Print Media in India has to change its style of writing

Most newspapers in India today are carrying articles about blogs. I read an article about Hindi blogs in the Times of India (Bangalore edition). Was happy to learn that there are about 500 active Hindi blogs, for the early years of broadband in India this is a sizeable number. Few blogs were mentioned in the article but not their URLs 🙁 I don’t understand why journalists in India like to “hide” vital information. If you are writing about a particular blog isn’t it natural for the reader to get the complete information? Duh!

Many times you read about a “portal” being inaugurated by a celebrity or a politician. But that article doesn’t mention the URL. Chances of search engine having that URL in their database is bleak. It is not clear to me why they don’t want to publish the URL. I guess they want the portal to pay the newspaper to include the URL in the article but that logic doesn’t work. If you cover an event, write everything about it, else don’t. You are only telling the world how stupid you are.

Since I mentioned the word “politician” let me touch upon another topic – political articles. In this age it is difficult to remember which politician belongs to which party. In the US they always mention the party and the state the Senator belongs to. Check out the following the two examples,

• Congress’s War Over the War: Some excerpts, Snowe (R-Maine) last visited Iraq in May and thought it looked like Berlin at the end of World War II. Struggling for the right answers, Boren (D-Okla.) listens carefully to his conservative constituents and consults regularly with his father, former senator David L. Boren, who chaired the intelligence committee.
• Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) is wary about the Iraqi government but invokes the smell of jet fuel from the Pentagon fire on Sept. 11, 2001
• Senate immigration bill suffers crushing defeat – Check out the left panel, very interesting. I am including it here for a quick reference,From the above table it is very clear who participated in the bill and which party-n-state they belong to.

Coming back to India, most readers know which party prominent politicians belong to. But few low profile/unknown politicians do “manage” to get into the news and we don’t know which party and state/constituency they belong to. We cannot infer from their “views / principles” which party they belong to because all our politicians stand for the following,

• Eradication of poverty
• Eradication of illiteracy
• Population control
• Pollution control
• Secular (what does this mean?)

In view of this confusion we must mention which party/state they belong to in all articles. Few examples that would help,

• A Mukherjee (CPM/West Bengal)
• Bangarappa (SP/Karnataka)