Help Haiti
January 16th, 2010
Stop The Press
If you have been following news stories for the past few days, you’d have read about the earthquake in Haiti and the amount of destruction that it has caused. Every now and then, such tragedies strike and at times like these I think it is our collective responsibility to help fellow humans beings out as much as possible.
What is truly shocking is how little aid was able to reach to the island nation in the first few days since the earthquake struck. News reports showing bulldozers piling up corpses and riots over single cans of water make for disturbing viewing.
So choose a charitable organization working in relief operations there, and donate now. Even if it’s a small amount, it counts. A country like Haiti is hit harder because it is so poor and has less resources already. I’ll be donating what I get from part-time work this month to Doctors Without Borders and the World Food Programme operations in Haiti. Take your pick, and donate now.
This brings me a to odd juncture in this blog post. Readers from UK have access to multiple charities they can donate to for the cause (including the ones I mentioned). I initially thought of sharing links to sites where readers from India could donate too. Surprisingly, as far as I see it there isn’t a single website based out of India that allows to donate to emergency relief funds. Not even the Indian Red Cross! (Having a single paragraph saying donations are tax-deductible is useless.)
Well done, Times of India, well done
Furthermore, Indian news sites seem to be paying hardly any attention to this ’story’. Forget the front page, there isn’t a single reference to the Haiti earthquake on the world news page of hindustantimes.com (when I saw it). And on Times of India’s website, a link to a story on Haiti is buried deep beneath stories about some UN weapons inspector being caught in a sex sting. Times of India then goes to reach heights of tactlessness by displaying keyword ads in its news article for ‘Haiti’ and ‘emergency situation’.
At least world leaders are pledging aid and the media is paying attention here. Not so encouraging on the streets, where the attitude here is – to a large extent – “don’t care”. I just hope that enough people chip in, in whatever way they can in times of humanitarian crisis.
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The New Hindu
August 20th, 2009
Reviews, Stop The Press, Tech Takes, The Answer is 42
The Hindu is probably one of the most old-fashioned major newspaper in India. While all the others have moved on to the “Yay us! We have full-colour newspapers!” bandwagon, The Hindu staunchly refuses to give anything other than black & white. And with its strong focus on South India events even in the Delhi edition it says a big “FUCK YOU” to all ‘naarth Eendyen’ newspapers like Times of India and Hindustan Times. Without a doubt, it’s the best copy-edited, best written, sane and sober newspaper in India. The effect of all the roofies that the editors at Hindu took seems to be wearing off – they have discovered the Internet! “Oh look, this Facebook thing is ossumz!“
"I wonder if this will look good on the op-ed page"
So The Hindu decided to give its website a major upgrade. The old site is still lurking around at thehindu.com – in all its 1990s Internet glory; the new website is at beta.thehindu.com. This redesign has been done by Mario Garcia Jr. Mario Garcia Jr, in case you haven’t heard of him in Hindustan Times, where they brag about getting redesigns done from him on the umpteen number of times it has ‘changed’ over the past few years. Journalism outsourcing professionals in India have been out-Bangalore’d by a Floridan! As someone else puts it, “Future contestants of Mastermind might like to consider “Indian Newspaper Design” for their specialist round. The answer for all 10 questions is Mario Garcia.”
Weight, what?
Consider what we have had to deal with so far. A cursory look suggests that the designer of the Hindustan Times website had an Uzi pointed at his head while he was designing the website, with some sub-editor saying “Naach Basanti, naach” in the background while yet another editor shouted “I want like, every, goddamn news article section to be on the front page. It’s so cluttered that the basic idea behind this is “Let’s put a link every 1cm and hope the user clicks something, even if accidentally.” And then HT editors keep wondering on their blogs as to why they aren’t earning revenues through ads. If guys like these stay around a bit longer, journalism will be dead.
wearepartof.indiatimes.com
Times of India’s website is a tad better than Hindustan Times. Their delight knew no bounds when ComScore (quite probably made a mistake and) declared that TOI’s site was the most trafficked in the world. Maybe it was the whole subdomain thing which bamboozled ComScore, because I kinda find it hard to believe that with the number of Internet users India has, TOI’s site got more visitors than any other newspaper website in the world. TOI’s site design is a bit better but still somewhat cluttered.
The new Hindu website
Coming back to The Hindu’s redesign – what I wanted to say was “This is fantastic!”. The design is really clean. Everything is arranged in a proper fashion – heck, they even placed the ads properly rather than jamming them anywhere, anyhow. When you land on the website, you eyes scan easily through the content without getting overwhelmed with information. There are flashing scrolling tickers and animated jumping monkeys to distract you. Also, The Hindu has decided to implement with a ‘web first’ policy – which means that from now on their reporters will publish their stories first on the website, then in print. Most other newspapers keep breaking news to a minimum, opting to publish online only very important breaking news via dispatches from agencies. Hindu’s idea, if it takes off, could mean a day when the online version of a print newspaper – that too one of the more traditional ones! – is given more importance. Why this makes sense is that fresh, original content being posted on the website first, a lot more people might be interested in reading news there – thus increasing potential for ad revenue. I don’t know about other, but I for instance only check online news sites in case some major event has happened and I want new news updates – or in case I need to link back to a news story. And with an uncluttered interface, chances are that readers will stick around longer and read more of Hindu’s content.
Douglas Adams, in his essay What Have We Got To Lose, was right on target that the future of media is online. Years after he originally wrote this article, its astonishing to note that most people associated with news media still think the same way, websites are still made with the same thought process like the early days of the Web that DNA has described in the essay. I urge you to read his arguments on why digital media makes sense for everyone – even media house owners once they get it.
Originally posted at Youthpad.
Tags: Youthpad
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