Sunday, October 1, 2006
ToI feeling the heat?
The Times of India says:
Everyone has a story to tell, but everyone is not a natural-born storyteller. Everyone has a right to an opinion, but a lot of people confuse it with meaningless fuming and ranting. Everyone has a right to be stupid, but some people abuse the privilege. There are a lot of people who are sick and tired of having to eke their way through life. A lot of people are sick of being nobody. A lot of people's lives have been reduced to inconsequential chatter with their inconsequential friends. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions and their lives a second-hand mimicry of others' life. Such people form groups, stick together and find comfort in each others' miseries.
…
They are interesting people. They think that they have something to say. They want to be read and heard and seen. But their aspiration is blocked by the obnoxious monster called the Editor and their high-voltage facts mixed with slam-dunk fiction, with a lot of typos and commas and semi-colons in wrong places, go down a drain called the Editorial Process. So they turn to blogging and take refuge under a series of posts on a web page in the form of a diary, with hypertext links to other such diaries. The bloggers love to attack those they hate: from McDonald's to Starbucks to Karl Marx to Mandal to Germaine Greer to the colleague at the next work station. Blogs are an online stream of consciousness written by people who believe that they are under orders from someone to change the world.
Dear Sir,
You are confusing the technology with a certain subsection of its users that you disagree with. The users of any technology are by no means an indivisible collective. Please learn to tell them apart. By your logic, because your paper publishes some rubbish, it is in fact all rubbish. That is a widespread opinion on your paper — perhaps that is what is stinging you?
Scherezade — Oct 4, 2006 9:18:18 AM — # ↩
oh! swish, encore! Mz Saxena's article was fairly irksome and am glad am not the only one irked by it.
Pradeep G — Oct 4, 2006 4:21:08 PM — # ↩
Her rant reads almost like the blogs she is trying to disparage.
ToI pontificatig on Journalism.. Ah! the irony.
Jon — Oct 7, 2006 7:20:08 AM — # ↩
Well said
Well said. I found her tone very condescending & her argument lacking. Power to the people.
igloomelts.my-expressions.com/
Anonymous User — Oct 7, 2006 11:07:07 AM — # ↩
Hmmm. Turns out a lot of people have been irked about the story. I? I, on the otherhand, just sat bak and had a hearty laugh, threw the paper out the window. TOI never fails to amuse me.
Ravages — Oct 7, 2006 11:08:12 AM — # ↩
The previous anon (Hearty Laughter) was me. Your captcha swallowed my handle
Kiran Jonnalagadda — Oct 7, 2006 9:14:17 PM — # ↩
A thousand apologies. Captchas are a pain, but I've had zero spam comments since.