Mint’s Views page formal endorsement (read it here) of Barack Obama and the rationale behind it (read it here) is raising some debate on other blogs (read one here) in addition to soliciting comments such as this from Mint readers. Dear Sir, Though I was surprised to see an endorsement for the US Presidential elections by an Indian newspaper, I do welcome it. But, I do hope you take it forward to the step and make endorsements for Indian elections. I know it is a tough ask, considering we have a parliamentary democracy and not a Presidential one, where individuals... (more...)

Two seemingly disparate pieces of news from two continents both sounding the death rattle for celebrated media organizations that ought to be joyously celebrating their 100th birthday tells you the story of an industry that is hurting badly in much of the Western world even as it remains healthy—for now—in places such as India. First the news. It is now clear that the Commonwealth Press Union (CPU), which was planning to celebrate its centenary in 2009, will disappear in December 2008. What began as a flurry of emails among some members of the World Editors Forum of... (more...)

It is eight days to go before Americans finally decide on their next president. By many accounts—and most polls and forecasts–Barack Obama is walking away with the election. Still, there are serious questions about many of the polls as well as the methodology, a little-discussed debate in mainstream media that is effectively captured by The Numbers Guy’s blog at WSJ.com who suggests this race is actually far from over. Notes The Numbers Guy:“Assumptions about turnout can have a big effect on the results. The New Republic chronicled the “new, frenetic age of... (more...)

Increasingly, many of us in print media are coming to realize that content is not king, conversation is. A good example of that, for me, has been the fact that a couple of recent blog postings on A Romantic Realist, in addition to generating a lot of back-and-forth in comments, also spawned detailed and interesting–whether one agrees or not with those views being immaterial–blog posts. The first two took off on the last blog post here, titled Whose IPR Is It Anyway? (read original post here) that discussed the issue of intellectual property rights... (more...)

If it weren’t such an egregious violation of the Indian Copyright Act of 1957, there would be delicious irony in the fact that India’s National Knowledge Commission, a high-level advisory body to the Prime Minister of India created with the objective of transforming India into a knowledge society, including “reforming the country’s Intellectual Property Rights system,” and an activist environmental group prone to pointing fingers at misdeeds of others were the ones ripping of Mint content. It all began with a colleague stumbling upon a rather familiar... (more...)

It was one of those serendipitous encounters. Rather than continue waiting for an errant car service at 6.30 am on a Saturday morning and risk missing my flight, I walked up to someone on the campus of the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore since he too looked like he might be headed to the airport. Turns out he was and was happy to give me a ride. He turned out to be a 22-year veteran of the Indian Police Service, now the Inspector General of Police, in charge of security as well as the Criminal Investigation Department of a state adjacent to New Delhi. Candid... (more...)

One of the interesting challenges of being in the newspaper journalism business these days is that the battle isn’t necessarily just about circulation figures–especially in India where newspapers are so cheap that hardly anyone drops a paper because they need to buy another paper every day. I mean Mint added 120,000 readers to Indian business newspapers (assuming you choose to believe our numbers) since it began on 1 February 2007, but I doubt any other business paper has seen a significant decline in circulation for that reason alone. The battle... (more...)

Every four years, one reads stories–and polls–about how the rest of the world actually prefers the candidate that often loses in the US presidential race. Many of us remember reading about how if Indians could vote, Bill Clinton would still be the US president! As the saying goes, if wishes were horses, beggars would indeed ride. Still, in the category of why didn’t Mint think about it first, my favorite magazine The Economist has come up with a smart–and fun–way for those outside America to cast their ballots. The magazine has created... (more...)

Two separate but somewhat related news items caught my eye this weekend. One was about the Indian government, led by the Congress party, announcing several economic and aid packages with an eye toward key state elections (read full story here). The other story was on that Congress party has picked Crayons as the ad agency that will handle its advertising for the next national election. While this is good news for the newspaper industry, as a reader you can’t but help notice that in New Delhi at least, it is impossible to read any newspaper these days without coming... (more...)

For a long time I avoided Facebook, finally succumbing to it only when my LinkedIn got a bit too big for my liking. What I hoped to do was keep Facebook to a very small, tight group of “friends,” people that I really, really want to engage with–a real walled garden if you will–while keeping LinkedIn for a larger community of some friends, lots of professional relationships and a bunch of people who want to add me to their network and I don’t know why. It worked well–for about a week. The problem I have concluded is how... (more...)