Why don't you buy books?

Dear Colleagues,

Have you realised that a good number of books for journalism students and teachers are being published now? These are books authored by Indians, published by Indian publishers, and are modestly priced. I have published lists of these titles in my blog from time to time hoping that the faculty may place orders for these books. Amazon, Book Ganga and other online bookshops also carry ads about the textbooks and academic books. Unless you buy, how do you expect the authors, publishers, teachers and students will benefit?

 I did a quick reality check and realised that many heads of departments have not purchased several important books although there are no budgetary constraints in private or public universities and colleges. I spoke to several full-time, confirmed assistant, associate or senior professors drawing pay-commission approved salaries. There are adjuncts, part-time, and visiting teachers who have not purchased any new books for the last several years. They did not have a list of books that could be useful to their students and colleagues.

I wish to draw your attention to some good books as follows: 

One such book is Harvesting hope in the Suicide Zone authored by  Award Winning Pune-based Journalist Dr Radheshyam Jadhav and published recently by Bloomsbury (Price Rs. 399.00) in December 2018. I inquired with a dozen journalists and journalism faculty in Pune. They have not heard about this book. I strongly recommend this to print journalism and development communication teachers and students.

I am impressed with the contents and quality of books authored by young journalist-turned-journalism faculty who have recently brought out Marathi titles. I am confident that these books will be useful to teachers and students of media schools in Maharashtra. Digital Patrakarita (by Vishwanath Anant Garud, publishers Ga Ma Bha Na Prakashan, Rs 150.oo) and Social Media (by Yogesh Borate, Atharva Publications, Rs. 150.00) are important and useful for the teachers and students in the cities and towns in Maharashtra.

I have found Prof Sanjay Ranade’s Marathi books माध्यम अभ्यासातील प्रमुख संकल्पना (Terms and Concepts in Medi, Rs. 200.00)  and   माध्यम अभ्यास व माध्यम समीक्षा (Both published by Diamond Publications, Rs. 200.00) very important for Marathi students who find it difficult to understand the theories.

Dr Hema Herlekar’s The Essential Art of Communication (Unicorn Books, Rs. 196) is another interesting book about modern communication principles with practical, down-to-earth tips’

I have refrained from recommending my own book, Newspaper English, (Vishwakarma Publications, for obvious reasons).

More books later.

Do you have books to recommend?

Please write to me for publishing in this blogpost: drkiranthakur@gmail.com) 

Kiran Thakur

Book Review by Mahesh Vijapurkar: ‘Newspaper English’

Book Review: by Mahesh Vijapurkar

‘Newspaper English’ authored by Kiran Thakur

India is home to the world’s largest population of English-speaking people outside of the United Kingdom and the United States of America. India is home also to the world’s largest newspaper by circulation or readership, The Times of India. Though spoken English is substantively influenced by the Indian speaker’s mother tongue, there are many ‘English only’ families where their mother tongues have weakened or forgotten.

Compared to how she is spoken in UK and UK – clipped British accents and the American drawl, using different spellings for the same word, some pronounced differently as well – the Indian English different. Indian words, mostly from Hindi, have made their way into the eminent dictionaries to be part. If mulligatawny crept into English dictionaries more than a century ago, jugad found a place in the Oxford Dictionary in 2017.

That does not mean English can or should be written in any manner one likes for there are rules of grammar. The rules are meant to provide some order and clarity. Clarity is derived from simplicity. Bombast and rhetoric are acceptable in a speech from a public platform, “Hand over a bouquet to the chief guest” sounds nicer and digestible even from the podium than “pay floral tributes”.

But, when writing news for a newspaper, the clarity is a result of simple, smaller words. The small words carry as much weight as heavy words do. One should read Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea to understand the impact of such writing; the reader can race through the book with ease without searching out a word’s meaning from any dictionary. Of course, local, colloquial terms used which provide the atmosphere are a different thing.

Kiran Thakur’s labour of love Newspaper English[i]drives home this point where he makes the following points: write brief sentences, short paragraphs, and avoid the urge to make the copy long. Dr Thakur[ii] as a journalist has been a practitioner of that kind of writing from the time he started working in the United News of India (UNI) and his later switch to academics, including research has not dimmed his enthusiasm for such writing.

He sees value in simple writing, and when he moved to teaching journalism as Head, Department of Communication and Journalism, Savitribai Phule University, Pune, he wore this objective on his sleeve. Now an adjunct faculty at FLAME University dealing with research, he took this work with passion and is the result of a seven-year-long effort, aided by the University Grants Commission. The content of the work and the credentials of the author make this book valuable. It is actually the academic study brought out as a boo.

When competing with the Press Trust of India (PTI) one had to be not only quick and but clear. The copy in English had to be understood by the small town’s local language newspaper deskmen whose job it is to translate the news into their respective languages. The process had to be quick, especially when deadlines were close. The speed of transmission and typesetting now available does not, however, eliminate the need for simplicity of writing.

