Tuesday, September 07, 2004

Truth, Blessed Truth and Statistics

For some of us, the carping against the Pune Times has occasionally taken on the zeal of a religious crusade. The reason for that is very simple, and successive posts on this blog will demonstrate that very clearly.

My principal opposition is that if a supplement called itself Pune Times, shouldn't it have a significant chunk of news about Pune? That's where PT differs in its interpretation. Here are some numbers to underline this point:

Take today's (Wed, 8 Sept 2004) issue. There are 6 pages in the edition, out of which 1 is devoted to cartoons, upcoming events, TV schedules and the like, which is perfectly fine. There are 25 news items on all the remaining 5. How many of them do you think are about Pune or even have an oblique reference to the city?

Just FOUR. 4 out of 25. Which means that news about Pune forms only 1/5th to 1/6th of the edition. Which for a paper calling itself Pune Times is astoundingly insufficient.

I must, however, commend the one they got right. The standout article today was on the Tekdi project. Outstanding because it is relevant, informative, useful and worth public notice. The same cannot be said about Sandali Sinha's dream role being Simran in DDLJ (I have nothing against Ms. Sinha, but there's no relevance putting her as the leading article on the front page of a city supplement). But in comparison, I'd rather read about Ms. Sinha than the "##Dare## aaye durust aaye" Rakhi Sawant (see Salil's post)

Coming back to numbers, about 16 articles were on film actors, pop stars and social dos.

I don't think I'll be this incensed if the supplement called itself "Entertainment Plus" or something. That'll take the wind out of the sails of this blog. But "Pune Times"? Nope.

5 Comments:

Blogger Nikhil said...

I am eagre to contribute my mite to this holy crusade against PT.
Somebody please send me an invite.

8:30 AM  
Blogger Nikhil said...

At nikhiluk@yahoo.com.
thanks.

8:31 AM  
Blogger Pleiades said...

On account of being from the dark side... am I disqualified?? :|

Sarika.

5:04 AM  
Blogger J Ramanand said...

Sarika, I was going to post a link to this blog on my own with apologies to you :-)

But it's like working for MSFT, the people there must be intelligent enough to figure out why people criticise them. So unless there's any conflict of interest, go ahead and lambast :-). Don't mind if we carp at some of the stories you do! (we know staffers must obey the big, bad editor!)

10:09 PM  
Blogger Srihari SN said...

Ramanand,

PT has come with a front page article about the boat club and references to you

Hari

1:36 AM  

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