Why are we not angry?

Have we lost our sense of outrage. Suhasini Haider, the petite anchor of CNN-IBN makes her point over Jesical Lall murder.

My daughter

Yuvika, my one-and-a -half year-old daughter, is just a bit disappointed after finding a doll taller than her.

Eating IT up

Tatas are known to be caring employers and all its group companies take credit in claiming that they are governed by the famed Tata ethics and culture. Tata Consultancy Services, the IT arm of Tatas and the princess of the Tata group companies, is the second biggest software employer in the country with over 41000 employees on its rolls. TCS sends its employees on frequent onsite assignments which take them to various parts of the globe within 18 months of their joining the company. The compnay aims to be among top 10 global IT companies by 2010.
Now a class action suit filed by one of its employees against the company accusing it of systematically pocketing federal and state tax refunds meant for him can substantially damage the image of TCS.

The dark side of moon

Flip side of IT?

Why Nitish didn't become a Steven Spielberg

Ranjan Das, a writer and director of documentary films writes about the funny ways of a wannabe filmmaker who wants to make a film but realises that he does not have it in him to be a filmmaker. I chanced upon this write-up from the desk of Kapilash Bhuyan, a friend who despite his broken leg, is planning to visit a fledgling film festival in Puri. It's surely funny..

THE MATURING OF NITISH

Nitish is a filmmaker, that rare breed who calls itself filmmakers without having made a single film. Perhaps being a filmmaker is the only profession where you don’t have to practice the craft in order to call yourself one; it takes care of everything, unlike say, a singer or an actor who has the advantage of singing or acting in front of a motley crowd at least, in order to lay claim to that profession. Nitish frequently had to face this question from people:

What do you do?
I am a filmmaker.

Oh, that’s good, but what do you do?
I am a filmmaker!

Na-na, that’s ok, but what do you do for a living?

And the conversation would gradually take a different turn and Nitish would make himself scarce… So Nitish decided that the next time anybody asked him what did he do, he would say that he was a writer - a scriptwriter. But his problems persisted.

What was that?
Well, it is writing for a film. There is a story and I am required to write the screenplay from that story; sometimes I write the story myself…

Oh, the screenplay, meaning you write dialogues?
Ok, ya…

What films have you written?
Nothing yet… actually I am working on a couple of scripts…

Oh, so you have not written anything as yet…
It’s not like that you see…

No-no, I mean you have not written anything that has been made into a feature film?

So back to square one. Nitish did not have a palpable profession that fetched him a livelihood… He was not a technician, an editor or cameraman or a sound recordist where he could rattle off names of projects… Worse still was when anybody asked which film stars he knew… How could he tell them that he has never stepped into a studio floor? Nobody would believe him…

He was in a state of limbo…

So he decided to go to Bring Your Own Film Festival at Puri in 2004 and met a lot of people who belonged to that breed who called themselves filmmakers without having made a single film. But he also met a whole lot of other people who had made films which were being screened at the festival. Nitish gathered courage and decided that next time he would come to Puri with a film of his own, made on DV, a format that has become so popular in the last couple of years.

So after the festival was over, he went back to his home town (wherever it is, but I have a lurking feeling that it is somewhere in the eastern of the country) and embarked on a project of working out a feasible script that could be shot in two to three days with friends as actors and technicians in minimum locations. The length would be something around 10 to 15 minutes and the budget should not exceed… Damn it man, one has to work up the budget… But that can wait.

So he spent the next couple of weeks thinking up ideas and threw them inside the waste paper basket. Damn it, it’s so difficult to work up a feasible script. He thought of all the films that he had seen in the festival and tried to draw inspiration. He summoned up all the European and Latin American masters that he has seen in the last 15 years… The inspiration was there, but the ideas were lacking. But being one never to give up, Nitish continued to struggle with himself and still he could not come up with an idea that appealed to him.

