Times of India

December 6, 2012 3:54 AM

The times of The Times of India - world's largest broadsheet English daily
posted by Gyan (10 comments total)

As a young exec type in an ad agency, I have sat behind my branch manager on his scooter while we whizzed down to the ToI offices before the presses closed to hand in a bromide. ToI has always had disproportionate influence
posted by infini at 5:08 AM on December 6, 2012 [1 favorite]

“We’re the market leaders. And the market leader doesn’t need a first-class editor. It can do with a second-class, or third-class, or even fourth-class editor. We don’t need editors”.

This is a great article (of a quality that you will never see in ToI), but this little bit is the perfect tl;dr version. It's an advertainment publication that's run entirely by marketing, and the news is treated like an unpleasant but necessary secondary function. Hence the common joke about ToIlet paper.
posted by vanar sena at 6:11 AM on December 6, 2012 [1 favorite]

The New Yorker had a fascinating, longform article on the Times recently, as well.
posted by knile at 6:17 AM on December 6, 2012

It's an advertainment publication that's run entirely by marketing, and the news is treated like an unpleasant but necessary secondary function.

There aren't many viable publications that aren't now.
Sucks to be us.
posted by Mezentian at 6:18 AM on December 6, 2012

“Every single morning in my edit meetings, it was: ‘What did TOI do? What did TOI do? What did TOI do?’”

I've seen so many Bollywood movies I'm just picturing a dance scene.
posted by Mezentian at 6:28 AM on December 6, 2012

Mezentian: "There aren't many viable publications that aren't now."

I bet if you accused NY Times editors of lack of journalistic ethics, they'd understand the term enough to be indignant.

“Righteousness and unrighteousness, pleasure and pain are purely of the mind and are no concern of yours,” the sage Ashtavakra advises Janaka, king of Mithila. “You are neither the doer nor the reaper of the consequences, so you are always free.” The body is imagination, only pure consciousness is real, and death, when it arrives, is not to be mourned.

I argue that a person who lives by this mantra has no need for ethics.
posted by vanar sena at 6:40 AM on December 6, 2012 [1 favorite]

So how do you take dharm and karm into context?
posted by infini at 6:55 AM on December 6, 2012

From the article:

A junior editor in the mid-1990s recalls one of Jain’s corporate managers, “articulating the wisdom of the palace, saying unapologetically: ‘The job of the newspaper is to deliver the reader to the advertiser’.


Wow, the devil gets the best lines!
posted by Jody Tresidder at 6:59 AM on December 6, 2012 [2 favorites]

‘The job of the newspaper is to deliver the reader to the advertiser’.

Sad but true!
posted by Renoroc at 7:38 AM on December 6, 2012

Content driven strategy isn't new. Only the media might change.
posted by infini at 7:57 AM on December 6, 2012