October 2008 - Posts - A Romantic Realist

October 2008 - Posts

Do you endorse endorsements?

Posted by Raju Narisetti at 
Mint's Views page formal endorsement ( read it here ) of Barack Obama and the rationale behind it ( read it here ) is raising some debate on other blogs ( read one here ) in addition to soliciting comments such as this from Mint readers. Dear Sir, Though I was surprised to see an endorsement for the US Presidential elections by an Indian newspaper...

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May you Rest in Peace and, by the way, Happy 100th birthday

Posted by Raju Narisetti at 
Two seemingly disparate pieces of news from two continents both sounding the death rattle for celebrated media organizations that ought to be joyously celebrating their 100 th birthday tells you the story of an industry that is hurting badly in much of the Western world even as it remains healthy—for now—in places such as India. First the news. It is...

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Outsourcing the business of predicting the Obama-McCain race to India, via Vaastu

Posted by Raju Narisetti at 
It is eight days to go before Americans finally decide on their next president. By many accounts—and most polls and forecasts-- Barack Obama is walking away with the election. Still, there are serious questions about many of the polls as well as the methodology, a little-discussed debate in mainstream media that is effectively captured by The Numbers...

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When blogs beget blogs that beget blogs...

Posted by Raju Narisetti at 
Increasingly, many of us in print media are coming to realize that content is not king, conversation is. A good example of that, for me, has been the fact that a couple of recent blog postings on A Romantic Realist , in addition to generating a lot of back-and-forth in comments, also spawned detailed and interesting--whether one agrees or not with those...

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Whose IPR is it anyway?

Posted by Raju Narisetti at 
If it weren't such an egregious violation of the Indian Copyright Act of 1957, there would be delicious irony in the fact that India's National Knowledge Commission , a high-level advisory body to the Prime Minister of India created with the objective of transforming India into a knowledge society, including “ reforming the country's Intellectual...

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So, how many Muslims do I have in my newsroom--and my life?

Posted by Raju Narisetti at 
It was one of those serendipitous encounters. Rather than continue waiting for an errant car service at 6.30 am on a Saturday morning and risk missing my flight, I walked up to someone on the campus of the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore since he too looked like he might be headed to the airport. Turns out he was and was happy to give me a...

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Can Charticles help newspapers keep busy (and young) readers?

Posted by Raju Narisetti at 
One of the interesting challenges of being in the newspaper journalism business these days is that the battle isn't necessarily just about circulation figures--especially in India where newspapers are so cheap that hardly anyone drops a paper because they need to buy another paper every day. I mean Mint added 120,000 readers to Indian business newspapers...

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Rooting and voting for Obama from the Indian electoral college

Posted by Raju Narisetti at 
Every four years, one reads stories--and polls--about how the rest of the world actually prefers the candidate that often loses in the US presidential race. Many of us remember reading about how if Indians could vote, Bill Clinton would still be the US president! As the saying goes, if wishes were horses, beggars would indeed ride. Still, in the category...

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Political Kiss-Up and Up

Posted by Raju Narisetti at 
Two separate but somewhat related news items caught my eye this weekend. One was about the Indian government, led by the Congress party, announcing several economic and aid packages with an eye toward key state elections ( read full story here ). The other story was on that Congress party has picked Crayons as the ad agency that will handle its advertising...

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Keeping friends close while making enemies via Facebook

Posted by Raju Narisetti at 
For a long time I avoided Facebook , finally succumbing to it only when my LinkedIn got a bit too big for my liking. What I hoped to do was keep Facebook to a very small, tight group of "friends," people that I really, really want to engage with--a real walled garden if you will--while keeping LinkedIn for a larger community of some friends...

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