The campaign against the attack on the media in Tamil Nadu needs to be sustained. It needs to be done on a national scale. The Hindu has an op-ed piece today on the issue by P.V. Indiresan.
N. Ram spoke on the issue in Coimbatore. You can also read Ram's first person account in the Financial Times on the showdown on November 7.
The Hindu has a separate section titled Rising Intolerance.
The November 10 editorial of Business Standard is a must read.

Attack on media in Chennai

Let's condemn the attack on the media in Tamil Nadu, India. The attack on The Hindu and Murusoli should be taken up as a challenge by the journalism community. The need is to launch a campaign against the very concepts of legislative privelege, defamation and contempt of court. The Hindu and many other publications have been subjected to frivolous defamation cases since the Jayalalithaa government assumed office. They have borne the attack stoically and have continued to stay the course – a tribute to Indian journalism. IOJ has provided a link here to The Hindu's editorial - a resolve to battle it out. Please join us in expressing outrage at the abominable attack.

Express your outrage

I was pleased to receive a mail from Prof. Vamsee Juluri himself about his book Becoming a Global Audience Longing and Belonging in Indian Music Television. The publisher is Peter Lang USA.
Andrew Goodwin, Professor & Chair, Department of Media Studies, University of San Francisco, thinks: “Juluri’s study has the great merit of being rooted in a political-economic analysis of the Indian culture industry and a sophisticated (but never simplistic or populist) account of reception. His study has solid empirical foundations and theoretical elegance; both threads weave through this book like a beautifully constructed combination of rhythm and melody. As music and culture have gone global, so has theory; and while the internationalization of musical culture has been a mixed blessing (as Juluri shows), the impact of local and global studies on cultural studies has been all to the good. If there was ever a time for a postcolonialist—as opposed to a postmodern—approach to media audiences, it is now.”

Our "brothers and sisters" in Pakistan ought to be mighty thrilled because, according to a European Union delegation: "Indian media wrongly projects the Kashmir issue." While we must collectively bow our heads in shame, we too need to go looking for such certificates from some European or American lobby or the other. Until then, suffer a pain in the neck.

Times Group signs MoU with BBC

Well, well, well, they have done it again. I wonder what the other big names are up to. ToI seems to take the cake all the time.

BBC 'tehelka' exposes racism
I wonder if the headline is accurate. Read the story....

India TV launch in January
Rajat Sharma is going to launch India TV. The launch will be a 24-hour Hindi news channel and the company is called Independent News Services - classic example of minomers, India and Independent, from Rajat Sharma.

A ‘crisis’ deftly defused
Here's an oped piece in the Jang taken from The Hindu on the Ayodhya issue - transcending divides.

I wrote a long mail to Michelle Nicolosi to describe the online journalism scene in India. If OJR focuses on India it would help to re-focus on issues concerns the newest form of journalism.
A major concern is the lack of data on the Indian scene. For instance, I would very much interested to know changes in newsroom Internet usage patterns. That would require periodic surveys. We can attempt that at CIJ but for that to happen it should emerge as a important web destination for journalists in India and the subcontinent. (That reminds me, although IOJ has wanted to claim to represent the South Asian region, we haven't include people from other country in the region.) Of course, online suverys have their own limitations.

Google's Online News list:

Express India - http://www.expressindia.com
News portal from Indian Express newspaper group.

BBC News, South Asia - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/default.stm
The news service from BBC World Service for South Asia.

Samachar.com - http://www.samachar.com/
Aggregates news from all major Indian newspapers with discussion groups.

HindustanTimes.com - http://www.hindustantimes.com/
Comprehensive news coverage on politics, business and economy.

NDTV.com - http://www.ndtv.com
News, views, exclusives and live news videos from India.

Good News India - http://www.goodnewsindia.com/
A site reporting little known stories of positive action and quiet endeavor by Indians.

Press Trust of India - http://www.ptinews.com/
News agency sharing Indian news as well as international, business, and sports. Contains subscription information.

Bharat Online - http://www.bol.net.in/
Online news on sports, national and international politics, business from the Delhi and Mumbai telecom authority.

Mid Day - http://www.mid-day.com/
Dedicated to news from Mumbai, India

Mantra Online News - http://news.mantraonline.com/
Provides headline news, sports, entertainment, chat, daily email news updates, and links.

