Big Company: Essel Group They are the company behind Zee Entertainment, Zee News, DNA newspaper and many other Big projects! One of their businesses is DMCL : Digital Media Convergence Limited. Dunno what to say about convergence but one of their sites my POPKORN is seriously TErrrrribLLLEeee!
Showing newest posts with label journalism. Show older posts
Showing newest posts with label journalism. Show older posts
I could have said Saad Akhtar, but surely for the title of Twitter person of the Year, we can refer to him as Flyyoufools, his twitter id.
(Moreover "Fly, you fools!" were Gandalf's words in Lord of the Rings and it is only right that they become famous outside the purview of the book)
Midday received more than 6000 votes in this poll, that has named Saad the top twitterer above offline celebrities like Sashi Tharoor, Priyanka Chopra, Gul Panag, Anand Mahindra etc...
His victory is interesting cause all his fame is only due to twitter and his comic site, most of the others on the list are offline celebrities (exception being @asfaq and his friends, which in a wider range also includes me)
Read a lovely article today about how the internet has changed writing in the 2000's. It brings to fore a really important aspect of internet, web and the social boom about how people are constantly communicating through the typed word! Formulating a status update, chat message or comment, typing it down and ENTER! Its out into the world, for people to read!
Especially in the younger social network savvy generation this leads to a developed skill in communicating/writing albeit in their own slangy or sms language.
Read the Article!
At the same time, people are mastering more kinds of writing. Other technologies that grew more popular this decade required a different mode of expression: Instant messaging invited a breezy, fast-thinking tone; blog comments (again, the thoughtful ones) sharpened our debate skills; Twitter enforced even more economy onto our words. In all of these, we were nudged toward something all writers aspire to: a strong, distinct voice.
How do you think social networks particularly affects the communication skills of a person? Moreover do you think that the newer generation will be better at writing and networking skills due to social media?
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Two days to go for new year's! I am not much of a TV or newspaper person and yet I have seen that I know quite a bit about whats happening around the world mainly due to Twitter and Facebook! Through 2009 starting from the emergency landing of a plane in Hudson river to Iran elections to MJ's death, the online media has become a serious contender for news dissemination.
Here I have combined CNN's key events of 2009 and the major hashtags on Twitter in 2009 to take a look at the major events of the past year and the role that social media has played as media!
Jan 15th: An US airplane with 155 passengers crash lands on Hudson river in New York.
All passengers were rescued alive. A watcher on a ferry took a photo and immediately uploaded it to Twitter through his iPhone. The news went viral. This was the first coverage of the event, later traditional media took it up.
Jan 20th: Obama is sworn in as the first African-American president of America.
While millions of people watched it live at the venue, a lot more watched it on You tube where it was covered live too. In fact Obama's Facebook page has 7,045,669 members and Twitter page has over 2,000,000 followers.
Apr 8th: Agitation in a small country called Moldova.
The youth used Twitter as a broadcasting service. #pman was the tag they used standing for "Piata Marii Adunari Nationale" which was the name of a square in the capital city, where they planned to rally. It was trending for quite sometime.
Jun 11th: Swine Flu pandemic declared by World Health Organization.
Constantly #H1N1 and swine flue were trending on Twitter. Tips to avoid getting infected and how to recognize the symptoms were blogged. However it also led to a spread of unnecessary panic amongst web users.
Jun 13th: Iran Elections Crisis.
#iranelections was trending on Twitter, containing gruesome photos, videos about the situation in Iran. Yet again the traditional media including CNN and BBC were slow at covering the event. You tube videos were the way that the citizens in Iran showed the people what the situation was like.
Jun 25th: Micheal Jackson - King of Pop dies!
The news was first broadcast via a local news website later picked by leading sites. There were two lessons learnt about the online media with this event:
- The online media like Twitter, Wikipedia, Google were not able to handle the huge demand for this news. Read more here.
- Gossip: There were rumors about other celebrities who died along with MJ. These rumours were proved false soon enough. However it becomes clear that the ' false rumours' and 'panicking people' is something that is true online as much as it is offline. Read more.
Though this does not really concern me being in India I was aware of what was happening due to Facebook videos that were being passed around.