And suddenly it occurred to him, does he have it in him to make a film at all? Or is it just inspiration, a burning desire without the accompanying competence? All his years of film viewing, dissecting masters, abusing contemporary directors (without having seen any of their films), studying semiotics and structuralism and fighting with friends over film related issues… he was now 35 and Rimli, his girlfriend from college, had left him to marry an investment consultant in the US six years ago after waiting in vain for him to make a film for years on end…

Nitish started questioning his ability and hit the bottle. Not that he never drank before, but this time he immersed himself in the liquid… and lo and behold, he suddenly hit upon an idea! There it was, floating in front of him all this time and he was not aware of it. And in a state of trance he wrote out a treatment… Next morning when he read it he discovered that it was not so bad after all. So that evening he drank again and started working out the details. And slowly a script started shaping up…

The next few days he drank without respite and wrote till he was through with the script and drank more… He had it in him after all… He was not incompetent…The next step was to consult a cameraman friend and work out the feasibility of the project in terms of production and budget. Well… even if he didn’t pay anybody and got the camera free and edited the film at night on the sly at some studio with the help of an editor friend, the budget still came to 50 grand. But there was no stopping him now. He borrowed from friends and relatives (his friends had immense faith in him always as a filmmaker); sold his mother’s jewelry, stole (yes!)… He was like a man possessed. And then he shot his film and edited it.

And he was a changed man when he saw the final version: It was a pile of shit. Nitish never went to the BYOFF at Puri in the second year. Today he works as an accounts assistant in a private firm and draws a salary of Rs 3,000.

Moral of the story: Just as the digital ‘revolution’ has democratized and demystified the process of filmmaking, it has also opened the floodgates of garbage that is being churned out by a whole lot of people who call themselves ‘independent filmmakers’. At least, Nitish realized that he was a pile of shit; most don’t.

An Anecdote: One friend from London writes to another in Calcutta (this was long before the days of e-mails and computers when people still wrote in longhand): “…and how are our friends in Calcutta?” The friend from Calcutta wrote back: “Oh, they are all fine and working. And those who are not working are making documentary films.”

Yes to divorce, but also to arranged marriages.

Yes to divorce, but also to arranged marriages. Yes to living in, but also to joint families. Young Indians, across big cities and small towns, want managed modernity and tradition with a twist. Dilip Bobb writes in India Today about about the changing social mores among youth.

In India, this generation, 700-million strong, is poised at a defining moment in the country's history. The dramatic changes in the economy, the market place, in job opportunities and lifestyle choices, their access to enabling technology and the affluence that they currently enjoy make them the most privileged and prosperous generation India has ever known. They are also the most potentially decisive in terms of shaping a new India and ensuring its place in the world.

The most dramatic change witnessed between this survey and the one conducted in 2004 is the attitude towards traditional social taboos like divorce. An astonishing 71 per cent now feel that getting divorced is a better option than staying in a bad marriage. The surprise element was that the region most heavily in favour of leaving a bad marriage was the traditionally conservative east. Even more revealing was the fact that among youth in non-metro towns like Ludhiana, Kochi, Lucknow and even Patna, the support for divorce as an option was over 60 per cent. Small town youth are clearly more progressive than is popularly believed.

After IT, media?

If there is one profession where the generation gap is starkly evident, it is journalism. Most of the media veterans are vocal in insisting that the profession has suffered an ethical and qualitative nosedive. In particular, they point to the growing commercialisation of the media to argue that the dissemination of information today resembles the marketing of soap and toothpaste. Writing in the Mumbai paper Free Press Journal renowned coloumnist and journalist Swapan Dasgupta argues why newspaper owners need to increase their Budgets for newsgathering.

When people built their own Rly station

Another Swades. Only that the people didn't need a Shah Rukh Khan to show the way. In Rajasthan, people power have done what a lethargic Railways could not do. Frustrated by the repeated rejections of their demands for a railway station, the villagers built their own railway station. All the villagers chipped and within a few days there was a railway station. Officials in Indian Railways should now die of shame. The Indian Express today has an excellent story on how villagers of Balwantpura in Jhunjhunu district of Rajasthan built their own railway stop.

