Ever since I can remember it, my family used to subscribe to the Hindustan times. Not only us, but all of papa’s friends, all our relations, everybody had HT delivered. I liked the HT, but found its news coverage too “staid” and the prose too heavy, not “friendly” English.
When I was in class 10th, my school, Naval Public School in Chanakyapuri, started the Newspaper in Education (NIE) program. In NIE, the TOI delivered newspapers to free of charge of the classes. Now this was the period before TOI had just had the new management take over, and were trying to revamp the whole image and style of the TOI. They identified the 10th std. and above as a test market for this new image.
All of us found the TOI “ritzy”. The language was “cool”, the news reports were liberally interposed with words like “bindass” and the whole style, including page layouts, length of columns, etc, were designed to appeal to the TOI target segment, namely the 16-40 age group. Also, the TOI began, for the first time, to introduce “specials”, like the Monday supplements etcetera, which were in color and very glossy. The “news” in these supplements was of society happenings, gossip and lots of fun stuff.
The problem with this was that TOI was more concerned with image, style, gossipy language and all the other extras than actual news reporting style, which was supposed to be detached, reporting news as it was, not spicing it up to sell more copies.
Of course I, like any other young adult, had definite opinions on what was good and what was bad, and the hell to all else! I started subscribing the TOI together with the HT.
Years passed, I grew. India took giant leaps in technology, the amul ads got better, we were introduced to the wonders of BBC and CNN…khana khazana was on air....ok, I digress…but the point is that with more maturity, I came to realize that the TOI reporting was, well, frivolous.
After seeing the days events, one wanted an analytical discussion in the morning papers, rather that just spiced up news with no analysis, nothing, which is what I got with TOI. Other papers did latch on to this, a shining example being the Pioneer and also the Asian Age, superb newspapers those.
But the TOI remained catering to the teenybopper market, still having the same idiotic, and by now irritating, slant on reporting. Also, they were shamelessly promoting other TOI group entities, like we had newspaper reports promoting the Filmfare Awards, for crying out loud!! not ads, mind you, but actual 2-3 column reports selling to us the wonders of these awards (which are another thing all together, and I will lash out against them some other time :) )
Also, TOI has started paying more attention to the supplements, rather than actual news reporting.
The TOI had turned into a tabloid, and there was no hope for humanity, except super spook, who saved the world with his heroics…sorry..well, TOI had turned into a tabloid. The online editions are worse. My day has to start with logging on to Indian newsites to ensure that AB is still our PM, and to hope against hope that some intelligent chap has bounced off Mamata and Amma…...but when I do log on to TOI, I see photos of semi nude women staring at my face, with an option of seeing the slide show. What the hey? When I log on to a news site, I want news, not a slideshow of semi nudes. On a tangent, for those of you not living in India, samachar.com is a fantastic site, as is hindustantimes.com, if only for articles by Vir Sanghvi.
So, there you go. If you want serious news, avoid TOI. If a tabloid sort of news is your cuppa, TOI is yours. Personally, I gave up on TOI 3 years back, and judging by what I see online and by my recent visit to India; I made the right decision to dump TOI.