Asiadragons India News - http://news.asiadragons.com/world/india/
News portal for the country from the Asiadragons.com web-site.

Free News India - http://www.freeindia.org/news/
News, and news related links.

123India.com - http://news.123india.com/
News page with daily free newsletter, latest headlines, and breaking news.

Jal News - http://www.jalnews.com/
Latest news brought to you from the desk of Jal Khambata.

News.nabou.com - http://news.nabou.com/world/india_news.html
Headline news and information in English on local affairs, business, internet, economy, politics, society, sports, stocks and technology.

India News Headlines - http://news.newmalaysia.com/world/india/
Latest India news headlines from various news resources.

NewsWing.com - http://newswing.com/
A selection of features and top stories about India and abroad.

India Weekly - http://www.indiaweekly.com/
News portal presenting news stories from all over the web. Bollywood links included.

India Newspaper - http://www.indianewspaper.com
Online India related news.

India News Online - http://www.indianewsonline.com
Updated top news stories, business and sports news from most of the Indian news papers.

Zeenext News - http://news.zeenext.com/
Online news channel from Zeenext.

Sumanasa.com India News & Samachar - http://indianews.sumanasa.com/
Articles, news, and opinions relating to the Indian subcontinent and abroad.

News Center - http://www.asksiddhi.com/news/index.htm
Top stories, breaking news, business, sports, entertainment, health, and weather.

Doordarshan News - http://www.ddinews.com/cgi-bin/ddnews/ddnews/default.jsp
Online news updates from the official government news agency.

News Behind The News - http://www.india-newsbehindnews.com/
Some editorial content, and links to the top stories and major Indian newspapers.

Yahoo! India News - http://fullcoverage.yahoo.com/fc/World/India/
Yahoo's compilation of news feeds from national and international sources.

SaRiGa.NET - http://www.sariga.net
Categorized presentation of Indian and World news from hundreds of sources, customizable for each user. 01191.com - http://www.01191.com/default.asp?ct=1

News headlines from major newspapers of India.
Bharat Varsha 1947 - http://www.geocities.com/bharatvarsha1947/bv1947.html
Snippets from news relating to India.

The Indian News Maker - http://www.theindiannewsmaker.com/
Indian and global news.

India's News - http://indiasnews.net
Links to stories from a collection of web news sources.

Indiatimes News - http://news.indiatimes.com/
Portal for news from the Times of India Group.

India Online - http://indiaonline.hypermart.net/news
Latest national and cricket sports news.

I wander what the criteria were for drawing up this list. They have listed NDTV, Doordarshan, PTI and a host of other sites but not rediff for instance online news.

Media Headline:
MTV culture, made for India

Vamsee Juluri's research "shows how music channels scored with pop nationalism". The study Becoming a Global Audience: Longing and Belonging in Indian Music Television is the result of three years of research. I searched around but couldn't get a copy of the report. Will keep trying.

Media Headline:
India sex survey arouses emotions
Vinod Mehta editor of Outlook magazine says it is important for the media to be provocative but not offend. "People in India are quite conservative and they get offended by what they see. Also, sex doesn't sell," he says. And we all can live happily ever after....

STAR News faces fresh round of questioning from government
Rupert Murdoch’s STAR News channel, even after getting Kolkata-based Ananda Bazar Patrika (ABP) as its majority partner, continues to face government scrutiny.

WEB SEARCHES: THE FIX IS IN
Some search engines, such as MSN and Lycos, accept money from corporations each time a paid-inclusion Web link is clicked. These links, which are essentially advertisements, are virtually indistinguishable from unpaid links. "Paid inclusion dilutes the accuracy and relevance of a search engine," says James Taylor, CEO of a search-marketing company. But companies using paid inclusion, including Yahoo, insist that search results are displayed in order of relevance. Anecdotal evidence, however, contradicts the claim that paid ads get no preferential treatment. In one example, the Lamps Plus e-commerce site turned up prominently on Google but was nearly out of sight on MSN. After paying to have the site included with LookSmart, which feeds search results to MSN and shares revenues with it, Lamps Plus pages soared to near the top of MSN's search results. An implication of paid inclusion is that smaller companies that can't afford to pay per click fees will be at a disadvantage. In addition, search engines may lose credibility if customers begin to see them as simply leading to a pile of ads.
SOURCE: Business Week; AUTHOR: Ben Elgin
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_40/b3852098_mz063.htm

-- Via Benton Communications Headlines

The IOJ web site survives. I had kept Oct 1 as the deadline for its revival. I made it! The updates are a series of interviews of prominent people in blogosphere by Kiruba Shankar.
Watson Solomon's Journalism Online has also come aboard.

