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The state of mainstream Indian journalism, it can be argued, is somewhat reflected by the number of journalists churning out books; leaving for greener PR, corporate communications and “policy”) pastures; joining thinktanks; going on sabatticals, etc—and it is probably no different from the rest of the world.

But nobody drives home the issue better than Dibyojyoti Basu.

Once chief of bureau at M.J. Akbar‘s Asian Age in Calcutta. Once the director of Calcutta Doordarshan’s first news-based private television show Khas Khabar (a la Aaj Tak). Once the head of Ananda Bazaar Patrika‘s television wing. Once host of Khoj Khabar on Tara Bangla. And now…

And now, the proud owner of Woven, a lounge in Delhi’s Meher Chand marker, for Bengali sarees.

Basu, who hosted his last show in 2011  on Akash Bangla before it was pulled off by its Left-leaning promoters, sees this as a hibernation period, before he achieves his life ambition of starting his own TV station.

Visit Dibyojyoti Basu’s shop: Woven



 The news of former Bihar chief minister Laloo Prasad Yadav being sentenced to five years in jail for the fodder scam under his watch was reported in the same old way by most newspapers which think readers do not have access to radios, TVs, laptops, tablets and mobile phones.

Not The Telegraph.

The Calcutta newspaper, with its tongue in rosogolla-lined cheek, telescopes into the future and enters the world Laloo will see in 2024, which is when he will be become eligible to contest elections once again, after a six-year hiatus following his release.

Laloo will then be 77, Narendra Modi will be 74, Rahul Gandhi will be 54, and Hema Malini—whose smooth cheeks became Laloo’s yardstick for smooth roads in Bihar—will be 76.

While those are all real possibilities, The Telegraph also looks at the less real possibilities—like Sachin Tendulkar still playing and pondering his retirement, like Hillary Clinton ending her second term as US President.

Along the way, the paper also wonders about whether the print medium will be around in 2024:

“Watch this space. If newspapers are still around the way we know them, we will tell you how right or wrong we were.”

Also read: The last newspaper will be printed in 2043

Will paper tigers last longer than real ones?


 Business World is out in a new avatar with a new periodicity.

In the first issue of the relaunched magazine, Fortune India art director Nilanjan Das and deputy art director Sanjay Piplani explain how they came up with the new design for the ABP group’s original business magazine.

The Grid: We live in an integrated world. We access content across media, platforms and screens. So we reassessed the grid — the intersecting lines that form the structure of a layout — to make the magazine a visual as well as literary delight, while maintaining fluidity across pages. Now, there is more white space, and images come out stronger and sharper.

The Fonts: A magazine’s character largely depends on typography. So we scoured 300 fonts to find the ones that were smart and elegant, so essential for a business publication. We selected 25 — 15 serif and 10 sans-serif fonts. Mixing and matching them on page, we cherry-picked three sans-serif and two serif fonts. And, we tried to challenge traditional styles of section heads and drop caps by making them bigger and bolder.

The Palette: Business persons are a dynamic herd. So should the media they engage with. There should be myriad colours; in all hues and tints. BW’s colour palette offers just that — a wide range of bright, warm, cool and elegant shades. We assembled the new palette with the intention of giving the pages a fresh, distinctive and powerful look, vis-à-vis our peers.

Also read: Business World to go fortnightly from weekly


 What goes around, comes around. Fourteen years after it went weekly, India’s second oldest business magazine, Businessworld from the Anand Bazaar Patrika group, is reverting to a fortnightly.

In a note to readers in the last issue of its weekly avatar, editor Prosenjit Datta explains why:

In 1999, when we had turned weekly, there was a very clear need to do so.

Twitter did not exist, and the Internet contained largely static content when it came to news. There was just one business news channel and it focused mostly on stocks. Most of the newspapers concentrated on news, and not analysis.

There was a great need for a business newsweekly…. a weekly publication that could analyse in detail the implications of the events taking place.

Over time though, the world changed and so did BW’s core content. As the Internet matured, and more dedicated business channels were born, they took over the primary role of disseminating news…. News became an increasingly small portion of what BW offered.

Now we are carrying those changes to the next logical step. We are stepping out of the news genre to focus entirely on issues, events and trends that will affect your business and the economy in the future.

Link via N.M. Upadhyay

Read the full note: Dear Readers

Also read: ‘Business journalists deserve credit for reforms’


 

Images: courtesy The Times of India

Read the full introduction: A second homecoming

Also read: The grandmother of all newspaper battles

Buy our newpaper: get a Harley-Davidson free!

Times, Telegraph and the Bengali paper wars

The new kid on the block announces an eclipse


 The front page of Ei Bela, the new Bengali tabloid launched by the Ananda Bazaar Patrika (ABP) group in Calcutta, as a “buffer” to counter the launch of a Bengali newspaper from The Times of India group, on the day Mamata Banerjee‘s Trinamool Congress walked out of the Congress-led UPA.

This is the second tabloid from the ABP group, after the now-defunct evening daily The Metropolitan under M.J. Akbar.

Also read: Times, Telegraph and the Bengali paper wars

Read our paper, get  Harley-Davidson free!


