Blogs

Here's a look at the front page of yesterday's Hindustan Times, Delhi edition. The lead (Delhi sees nuclear club entry by year-end) is clean. The header is better too. The headers for this developing story which appeared as "Nuke Bill passage on course" on June 28 and "Nuke deal faces first vote today" on June 27 would have been appropriate had HT been an American daily. Climbing down to the next story (More troops to plug border infiltration). It is quite clean too. But I have a problem with...

Here's a look at the front page of today's Hindustan Times, Delhi edition. Once again, we start with the lead (Nuke Bill passage on course). And once again, we find mistakes in the intro itself: The international relations committee of the US House of Representatives began considering a bill seeking an exemptions for India from the discriminatory nuclear regime that presently existing under US law. Early indications, based on votes on amendments to the bill, indicated that of the 45 committee...

Here’s a look at the front page of today’s Times of India, Delhi edition. Let’s start with the lead once again (We killed Rajiv, confesses LTTE). There's a bloomer in the first line itself: Fifteen years after a LTTE suicide bomber killed Rajiv Gandhi in Sriperumbudur, the Tamil rebel outfit on Tuesday admitted its responsibility for the crime and delivered a public apology. It should be an LTTE suicide bomber and not a. The second sentence of the intro reads: In an interview to a TV network on...

Here's a look at the front page of today's Hindustan Times, Delhi edition. The lead story (Nuke deal faces first vote today) starts with a typo in the intro itself: Indian circles are guardedly optimistic one the eve of the first vote in the US Congress on the Indo-US nuclear deal. Yes, it should have been on, not one. Those of us who have worked on the desk know that typos happen. We can never justify such mistakes, and we don't make fun of typos (i.e. of each other) either. We all make...

It is funny when the same word/set of words is used differently in the same publication on the same day. The Times of India did it on June 26, 2006. First, the incorrect usage (Economist PM goes 'ballistic'; The Times of India; June 26, 2006): With contracts worth Rs 3,500 crore already being signed for its mass production to begin, the Army is now raising a special BrahMos regiment to use it as a precision land-to-land weapon. Moreover, work is well underway to configure it for the Sukhoi-30MKI...

One of the best ways to tighten a copy is to do away with redundant words. Many redundancies crop up in copies because of a reporter or a sub-editor's desire to add colour to a story. This Reuters creed provides a glaring example (Two former ministers arrested over Kashmir sex scandal; Reuters; June 20, 2006): An angry mob ransacked the house of a woman suspected of running the sex ring in Srinagar, the state's summer capital, soon after it broke in April. The woman and three others were...

Here's a look at the front page of today's Times of India, Delhi edition. Let's start with the lead (In Congress, a battle rages for quote crown): HRD minister Arjun Singh's suspected attempt to appropriate the political ownership of the move to introduce OBC quota in Central institutions has finally run into in-house resistance. Suspected attempt? Who is suspecting Arjun Singh of doing anything? The next para says: Social justice minister Meira Kumar has questioned the justification of the HRD...

If you have ever worked as a reporter, you would know that no two reporters can use the same language to describe the same set of events. Something like fingerprints, you know. But the Zee News and Times of India correspondents who filed the story on the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) seeking the Tamil Nadu Speaker's sanction to prosecute J Jayalalithaa have somehow managed to do the impossible. Here's the Zee News story proudly slugged "Bureau report": New Delhi, June 26: The CBI has...

Deny does not mean the same as rebut (which means argue to the contrary, producing evidence), or refute (which means to win such an argument). See this (Big names in sleaze story; Hindustan Times; June 25, 2006): "If there was pressure, Singh may have escaped arrest. All the accused have already been sent to judicial custody," stated SSP Dehra Dun SK Gunjyal refuting charges of political pressure on the police. Gunjyal did not refute anything, he merely denied charges of political pressure. He...

Hyphens again, folks. You need to be careful while creating a noun from a phrasal verb. By and large, the rule of the thumb says that you need to hyphenate the noun. Read this (Big names in sleaze story; Hindustan Times; June 25, 2006): While Anand Suman Singh, a Uttaranchal Sahitya Kala Sanskriti Parishad member has been arrested for allegedly procuring call girls to supply them to politicians and bureaucrats, speculations are rife about a massive cover up to prevent more names being made...