Rethinking Newspapers: The Indian Context

Writing in his blog Emergic, Rajesh Jain makes a case for Indian newspapers to reorient their strategies.

Indian media is booming. TV channels are sprouting up to cater to every niche. FM radio is coming into its own. The Internet too is showing signs of a revival. The mobile is emerging as a new alternative. And newspapers are proliferating. Flush with funds, most Indian publishing houses are expanding operations. Mumbai provides a good snapshot of what's happening: Hindustan Times entered, DNA launched, and Mumbai Mirror was created by Times of India as yet another alternative.

Yet, when I sit to read the newspapers every morning, I find fewer and fewer stories to read. And it is not just because I may have read the stories on the Internet or seen them on TV. I cannot but help thinking that, in their efforts to build (or retain) a mass user base rapidly, most newspapers have decided that they need to cater to the lowest common denominator. That means focusing on the youth, who've got limited attention span and (perhaps) prefer dumbed-down versions of stories. And that is exactly what the rest of us get. The Indian Express remains the only exception and that's why it is the paper I read first.

After reading Jeff Jarvis and Jon Fine, I started thinking about the Indian context. How can Indian newspapers improve their content so that I spend more time with the newspaper and with their brand? I may not fall in the youth category but, surely, my attention is worth something and there are plenty of others like me. How can an Indian newspaper build a compelling print and online proposition for readers like me? For the purpose of this discussion, I will focus on English newspapers.

An English language newspaper in India must make the assumption that every one of its readers has access to the Internet. Considering that the largest English-language Indian newspaper sells a million copies and the Internet user base is estimated at anywhere between 25-35 million users, that is a reasonable assumption. In fact, it can also be assumed that the reader uses a mobile phone. So, that is the context in which one needs to think. The newspaper reader is not just always reachable (via mobile) but also has access to a connected computer for complementing the printed paper.

In this context, much of what Jeff Jarvis says is applicable in the Indian context also. Some of the newspaper sections can be moved entirely online with support for personalisation. The printed paper can work as a window to the various sections and stories online. For example, each story in print must have a number which allows me to easily find that story online and send it to friends or colleagues at work, and perhaps, blog it. Also, as a user, I can set up my own e-paper(or m-paper) online with preferences for different sections especially, in finance and entertainment. SMS can be used to alert me to local events and breaking stories. Taken together, these will create a much close relationship between the reader and the newspaper allowing for monetisation through advertisements which can much more tailored.

Indian newspapers could also engage their readers a lot more. One step in that direction would be to enable their journalists to blog so that stories can have discussion and follow-ups. There are times when, for space reasons, stories are edited for the print version. It would be nice to read about the writers' thoughts and experiences and that may be better done on the web than in print. In addition, newspapers can also showcase some of the writings from bloggers. There is now a growing base of Indian bloggers and the commentary is getting smarter. [To its credit, Mumbai Mirror does feature a couple blog posts daily on a specific topic.]

Taken together, a lot of these changes will make for a better product. Will it increase circulation? I don't know. But I do know, that it will make for a better reading experience every morning for many of us. India is changing and we need our newspapers to change with it for the better. Of course, the newspapers could argue that they are changing. And their real customers are not us but the advertisers who pay money to reach their reader base and those revenues are rising. What I am not sure of is how long this trend will continue. In the next 2-3 years, India will see a significant increase in both always-on and broadband Internet connections, and data-enabled mobile handsets. That is the world newspapers will have to prepare for. It is a world where search engines will rule and users will be able to subscribe to the topics(and ads) of their interest. It is a world where each of us can get our Daily Me. It is also a world of multiplying media options as video becomes a reality on the Internet and the mobile.

