Do you like turns?

Let me explain. A turn is copy continuing from Page One to a page inside, any page. Read more

Did you see our Page One on George W Bush’s session at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit?

The heading simply said, “Namaste India.” The picture underneath was of Bush with folded hands. A moment immortalised. Read more

We got lucky with Kobad Gandhy and that’s how we had with the best story in town. Or was it more?
The excitement began early in the day.

Our Jamshedpur correspondent who has been in Delhi for a refresher course heard from a source: someone big has been picked up in Delhi. Read more

How many times will we say, “Delhi collapses every time it rains”? We have said that four times already this monsoon, or perhaps more. Though it hasn’t rained that much, but the few times it did, the city collapsed.

Office hour traffic, which is usually quite slow, goes down to a crawl. Distances covered in five minutes take an hour or more. Sometimes, the jam begins just outside the colony gates. Read more

When do you move on? When do you let a running story slip down the Page One hierarchy? Not an easy call, specially if the rivals had it up there at the top the next day, with more details.

We nearly hit that slope on the swine flu story Wednesday night. So, nothing much had happened in Pune or anywhere else, except more panic in Pune. There was a run on hospitals there. Read more

So what did you think of our new design? Cool, isn’t it? Now that it’s all over and the new Hindustan Times is out there, I can talk about a feedback session when we tested it first on some readers – all young and upwardly mobile Delhiites. Read more

I don’t think most people don’t read the anchor story, you know the story right at the bottom of the page, placed between the ad on the right and the briefs column on the left.

Readership surveys have apparently shown that readers, one, don’t notice it, and, two; they don’t go so far down the page, they simply move on. I don’t buy this, not at all. Read more

The first election I covered was in 1994. Delhi was made of seven Lok Sabha seats as now, but differently sized. East Delhi and Outer Delhi were the massive comprising 20 and 21 assembly constituencies respectively. In fact, if my memory is still with me, which it is I think, Outer Delhi was the most populous Lok Sabha constituency in the country – a dubious honour, but an honour no doubt. Read more

Everyone was a little tired of Pakistan. Our foreign editor left for home every day praying for a quiet night. But he was back on his BlackBerry within 30 minutes or thereabouts.

One more suicide bombing, one more statement from their home office or one more twist in the Swat story. It just didn’t stop. Tuesday night our Mumbai crime reporters came back with some more. Read more

Quite simply, putting together a newspaper in the night is a bit like teen-patti – put your money on the table and pray the player on your right is a bigger fool. Next morning, when you see what others did, you kick yourself a bit, curse some colleague and generally feel vindicated about something as small as getting the skyboxes right, or a headline. Read more