I, Subhash Rai, Chief Sub-editor, Frontline, Chennai, started my career in the software industry, moved on to online journalism, teaching new media, and now have settled down as a print journalist. That's the road traversed so far.
I worked for a couple of years as a programmer in Bangalore and then went to the United Arab Emirates. I came back to India and joined the Economic Times - Online (ET Online), then in Bangalore. The job involved programming, content development and maintaining the website. I then moved to Indya.com as the Operational Head of the news channel. After that, I moved on to journalism education. I joined the Indian Institute of Journalism and New Media as Assistant Professor and Director, Centre for New Media. Just after I left indya.com the new media façade unraveled. In a sense, I got a ringside view of the collapse.
I moderate an e-group Indian Online Journalism, which has been alive for more than three years now. I also edit the website for the group as <http://www.indianonlinejournalism.org/> . My blog is at <http://www.subhashrai.com/> .
At ACJ, I teach the New Media Elective. With a shifting goalpost like new media the game will remain as interesting as ever.
- 30 -
This is my introduction. Does it sound okay?

This is the Wikipedia Mass Media page. I have started the Mass Media in India section. Join in. I will write as much as possible about news media. I hope we will have people looking at other aspects of the media.

Rukmangathan is my colleague at Frontline. An avid surfer and the defacto systems manager - Here's his site. Still growing....

Michael Powell is leading the charge for the cabal at the FCC in the U.S. I've been following this battle. Here are a few links to related sites:

FCC Media Ownership Bill (S.J. Res 17):

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:s.j.res.00017:

U.S. Senate: http://www.senate.gov/

Federal Communications Commission: http://www.fcc.gov/

U.S. House of Representatives: http://www.house.gov/

AP: http://www.ap.org

FCC rules: http://www.fcc.gov/ownership/

The war on terror and the U.S.
United States: 'War whores' on tour. CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour says the media as 'intimidated' into following the official line in Iraq. Veteran journalist Nicholas von Hoffman takes a tougher view...Simply put,' he argues, the US mass media 'put itself at the service of the state'.

From: Index on Censorship e-bulletin 22 September

Star ties up with Tatas for DTH
RUPERT Murdoch-owned Star Television has told the Government that the company has tied up with the Tatas for its direct-to-home (DTH) foray and would launch its services by mid-2004.

Commission seeks Tehelka's camera as doubts emerge over tape
An independent British expert has expressed some doubts over portions of the famous Tehelka tapes. The full story.

Financial Times to pick up 13.85% in Business Standard
The Financial Times will join the Kotak Mahindra group and Great Eastern Shipping as the leading investors in Business Standard. The company will continue to operate as an independent entity, with its management reporting to the board of directors, on which Financial Times will have appropriate representation. Read the FT story.

FT first to buy stake in Indian paper

Foreign Investment rules relaxed: Print Media : July 2, 2002.

The Hindu is celebrating its 125th anniversary. A glorious moment for Indian journalism. The paper is ably led by N. Ram, as the editor-in-chief. Read his editorial, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow .
I work for Frontline, the only magazine in India with a progressive worldview. It's a publication from The Hindu stable.

Amy Gahran is back with Contentious, as a blog.

DD will go the U.S. network way
The U.S. FCC Chairman Michael Powell's comments on network television:"I don't care how much money they made this year, they're dying." He says part of the reason is because cable networks have both subscriber and advertising revenue, unlike network television.
Although we can't draw exact parallels, India's terrestrial network Doordarshan, is headed down the same path, if the establishment has its way.

'There are journalists who are fixers, lobbyists', says Sashi Kumar in an interview to prdomain. In fact, MDF had organised a colloquium on Emerging Media Issues in March this year that dwelt on such topics. Tulika Publications is to bring out a book on the deliberations. I've been looking forward to that.
Disclosure: I teach the new media elective at ACJ.

Here's a blog that's interesting: The Indian Bloggers List. There are a couple of others worth mention here: by Anita Bora , and then there is Aruna Srinivasan's. Jyothi Kiran calls her site a blog as well. I'm not so sure about that...