Despite all the futuristic talk, I still think there is a distinct charm in holding the newspaper in your hand. Or, maybe, I come from the old school where habits die hard. I just wish for the days when the newspaper would open minds and expand thinking. Or, maybe, the world of media and technology has moved too far ahead, and we better accept the wisdom of the crowds. Whatever it is, I hope to get a better product in the months and years to come, and spend more time, not less, with the newspaper. Or, maybe, that is wishful thinking. Only time will tell.

Scoops vs collaboration

Jeff Jarvis argues that newspaper scoops could be enriched by collborating with public as well as bloggers before they are published.

Steve Baker laments that he could not blog to the world about the gigantic Business Week cover story on math that he has been working on for months. It frustrated him not being able to talk about what was consuming his days because Steve is now living the transparent lifestyle. I know, because Steve told me about it over lunch but swore me to secrecy until the thing was out. And knowing Steve, I’m sure it also frustrated him that he could not tap the knowledge and generosity of his readers and fellow bloggers — and there are, no doubt, plenty of amazing mathematicians among them who could have enriched the story and even enlarged the audience. (And I’m not one of them.)

Is it better for Steve and Business Week to have held back their story from public view until it was packaged and polished and delivered in print, or to have sought out the best advice on it from an informed public by seeking collaboration via Steve’s blog as the story was being formed? Which produces a better product and a better business?

Of course, the magazine vets would say that they could not possibly let the world know about such a megastory because then the competitors would steal the scoop. How silly of me even to ask. But what competitors: US Weekly? And if Fortune came along and did its mondomath story, at least colleagues in the business would know it was a ratty thing to do, stealing from Steve’s blog, indicating they didn’t have ideas of their own.

If publications shared what they were working on and if the practice succeeded in improving stories — and, indeed, in drumming up excitement for them — then they’d all end up doing this and all would fear being stolen from. Honor among hacks. The bigger question is whether there is value left in the scoop. As good as it is, will that math story really drive extra newsstand sales (no matter how much Steve tried to get them to sex it up)?

Or is the essence of a magazine — and its strength in a world where content has been dethroned by connections — that it is about an ongoing relationship with a public that shares interests? Obviously — except for the aforementioned US and other outlets of bodily fluids journalism — I’d vote for the latter. Perhaps it is better to create the means for that community of shared interests, needs, and expertise to improve stories and gain and share knowledge. Perhaps it is better to make magazines less of a product and more of a process, less of a subscription to a thing and more of a membership to a community. Stop me before I go too far. Oh, too late.

Now let’s ask, what is the value of the scoop in the more timely media of newspaper and broadcast? Do scoops really drive the business? Or do they stoke the ego? Here, too, I’ll vote for the latter. Now you could argue that in this marketplace, where Google kills brands and levels the content playing field, it’s more necessary than ever to have the scoops and exclus and stars that separate you from the pack. Except I’m not sure they do separate you. My wife reads newspapers and magazines far more loyally and diligently than I do and she remembers every fascinating thing she finds … except she never remembers where she reads the stories she repeats because that matters only to me, not to her. My mother used to quote stories to me that she’d read in the Chicago Tribune, when we all lived there — even when I had written them. Bylines and scoops and exclus are not worth as much as we assume they are.

I just came back from the Online Publishers Association confab, where I spoke at the end, and I said that we waste too much resource and money on ego: on having our own movie critic, though the movies are the same everywhere and the opinions that matter are those of the audience; on having our own golf writer go to the tournament far away, though the score is the same as the one reported hours before on TV; on sending our own political pundits to the political conventions, when nothing happens there.

And perhaps holding back stories like that Business Week cover also carries a price. Perhaps involving the public of interested and expert people will bring more knowledge to the story and to the community gathering around that formerly print brand. And perhaps that community will help market itself, linking to the discussion and the story to tell people who wouldn’t have otherwise cared that Business Week has a story about math that will interest them; perhaps that’s the real newsstand bump you want.

As the news industry faces huge business challenges and the urgent need to find new efficiencies, one of the questions it has to ask is what the real value — and cost — of scoops, exclus, stars, and secrecy are. Or to put it another way: How much are we investing in institutional — and often, personal — ego that should be invested in better information and stronger relationships?