Oct 9th: Obama wins Nobel Prize.
Again the topic was trending on Twitter. Many people asked whether it was deserved and wasn't it too soon to be awarding Obama this prize?
All in all I think we should see much more usage of social media for brands, companies and also as a news medium.
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Rupert Murdoch is the the chairman and CEO of News Corp. which includes Star TV, 20th century Fox, Fox channels, MySpace, Tata Sky (partly) and a lot more!
From quite some time he has been making indignant remarks against Google, Bing, Ask.com and other 'usurpers' of news content. Google retorted by saying that it was these usurpers that sent about 4 billion visitors to news sites!
In a nutshell the entire debate is about free online content. Really good, researched and analysed content is available free of cost to all. This is great from a larger point of view, where any simpleton computer user can access important info free of cost. However news corps are not able to monetize their sites well enough.
One of the ways to get some ROI on the articles is by asking readers to pay for the content. On these lines Wall Street Journal has started a 'subscribe to read more' policy.
Surprisingly if you take the title of a preview only article and copy paste in Google, it shows the entire article in its search field. Googlers can this way read the entire article, anyway!
The reason that Google displays this charged content for free is due to cloaking...
Google has strict policies against what's known as cloaking: showing one web page to the crawler that indexes it but then a different page to a user. We do this so that users aren't deceived into clicking through to a site that's not what they were expecting.Given the publishers ire at this arrangement, they have introduced a feature that allows only the first 5 clicks for free, but after that the user gets directed to a register/subscribe page. Read more at the Google Blog.
Below is a longish (30 mins) video of Rupert, where he explains his idea behind charging for online news.
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On my flight from Mumbai to Coimbatore (that is where I am right now) I was just thinking about the Indian education system. I am specifying India only cause I know about it, while other countries I am not so acquainted with. I feel it totally lacks courage. It seems like a syllabus made by scared people.
They want the kid to get knowledge before any life experience! Students are made to learn umpteen number of things they can't possibly care about and then and only then are they asked to go out and get experience. I see sense when somebody is into some area of work and then they want to learn more so they go to school, to learn from people who have some knowledge.
This is the approach I plan to take as a photographer. I plan to get all involved in it. I am just gonna shoot and hopefully I will get some work also. Through work (freelance assignments) I can explore new stuff and try different things!
After doing some amount of photography on my own, if I went for a course, then I would know how to make the best of the class. Understand the professor (if he is any good) much better and ask him the right questions. Without any prior experience of photography doing this would not be possible.
In schools however students without any practical experiences are expected to know all kinds of facts and figures for years! This way the understanding that students will develop about the subject will only be very little! It makes students think more about their degrees and qualifications rather than about their work, skills and passions.
If you tell them to just go and work on something completely new.... DUH! They usually won't know where the hell to start cause they will expect some teachings or specific instructions to begin with.
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I had my last sports journalism class today, kinda sad cause I attended only two lectures and the prof seemed quite interesting.
Lot of people gave presentations on some sport, discussing its various aspects.
Somehow I realised how much many sports meant to me when I saw them in movies!
Eg: Golf
I barely have anything to do with golf. Its the gentlemen's sports = boring for me.
What I do remember is a movie called Tincup with Kevin Costner and Renne Russo. Very cool movie. Kevin Costner was this golf hotshot who lived alone in his caravan and finally due to some twists of fate he participated in a big golf tournament and well... I can't type the entire story here.
It is very interesting how he comes second in the tournament but plays the most memorable game ever!
Now that is all that really comes to mind when I think of Golf.
Another sport: Baseball
I love playing baseball. I have played it when I was smaller and the funniest thing was that after hitting when I run from first base I completely forget to throw the bat. Everyone is shouting throw the bat and I reach the third base and fling the bat to the first base LOL!!! This is one sport that really charges me up!
Movie: Signs
This is a creepy movie by Night Shyamalan where some really horid aliens came to Earth and traumatized the areas where they had landed. There is a ESP scene where a wife before dying tells the husband remember the baseball bat.
They think she was totally incoherent then. As it happens the husband and his brother come face to face with this totally hostile and horrifying alien in their living room, suddenly the guy remembers his wifes incoherent words... the baseball bat, which was kept on the mantelpiece. He slowly takes it and smashes the aliens head in.
