After my return from the round-the-world trip, I browsed through 2 weeks of newspapers: Indian Express, Times of India, Economic Times, Business Standard and Financial Express. And wasn’t I disappointed. The mediocre reporting and lack of depth hit me hard, especially in contrast to reading the international papers daily (Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Financial Times) as I travelled. Of course, I read the WSJ, IHT and FT daily on a regular basis, so I should not have been that surprised. But, as I spent a couple hours scanning through the Indian papers, I realised that we are still far behind in our quality of coverage. Our two leading newspapers, ToI and ET, have dumbed down to attract a more youthful readership to an extent that needs to be seen to be believed. The others, presumbaly because of lack of ad revenue, have better (more serious) editorial coverage but still lack a wider perspective that the rader of today needs.
I could not help but think that if we can get a group of top-notch journalists in India to start a weblog with serious, deep thinking articles, it could definitely attract an influential readership. The question is: will it be self-sustaining financially. Nevertheless, Indian print media (at least the English ones) could do with a lot of improvement. For starters, they could at least do away with the flimsy headlines.