Rethinking Newspapers

Indian newspapers have to focus less on reporting and more on journalism. There needs to be a greater emphasis on doing in-depth stories about the changing India. as is being done by the international publications that do more insightful trend-capturing stories on the changing India than the homegrown magazines and newspapers.

Read weblogger and journalist Jeff Jarvis's take on New Age newspapers in his blog Buzzmachine.

Newspapers waste too much money on ego, habit, and commodity news the public already knows. In an era of shrinking circulation, classified, and retail ad revenue — and in the face of shrinking audience and increasing competition — papers have to find new efficiencies and cut these expenses to concentrate instead on their real value (which, I’ll argue, is local reporting).

Newspapers also have to have the guts to stop trying to produce one-size-fits-all products that serve every possible reader and interest in one edition. When they were monoplies, newspapers tried to have something for everyone so they would attract the largest possible audience and assure their status as the marketplaces in their markets. But today, that can be terribly inefficient: What is the real cost of maintaining stock tables for the few readers who still use them in print? More on that below.

And newspapers have to take an even more frightening step: They need to start driving readers from print to online. Yes, that means driving readers from a higher-margin product, print, to a lower-margin product, online — but those margins are artificially maintained because advertisers still value print more than readers do (why else is the print audience shrinking while online is growing?). When reality catches up to advertisers, and when buying ads online in a distributed world is made easier — and that will happen — will newspapers be ready? When that day does come, newspapers will even have to consider selling print as a value-added upgrade to online, the reverse of what is done today.

The point of this exercise is to peel away the layers of the onion that a newspaper no longer needs so it can get to the core of what it really is, what it does best, what it must be to survive and prosper. You can pose the question one of two ways: What do we kill to save money, or what do we kill so we can shift resources to more important things? Whichever, you can’t stay the same and certainly can’t develop new features until you cut the fat and flesh. Mind you, I am not saying that all this needs to be killed. But I am saying that this is a necessary exercise to get to the essence of what a newspaper has to be. So I’ll start the bidding; please add your nominations (and disagreements):

BUSINESS

* Stock tables have to go. The Star-Ledger in New Jersey (with whom I used to work) killed most of its stock listings more than four years ago and didn’t suffer at all. In fact, they saved $1 million a year in paper and ink even with added improvements in the business section. It’s shocking — but a telling commentary on the snail-led newspaper business — that only now is another paper, the Chicago Tribune, planning to follow suit, sending people to a toll-free phone service and online for commodity stock prices.

Consider the economics: What is the net profit per subscriber? How many of those subscribers need to cancel their subscriptions before you lose more money than you would if you killed the stock tables? The truth is that you’ll likely lose only a handful of subscribers. But even if you lost hundreds, I have no doubt that the consequent loss of circulation revenue and audience to support your ad rates would be far less than the savings you’ll recognize from killing the tables. That is the essential business calculation of this exercise. Keep those economics in mind when we get to other features. It means that while everyone in the business is trying desperately to maintain circulation, the smart thing to do may be to decrease your unprofitable circulation if it means getting rid of major costs. Heed the cash cow in the coal mine.

* National business news is covered well in other publications, online, and on cable. Can a local paper really compete? I don’t think so, or at least I’ve never seen one do it very well. Do you get rid of it? Probably not. But you can reduce coverage to digests and major news — and if enough papers need such packaging, you can be sure the Associated Press will provide it.

* Local business news is, clearly, part of the franchise. But many markets now have local business weeklies (see American City, with whom I also used to work). I’d examine the coverage of a daily newspaper section vs. the weekly business paper and consider new relationships: Maybe the weekly can provide daily coverage more efficiently and at a low cost if it drives branding and subscriptions for the weekly. If the daily paper doesn’t want to concede the turf, maybe it should create a product to compete head-to-head with the weekly. Much of this depends on how much news is really generated and covered locally — that yields one analysis in L.A. and another in Peoria — and how much ad revenue is attributable to business in print.

