fastest-growing markets for US-based technology companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter. India’s Twitter users currently number at 26.7 million, and as of J...
The 15-20 minute discussions on international TED Talks have been instant hits worldwide. The introduction of the TED Talks India has brought in another innovation, keeping in mind the low retention rate in the age of social media. The first TED Talk India, which was launched with much fanfare this ...
The Indian media often refers to the 21-month ‘emergency’ (1975-77) to demonstrate the consequences of a government clamp down. The heroic fight back of some of the media houses is shown as having brought ‘freedom’. Four decades have passed; the society has changed and so has its media. But ...
Media’s election coverages, in many cases, start with the reporter asking the car driver in which he travels - ‘what is the scene?’- and then, sometimes unfor-tunately, ends there. There was a story, almost convincingly circulated among media people, that a famous reporter wrote and file...
Today’s social media come under a few big global names - the Alphabet (Google), Facebook, Twitter and the Microsoft. The slightly ‘older’ media – the television and cinema – also fall under a few global names – Disney, NewsCorp (Star), Viacom, Time Warner and Bertelsmann. Almost all the ...
The loss of credibility is perhaps the most serious concern of the Indian media today. Many within the media can feel it but are reluctant to accept it fully because of a variety of reasons. Media persons per se tend to shift the ‘blame’ to the promoters who are interested more in business than ...
In a recently concluded global conference in New York on ‘news literacy’, the assembled teachers and professionals expressed concern at the alarming rate in which ‘fake news’ was invading the media, specially the social media. They realised that the problem was too large for any organi...
Between the devil and the deep sea.The murder of Gauri Lankesh confirms the crisis journalism is facing today: on one hand, you submit to power and lose your credibility; and on the other, you defy and get killed. A report from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says that so far ( calcu...
The Supreme Court’s 547 page-long judgement on privacy is not just a legal landmark; it’s a learned document, well-referenced, on how information technology today, if not properly controlled, can be a palpable threat to human life and freedom. The judgement on one hand has reversed its earlier p...
