A bloggers’ revolt against TOI?

Thanks to the tight schedule, I’ve been out of blog reading for quite a while. Infact, I didn’t follow many news articles about Mumbai. Ofcourse, I read the front page articles and realized the magnitude of what’s happened in our financial capital. But when I was back, I was taken by surprise at what Times Of India (TOI) has done. The only comfort seems to be the revolt that bloggers seems to be bringing about.

Thanks to Uma, a very casual and irresponsible act on the part of TOI has come to limelight again.

It’s not a surprise that TOI has done something cheap again. I’ve always been very critical of TOI after my first exposure to it during my two year Bangalore stint. During the peak of the Rajkumar episode when Veerappan kidnapped him, the sleazy images on top corners of the very first page with messages saying some model is pregnant or an actor is getting married for the nth time used to irritate me pretty badly. It was sheer irresponsibility. The whole of India was waiting with bated breath on the outcome of that incident. For people like me who hail from TN, the issue was even more serious since the outcome had the potential of starting a yet another backlash against Tamilians in Bangalore. That was the last thing we all wanted when foreign investment was at its peak in both the states. With all these things in mind, you turn the paper and what you get to see in the first page a semi-nude model! That’s when we shifted to a different paper.

The issue this time is very similar. Mumbai was lashed with a devastating, record-breaking rain, and TOI comes up with a beautiful half-page article saying celebrities were devastated more so since TOI didn’t reach their homes!

It’s true to a good extent that people would be expecting the morning paper to know what happened in other localities and probably in the rest of the country, but this certainly isn’t time for marketing, and this certainly isn’t the way to put things. The article has quotes from the likes of who felt the magnitude of the rains only when their beloved TOI didn’t reach them. And that’s in a space where many photos could be squeezed in. The issue has been vetted all over by an array of bloggers as listed in the same article.

In all, it’s irresponsible for a newspaper that’s the oldest in the country to do such a cheap thing. Hope the outcry of all the bloggers and others reach the ears of TOI, which seems to be pretty dumb to such issues of late.