Local business news also includes the bread-and-butter lists of promotions and such. I would drive that online, where you can be comprehensive at no cost, where you can publish every damned press release and promotion there is, which you could never do in print. Online does attract business advertising.

* Personal finance is more of a national story than a local one. If you believe you need to provide advice about taxes and mutual funds, you can get it from the wires and syndicates and you can meter how much you buy based on how much ad revenue you generate. If you’re worried about providing the service to readers and don’t get ad revenue, then don’t waste the space and instead just give them links.

Local newspaper business sections are generally unimpressive and so you need to calculate whether — given the current competitive and ad landscape — it is worth investing more to improve them or whether you can provide sufficient service at lower cost.

ENTERTAINMENT

* Critics are luxuries. This is heresy for me, a former critic and creator of a magazine of criticism. But newspapers don’t all need their own movie, TV, and music critics. The movies are no different in Terre Haute than in New York. Lots of local critics are second-rate. And the truth is that the opinions of the audience matter at least as much as theirs. You can syndicate other critics or you can enable your audience to be the critic. If you’re going to continue to employ critics, concentrate on the uniquely local, like local bands, to help serve a different audience. Oh, and if you’re keeping a TV critic to report on new general managers at local TV stations nobody knew anyway, you’re wasting that money.

* TV listings are a goner. They take up lots of newsprint and don’t work well as more channels are squeezed into a tighter space. Lots of people get their information from their TiVos, cable boxes, and online. And TV is going to continue to explode such that time-based guides will become more and more irrelevant. Now every circulation director I know will faint at the notion of getting rid of TV books and pages but I’ll just bet that some paper will try it and find itself no worse off. I’d recommend providing some highlights and call it a day.

* Movie listings are tougher, for they can be comprehensive and they are convenient. Some papers are switching to paid listings only and that makes sense.

* Entertainment listings work best online if they are comprehensive and searchable — and if they are provided by the venues and not at the expense of newsroom resources. I’d look at this as an opportunity to be more of a gathering place for information and less of a printed feed of repetitive listings: Provide a data base that venues can use to enter data. I’d list highlights in the paper to promote fuller listings online.

SPORTS

* Most sports columnists are, according to sports-fan-friends of mine (I’m quick to caution that I’m not one), a waste of ink. Are you better off paying their salaries or syndicating the best?

* National sports coverage is a luxury … for the guy doing the coverage. Do you really need to send your own guy to that golf tournament?

* Sports agate will be the next to go online, after stock tables and TV listings. Sure, keep listing the details for local teams. But send users online for the national stats. Better yet, provide more comprehensive stats for local school teams online than you ever could in print. Change readers habits to expect the fine print online.

Sports presents interesting challenges. Less than half of the audience reads sports and the endemic ad revenue has never been great (tire ads and … tire ads). Yet those those who read sports are ferociously loyal to the subject. So should papers consider creating separate sports products either online or in print? Would there be sufficient audience and revenue? Should papers concentrate more heavily on local sports, down to the very local level? More on that another day.

LIFESTYLE AND FEATURES

* Comics are a killer. Every time a paper changes so much as a hair on Beetle Bailey’s head, the editor’s office is overrun with angry mobs. Yet comics take up a lot of paper with no advertising; they strictly support circulation. Hmmmm. What do you think?

* Syndicated features like bridge and advice columns, similarly, get no ad revenue and have nothing to do with the local mission of a paper. As older readers die off, taking these habits with them, I’d try to kill these features off.

* Food, home, fashion, and travel coverage get low readership but high ad dollars. I’d concentrate on buying the best features from elsewhere rather than spending a lot on dedicated staff and supplement that with local freelance columns and features.

NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL NEWS

Now we start striking the bone. News is news. But I’ll be that half the papers that maintain third-rate bureaus in Washington would do better running news from syndicates — AP, Reuters, Washington Post, NY Times, Knight-Tribune — and covering local pols with local news staffs.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: It is absolutely pointless to be the paper that sends the 15,001st journalist to the political conventions, where nothing happens and what does happen can be seen on C-SPAN and the internet. Sending your own people to the conventions and other gang-up stories is fueled by one motivation: ego. Reporters want to be on what they think is the big — read: blanketed — story. And editors want to brag that they sent them. But readers don’t give a damn. See my post below on the value and cost of scoops and exclus. Following the mob to the story that’s already over-covered does not serve journalism. It serves the ego or reporters and their institutions. And it wastes money and space and opportunities to cover more important local stories that really matter to readers’ lives.

LOCAL NEWS

Welcome to the marrow. Local news is what should matter most to a newspaper (with only a few exceptions). And newspapers need to find new ways to gather more local news. I’ll cover that in a subsequent post. But it’s apparent that if you reduce what you’re spending — read: wasting — on some of the areas above, then you can afford to spend more on the news that matters in your market, the news only you can provide, the one kind of news that makes you indispensible in any medium.

But not all local news is worth the effort. I have long argued, without much company, that one of the greatest wastes of newspapering is editing for prize committees. Writing overlong, show-off series that are aimed at winning Pulitzers and lesser awards is often done for institutional ego over actual service. Tracking meth across the globe sounds cool on a prize application but I’ll bet you that most readers don’t give a damn. If, instead, you took those resources to get rid of a crooked mayor or reform property taxes, you’d be performing a far greater journalistic service. It may not get you awards, but it will get you readers.

And I’d look hard at your local columnists and ask whether they are as informative and entertaining as local bloggers. They used to provide some humanity and voice in otherwise gray, dull papers. Maybe your readers can help do that now. More on that in a later post.

The challenge in local news will be to get more and more local. But that, too, I will cover in a subsequent post.

At the end of this, I believe, the essence of a newspaper is local news with some other services and distractions. It is important for newspapers to boil themselves down to their essence and figure out how to do better at providing that unique and valuable service. That’s when you can start reconstructing what a newspaper — on paper or not — can be and should be today.

* Editorials and editorial columnists. Does a paper really need an editorial board and columnists just to produce opinions when, as the blogosphere amply demonstrates every day, there is no shortage of opinions out there. If you want a true op-ed, perhaps the goal should be to better capture the opinions of the public.

: In the comments, Nellie laments each one of the proposals above and asks the crucial question:

Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of angry and sometimes heartbroken phone calls come to the receptionist every time one of these dubious “improvements” is implemented. Each represents a reader who blames the local paper for wrenching away a part of their lives they’ve come to depend on.

Paring away the parts of the product that people care about leaves what?

And there’s the real question, isn’t it: What is the role of a newspaper in a community and in readers’ lives. If it is still expected to be all things to all people in a nichey world, I’m afraid the business will not work. That’s why newspapers need to figure out their essence.

Forgotten hero

Heroes and hype - they go hand in hand. As a nation,
Indians have always put their cricket heroes on a high
pedestal. They shower them with praise, but they also
have a nasty habit of soon forgetting them once the
hype is over.

If last year Team India had no place for Sourav, this
year Team Orissa has no place for 28-year-old
right-handed opener Shiv Sundar Das, Orissa's first
Test centurian. While the Raj Singh Dungarpurs and the
Greg Chappells saw to it that Sourav was excluded, in
Orissa it's OCA secretary Ashirbad Behera and chief
selector Chinmayananda Behera.

Das, who has opened in 23 Tests on-the-trot and
captained the State Ranji squad till 2004, was dropped
on Monday by the Orissa Cricket Association from the
the list of 25 probables for the East Zone Ranji
Trophy one-day championship to be held at Dhanbad from
Feb 11. Neither the news made it to the frontpages of
local newspapers nor did it create a sense of
indignation among the people of the State.

Read my take on SS Das's exclusion in today's Telegraph.