Journalism - reality and fictions about it

A lot has been said, written and watched about Bharka Dutt, Vir Sanghvi and Niira Radia.  This made me go think about ethical journalism and check my memory of movies that describe a similar struggle.

The first one that comes to my mind is timeless classic All the President's men in which Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford wonderfully bring out the struggle journalist undergo to collect information and the extent to which they risk their lives to gather evidence before they publish a story. The next one is of course Wag the Dog in which Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman tell us how a manipulated promo and marketing can make or break a country's top leadership positions.

In Tamil, we had Oomai vizhigal an with Jayshankar, the newspaper editor struggles to uncover the mystery behind beach resort murders of chennai. Page3 is another excellent effort from Madhur Bhandakar in the same lines. Then we have the latest offering from Aamir Khan, Peepli live which showcases the brutal realities of today's Media. This list would not be complete without mentioning about Alaigal a TV serial which I watched in my childhood days. Sivakumar is at his best as the publisher of a newspaper in it.

My own post in this blog talks about yet another fictional movie about the same topic. In the edited versions in front of the camera, we see the shows where journos and anchors grill the opponents and we even feel that they go overboard to sensitize the issues. But in reality (and as all the above movies depict) it looks like the politicians, corporates and nay their lobbyists are the ones actually in control of the media !

Paparaazi

Seriously, how crazy and absurd can the paparaazi get? Why should I watch the video and photographs of MS Dhoni and his wife having a good time in Goa? I can ignore if this news is about showbiz icons or if it appears in Page3, but WHY in the sports column of a national newspaper ! A south Indian male actor recently tweeted - " It is easy to become journalist today, just follow somebody's tweets and yo! you have a 100 words writeup."

10 Free Filmmaking tools I use

Guerilla filmmakers can use the following tools for their work.

1. Celtex: Script writing

2. Google Sketchup: Set decoration and lighting

3. Paint.net: Image editing

4. Movie Planner: Planning and scheduling your production

5. Windows movie maker: Video editing

6. Audacity: Sound editing

7. Virtual Dub: Sound editing and effects mixing

8. Blender: Animation and graphics

9. Wax: Compositing and special effects

10. Cinecode : Video Format conversion

All the best !

A piece of you everywhere, for everybody

The other day my wife made a strange observation that she gets promotional messages to her mobile based on what she spoke about in her conversations. For example, in one of her phone calls, if she spoke about having a clean drinking water for us, the next day she got Ads about water purifiers. To say that I was shocked would be an understatement. Being in the contact center industry for many years, I knew this was technically possible using Speech recognizers and caller segmentation. But would TRAI, the regulator in India allow the provider to do anything of that sort?

Much has been written and talked about Facebook's recent changes, the perils of it and how to safeguard yourself against it. Welcome to the next evolution of www, this is where we are heading - what Facebook or any online company wants to know and track is what you are doing everywhere online and offline , not just in their website ! Thanks to social media, wherever online we go, we can Digg it or delicious it, tweet it. Look at this company Blippy, which wants to know what you are buying and suggests it would be easy if you just give them your credit card numbers and they would track the information for you ! Do you know that instead of having various login IDs in various sites, you can be just one unified online avatar with an open ID.

So what happens with all these information about you and why is everybody after it? Well, a whole bunch of data mining companies exist doing things like social monitoring, social media discovery and much more. Considering the fact that every company (online or in general) wants has Social Media Management as a bulk part of their IT budget you realize how this information could be used to sell you anything. I guess the day we sent our first email, we all fell into the trap and trusted a stranger with information about us. And I don't think we are ready to go switch back to postal departments.

Digging further, we figured out my wife's claim was not correct, at least for now. I  and a couple of my friends also got the same SMS Ad the next day in my phone and we had not spoken about water over the phone.

Are you content with the content you consume?

I've always had some questions in my mind about the media. Media exists to question, publicize, expose or opine on the happenings as this recent article claims. And so confirms our Supreme Court in its judgment. But does the responsibility of the media stops there? or should it take some positive actions beyond just bringing the issue to notice of us the consumers ?

I happened to be in an event where Mr. Vinay Tiwari, CNN IBN's head of operations was one of the speakers. He sure had the audience delighted with his one liners like "The difference between erotic and porn is just lighting", "Two things nobody in India understands completely are Duckworth-Lewis method of resetting target in cricket and TRP ratings of media". In response to one of the questions from the audience on how they decide to prioritize the content shown in news television media, he said it would be impossible to satisfy the whole nation's audience in terms of what is exclusive and breaking and important news. As long as the news it correct and accurate his channel runs it. "When we say it is breaking or exclusive, we mean it is breaking and exclusive for us the channel". Now, how much do you concede with that as a consumer of news media content ?

Also, who questions the media which questions the happenings? Social media wins the race in this case. For instance, I write a review thrashing or praising a movie but who rates and reviews my review? the comments to my posts is the solution in case of blogs. We see less and less of "Letters to editor" and "Edhiroli" in case of print and television media. I wish the channels ask the viewers to SMS them answers to "How well did we cover IPL controversy?" instead of "Should Modi be removed ?" The viewers don't have the final say in the second question anyway.

Mr.Vinay Tiwari concluded by saying "Remember, the TV comes with a remote, using it is the only way you can punish the channel"