I haven’t read the Times of India for sometime, but sporadically read the online edition whenever I find the time, like today.
The previous reviews that I read on the same paper, were not very flattering and I would say that I agree with them.
The Times of India has a very mediocre feel to it. It feels more and more like a ’’hick’’ newspaper, more like ’’Seventeen’’ magazine than a newspaper which is able to report serious news.
It reminds me of the movie ’’Broadcast News’’ where the people who contribute quality news are superceded by the dumb, but good-looking news anchor , a representative of sensationalism and shallow reporting. For instance today, the headlines were cricket, OO7, movies and Britney Spears, all lowbrow news.
This really can’t be representative of a newspaper which claims to have a nationwide circulation.
Has society ’’dumbed’’ down so much that we can allow a newspaper to blatantly insult our intelligence by saying that it publishes all this because of ’’public demand’’?
Also why is a newspaper which is named ’’Times of India’’ reporting more foreign news than local news, which readers like me would be interested in. The local editions seem to have very sparse to no news.
In addition to the above, it seems to publish stories which contort facts. I accept that honest journalism is a dream, but leave it to the Times of India to get a piece of news without any serious connotations and blow it up to gargantuan proportions. The paper doesn’t seem to realize that the news pieces are actually read by people who are malleable enough to believe in it and act upon the information.
Norman Mailer said ’’Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists’’ and I would say it is very relevant in the case of Times of India.
Is the newspaper trying to mold itself differently from ’’The Hindu’’ and trying to portray itself as more of a ’’fun’’ paper with the 12-25 group as its target audience?
I am sure that the magazines published by the conglomerate cater to the group of people who want to read such material. Why not keep the newspaper more serious and sober?
The saving grace for Times of India is The Economic Times, which has got some very good analysts working for it.
Coming to why I sometimes read the Times of India, because among all the mediocrity is hidden articles or op-eds by some of the most distinguished people in Indian journalism which is truly a treat to read.
On a whole I would say that a reader should use his/her intellectual ’’sieve’’ to separate the chaff and the wheat and if done so, you could get through the newspaper in approximately fifteen minutes.
All said and done, the Sunday crossword is still one of the most enduring and probably the finest part of the newspaper, so just go ahead and buy the Sunday edition. I feel it (the crossword) is doing a ’’Horatio’’ stand against the banality of the rest of the paper