It’s cheap, it gives you great offers BUT....it’s useless.....Marketing is the buzz word here. All of sudden, my city beautiful, Chandigarh was talking about this great newspaper which was to start a Chandigarh edition. Well most people were talking about it because of the aggressive marketing done by the Hindustan Times. So yea, I did it. I subscribed to it. I saw no harm.
For the first month I must say I was impressed. Day after day it covered each and every little thing that happened in my city. It devoted pages and pages to the big and small achievements of the UTites. Lovely. My neighbour’s photograph appeared one day, then my friends at college too figured in it, now that got me thinking...this newspaper was too close.....too ’local’. After a month I realised I being a mass comm student had no impressive opinion over any issue of national interest. All I knew was what was happening in my city.
There are some things that I like..
One good thing about the HT is it’s Classifieds. They’re indexed. You can check out what you want by going through the index, so you don’t really have to sweat it out on each page. Good job. The HT Careers is yet another good supplement which has impressive articles for working people as well as for people preparing for job interviews. All this is interspersed with advertisements for job interviews.
The HT has an impressive editorial board and good articles of national interest, but it loses out on national level news.
In an effort to make HT a part of the UTite’s life they give the reader rather useless news about almost everything under the Chandigarh sun.
Slang
Another thing that I found rather disconcerting was the regular use of slang in the Chandigarh supplement. Maybe it’s acceptable to use guv instead of governor but for some reason it sounds highly unprofessional.
All in all...
As a business, HT has been an awesome success in Chandigarh, but as a newspaper it has failed miserably. It has managed to ’get’ people to subscribe, but it has failed in accomplishing the basic purpose of a newspaper....News!