Hooooph, that was a great end to a very, very tight situation. Man I stopped watching Shyamalan's movie after that.
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Today was a very eventful day. A meeting of Hamara Footpath, the NGO I am working with. Journo lecs where I had to submit some important assignments and did some on the spot article revamping, which did get appreciated.
Finally I saw a movie!! The last movie I saw was Australia which was way back on 5th January (checked the date on my blog post)!
Little Zizou was a very funny movie, very entertaining. A fantastic spoof about the Parsis becoming all fanatic over pure bloods and mingled bloods. Where they stopped allowing cross breed parsis from entering their agyaris.
Acting is good, and many cameo appearances which can be appreciated with men and women both. ;p
A great watch all in all!
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Just had our last lec with one of our favourite lecturers in Journo Class. This Prof is called Mangesh Karandikar, he teaches in Mumbai University in Mass Comm div.
Something we discussed was international journalism, and how it works.
There two types of international journalists, parachute journalists and immersion journalists.
:D the parachute journalist does not parachute down to a place. He keeps going from one place to another covering recent, breaking news.
Like for the recent Lahore shooting many journalists from all over the world must have flown down to cover this event.
In one or two days they fly out to some other location where some breaking news is happening.
So they probably get a lot of jet lag.
Immersion journalists on the other hand stay for prolonged period of time in a country, understand its people, get into the psyche of the country.
Then they report not on daily or regional events of the country but they write about the country.
They may also write about some major event of the country, like there was one immersion journalist who stayed in India for almost 25 years and then he wrote how India felt when Rajiv Gandhi died. His article truly echoed the sentiments of the Indian people.
(I don't remember this guys name)
Typically these journos stay for 3 or 4 years in a country cause after that they too get home sick, disinterested. Very few stay on for like 15, 20 years in a country.
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I have wanted to write about some topics here which I am not finding time to so just gonna summarize, maybe on a later date will write a post on it :)Get such interesting posts at your Inbox!!
In 1959 Keshav Singh was jailed for contempt of the House. He moved the High Court claiming his fundamental rights had been violated. The HC arranged a hearing. The government official failed to be present at this hearing as a result the decision was taken by the two HC judges and Keshav Singh was given bail.At this the House issued a notice for the two HC judges for contempt of House. These two judges moved the court and the High Court stayed the arrest of the two judges.As a result the House issued a notice to all the judges of the High Court! :DThe case then went to the Supreme Court where in the Court declared that the House cannot arrest the judges cause they were working under the jurisdiction of the court. The Court also cannot try Keshav Singh's case cause he was arrested under jurisdiction of the house.The Court is supreme in its jurisdiction and cannot come under the House while the House is supreme in its jurisdiction and cannot come under the court!!Another landmark case....Get such interesting posts at your Inbox!!
Due to my sheer inability to stay with my study material for tomorrow's exam, I shall over here outline some of the famous Searchlight cases in Indian press Laws, which might also be asked in tomorrows paper.
Searchlight Case 1:
In 1954 the editor of Searchlight (M.S.M Sharma) a newspaper in Patna went to the proceedings of the Bihar Legislative Assembly. There a particular MP went on with a string of invectives and abuses. As the entire episode ended the Speaker declared that this incident must be removed from records and that this cannot be published.
The editor of Searchlight went and published the entire event word to word in the paper the next day.
The Speaker sent him a show cause notice asking him to appear and give a reason as to why not to prosecute him for violating the law which allows the Speaker Supreme authority in the House.
The editor in turn moved the court under art 32 saying that he had the Freedom of Speech (art. 19 (1) a) and that was his fundamental right which was inviolable and the speakers order was curbing this right.
However the high court ruled in favour of the Speaker, after which he went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Courth issued a statement saying that the speaker is the law in the House and his law has to be obeyed on any material got from the House.
This was a landmark decision where the Government's Privileges were challenged. The ruling was in favor of the government.
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Article edited on 11/1/09
A few news articles on RediffMore surprising is how the comments are so often totally unrelated to the content of the article on such portals!Get such interesting posts at your Inbox!!