The beta version of a tool to collect the front pages of selected online news sites once a day.
It is available at World Frontpages Today

I've been hunting for a news archive on the Northeastern States of India. Haven't found one yet. Here are some useful links though:
A list of sites at
Kangla Online.

The Home ministry site's section on the Northeast.

Crawford Kilian's blog on Web Writing is good. It deserves a place in the right nav bar. Isn't it?
http://crofsblogs.typepad.com

Don't forget to go right to the bottom of the page for links to his recent comments and recent posts.

Cheers!

Shortlist for the 2003 European Online Journalism Awards
http://www.net-media.co.uk/awards/shortlist.asp

SPORTSML: Sports Data Language extends XML

A new computer language to describe sports results has been
approved by a consortium of news organisations. SportsML or Sports Markup Language, has been created by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), in association with major news agencies.
SportsML is a dialect of XML, and its data can be easily the Web, newspaper publishing systems, or sports archives. As a part of the XML programming family, SportsML adheres to benchmarks set down by W3C.
SportsML breaks sports data into bite-sized pieces and allows publishers to completely describe the how, what, when, where and why of sports. Documents in SportsML can be as simple or as complex as needed, drawing from a wide range of available descriptions for sports scores, schedules, standings and statistics.
Team and player names, results, standings and other important information are handled in a standardised way, greatly reducing the tedious editing process that is often required to prepare sports results for publication. League data can also be stored in SportsML, making standings and playoff results easier to handle.

Showcase site for young reporters

A young British journalist, Richard Powell has started a showcase site to help novice journalists. The site is an online press agency with news articles from young reporters all over the world, which has been around since April 2002. The site has been created in collaboration with the 'BBC News Online' team.

Baghdad Journal by Wade Hudson

The Committee Against the War on Iraq has issued a call on people in Chennai and all over Tamil Nadu to light "A Candle in Every Home" between 6.30 p.m. and 7.30 p.m. on Monday, March 31, 2003 - in support of peace and in solidarity with the people of Iraq.

Please join us...

Stop the war

Robert Fisk - the un-embedded journalist reporting from Iraq.

'It was an outrage, an obscenity'

It was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three small children in their still-smouldering car. Two missiles from an American jet killed them all – by my estimate, more than 20 Iraqi civilians, torn to pieces before they could be 'liberated' by the nation that destroyed their lives. Who dares, I ask myself, to call this 'collateral damage'? Abu Taleb Street was packed with pedestrians and motorists when the American pilot approached through the dense sandstorm that covered northern Baghdad in a cloak of red and yellow dust and rain yesterday morning.

full story

Stop the war

taking sides

Taking Sides - for justice. A critical look at the news on the 'war on terrorism' and the attack on Iraq.

'You Just Can't Imagine It'
by Rachel Corrie

I have been in Palestine for two weeks and one hour now, and I still have very few words to describe what I see. It is most difficult for me to think about what's going on here when I sit down to write back to the United States -- something about the virtual portal into luxury. I don't know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell holes in their walls and the towers of an occupying army surveying them constantly from the near horizons. I think, although I'm not entirely sure, that even the smallest of these children understand that life is not like this everywhere.

e-mail from the late Rachel Corrie to a dad.

Stop The War

The Countdown Begins

AIJAZ AHMAD

The internal dynamics of its capitalism driven primarily by petrodollar and weapons-dollar industries and the need to beat its European rivals in the race for global domination propel the United States inexorably towards war.

full story

Cameraman injured in Parliament attack dies

ANI cameraman Vikram Bisht, who was injured in the terrorist attack on Parliament on December 13, 2001, died here on Thursday morning. He's survived by his wife and two children.

Times of India

Don't tap, write!


The Tablet PC, just launched in the Indian market, could mark a radical shift in how computing devices are used. Anand Parthasarathy carries out a detailed evaluation of Acer's version of the Tabletto, providing this exclusive test report.

The Hindu

Streaming via the net

The streaming technique can be employed to deliver large videos
over the Internet in the available bandwidth

Deccan Herald

Easy messaging

The ‘SMS eXchange’ helps to send
and receive messages through a mobile phone in the
SMS mode to the recipient PC on a network

Deccan Herald

Bridging the digital divide

Networking rural India with telephone and the Internet is becoming a reality with Chiraag. Tamil Nadu is using corDECT technology to network ten districts. Villagers and some corporates are already benefiting.

The Hindu