A funny thing has happened to newspapers over the last year and though we’ve all noticed it, few of us have bothered to discuss this development.

Which is odd, because you would have thought that somebody would have written an obituary by now. [Read more]

In the old days, journalists were prevented from referring to communities while reporting any acts of violence. At some level, this made a certain amount of sense.

If a man picked your pocket then it shouldn’t really matter whether he was a Sikh, a Jain, a Muslim or whatever. All that mattered was that he was a pickpocket. [Read more]

Do newspapers actually put two and two together? We pride ourselves on our ability to take seemingly unrelated events and to put them together so that readers can gain an insight.

But my sense is that most of us fail at this task. This was brought home to me to when I read Maureen Dowd in the New York Times (and nearly everywhere else - she is widely syndicated all over the world) recently. [Read more]

So, Archie is marrying Veronica? Or he is not. Actually, he is proposing to Veronica’s maid of honour, Betty Cooper. Or is he?

Confused? [Read more]

For nearly as long as I can remember, the prevailing consensus in mainstream media has been that liberalization is a good thing. Way back in the 1980s, when Dilip Thakore was the founding editor of Businessworld, he always made it clear that his policy was to back the corporate sector against government because there were too many restrictions on doing business in India. Few editors went quite as far as Malcolm Forbes who used to cheerfully describe his eponymous magazine as a capitalist tool, but there was no doubt that few socialists would ever make it to the top editorships. [Read more]