Will be putting up a few posts related to the terror activities happening in and around Mumbai. Another new aspect that has come to my notice, the TV has now extended the service where commoners directly affected by or having any news of the terror attacks can call TV channels and report. Atleast I am seeing this in Times Now.They have gotten a few calls from people trapped in Taj, and the anchors have been very clear about not disclosing the location of these people in the Taj cause the terrorists would also be watching TV.With the advent of mobiles, mobile internet connectivity, laptops etc... these kind of hostage situations have gained new turns where some times media can actually talk to hostages and sometimes even the perpetrators of the crime. One of the first incidents where this happened was when a couple of students took a school hostage somewhere in America I forget the name.The trapped students started calling up from their mobiles and started writing what was happening live on the internet. So some of them disclosed on air how they were staying away from the criminals and well the criminals also happened to be tuned to the television broadcast. Thus they got on tracks of these hidden students and the episode got ugly due to media intervention. So it is definitely good to see the media handling this situation is now taking these things into consideration! Times Now has clearly disclosed that they will not be talking any strategy, specific locations and such stuff on air.Though ofcourse they are showing footage of where the military is placed outside but well I think they are still doing a great job. Some of them have been in studio from the beginning staying awake all night long I think that is amazing.So Kudos to TIMES NOW who I think is doing a fantastic job of covering the terror attack on Mumbai!!Get such interesting posts at your Inbox!!
Sitting here in my room which happens to be in posh South Mumbai, the saving grace of Mumbai, financial capital of India. I am hearing the commentary of a Times Now reporter talking abt a possible hostage situation at Trident hotel which is a 5 minute walk from my place.Another possible hostage situation where a top cop lost his life is the Taj Mahal hotel. Which is again a small walk away, and I could hear one of the blasts in this hotel. That blast caused a great fire in one of the Taj rooms and now the fire has entirely spread on the fifth floor! The Taj dome is bursting and breaking under the heaten throes of the raging fire.A number of other places shootings, blasts are taking place! I told my watch man to sit inside the building and close the doors.In colaba it seems the terrorists got into a residential building terrace and consequentially a couple in their home were killed!I feel a sense of being dazed. I could call it a sense of unreality but I think it is the sense of reality settling into me. Maybe listening to blasts in Bangalore, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Assam, Islamabad did not do it. Maybe reading about the Congo genocide did not do it.But this that is happening is where the world is at......More later, now I am starving it is 3.00 in the morning and I need to eat.Get such interesting posts at your Inbox!!
If you wonder what left and right political leaning is take a look at political compass org, it has a long test, 6 pages lot of questions, some of them I had to read 5 times before it registered, and I could answer LOL!Anyway I finally finished and got my leaning:According to this site you are reading a libertarian left person. So my views tend towards a government which is a mix of communism and anarchy! It is actually quite accurate (I think). And what makes me really happy is that Dalai Lama, Gandhi and Nelson Mandela are the prominent figures who would be quite near me on this scale. 
The red dot is me... The analysis of international people's standing :
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I have been thinking about what being a journalist is all about?? Often we talk in class about the very ethical ideas of truth, humanity, duty .... anyway I am not gonna get into why that is pretty obsolete kind of stuff, because they are more or less totally subjective.Today we saw a fascinating movie in class 'The China Syndrome' about a nuclear plant and how a defect in it's making comes to light or doesn't come to light. (The outcome is not shown) There is a large bit about broadcast journalism in it that is the reason we watched it. It is a 70's movie, my professor said that at this time something known as balanced journalism was followed. According to this school of thought both sides of a situation are spoken by the anchor. This was followed in print also in the 70's in America.Now however newspapers are very much opinionated, and they all seem to be taking a stand. There are other schools of thought which say that newspaper's stand on the situation should be a part of telecast.My view however is towards balanced journalism, so that the viewers can make their choice and because usually there are 2 sides to the story and the solution lies in the middle. Taking the question conversely Does being opinionated make me a journalist, well not really cause in media now a days as we change channels one would have to change their opinions also. :DAnyway I don't have any first hand experience in journo yet, I generally like dabbling around with theories. Get such interesting posts at your Inbox!!