Once in print, the news item has a function to perform. As Martin Cutts underlines in the foreword, “The first paragraph must provide the gist of the story and help them decide whether to bother reading any further. Nobody in the history of newspapers has ever read the second paragraph first. Readers only reach the second paragraph if the first has hooked them.” Also, “if you don’t get to the point immediately, your readers will go elsewhere”.

That said, it is the experience of most readers of most newspaper that to get to the point he has to wade through several lines of one or two sentences in the first paragraph and barely get an inkling of the story. It is apparently wrongly assumed these days that the headline itself is the equivalent of the lead – Americans call it the lede – and stick to clutter of words that slows down the pace of reading and understanding. Readability is the true test of any writing.

A newspaper reader is not going to settle down with the day’s edition as if there was enough time to traverse from big paragraphs of long words in lengthy stories from column to column, and then page to page. His attention span is decreasing, and alternative outlets for news are available on the Internet on the mobile phones. Mobile Apps provide digests and mistakenly the news consumer has the mistaken belief that what arrives on the WhatsApp is as good as what a newspaper should be providing.

Newspaper English, therefore, has been brought out at probably the best time and help sensitise the news writers to change their ways. It is a useful in that context. Also, despite the large English-knowing population, it has to be understood that the newspaper is not bought only by the highbrow readers but has to serve the needs of the lowest common denominator in that section of the population. It is hard to secure the return of a reader to a newspaper to which he has cancelled the subscription.

Thakur has painstakingly provided a plethora of examples, each detailed and listing the inadequacies of style and structure of the news in the publications. His analysis is dispassionate, he has named newspapers from where the examples are cited. He advocates explicitly and implicitly the style of the news agencies and correctly insists that “it is easier …to switch over from the style of a news agency to that of a newspaper, but not the other way around.”

My tongue-in-cheek response to that, however, could be: Dr Thakur, do you mean it is easier to teach students the best practices but difficult for them to unlearn the bad practices now common in newspapers?” That dig apart, I agree with that contention. He has carried out readability tests using several tools available on the Internet and his conclusion is valid: newspapers should not only encourage simple writing but insist on it as a style requirement. But Indian newspapers are not known to have stylebooks. Not even a good do’s and don’ts.

Newspaper English has a nicely designed cover by Dr Nachiket Thakur which is as subdued and attractive as the simple writing advocated in the pages within. This book should be a must read for all journalism students and the faculties that try to shape them, and for the heads of the reporting and editing departments of all English-language newspapers. In the absence of stylebooks, this would serve as a guidepost.

Book Author: Prof Dr Kiran Thakur

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Reviewed by
Mahesh Vijapurkar
Former Deputy Editor, The Hindu

mvijapurkar@gmail.com

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drkiranthakur@gmail.com

03, Indrayani, Patrakarnagar, Pune 411016

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Title of the Book

Newspaper English

Publisher: The Vshwakarma Publications, Pune

https://vishwakarmapublications.com/product/newspaper-english/

No. Of Pages: 172, Price: Rs. 225.00 US $ nine

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[i] Vishwakarma Publications, Pp 172, Rs 225, US$9

गीतांजली घोलप यांना पीएचडी

गीतांजली घोलप यांना पीएचडी

पुणे: पुणे येथील न्यू मीडियाच्या अभ्यासक गीतांजली मेघ:श्याम घोलप यांना टिळक महाराष्ट्र विद्यापीठाची पीएचडी जाहीर झाली आहे. टिळक महाराष्ट्र विद्यापीठाच्या वृत्तपत्रविद्या आणि संज्ञापनशास्त्र विभागांतर्गत घोलप यांनी ‘चार निवडक महानगरातील विशेषत्त्वाने मुंबईच्या संदर्भात न्यू मीडियाचा शहरी समाजावार होणारा परिणाम’ या विषयावर आपला प्रबंध सादर केला होता.

डॉ.डी.के.पोखरापूरकर यांच्या मार्गदर्शनाखाली त्यांनी आपला प्रबंध पूर्ण केला.

गेल्या दहा वर्षापासून डॉ.घोलप या माध्यमक्षेत्रात कार्यरत असून त्या मुंबई व पुणे येथील संज्ञापनशास्त्राच्या विविध महाविद्यालयात अध्यापन करत आहेत.   

Public Relations: Concepts, Practices and Applications

The following from Prof. Pavitra Shrivastava

Book Review:

Public Relations: Concepts, Practices and Applications

Editors: CK Sardana & K. John Babu

Publisher: Dominant Publishers and Distributors, New Delhi

Year: 2018

Pages: 182

Price: INR 950

ISBN: 978-93-84207-95-3

Public Relations is one of the fastest growing sectors in the world today. As the organisations across sectors are in need of building and maintaining positive image among its various stakeholders to succeed in attaining their goals, public relations has a huge role to play. The public relations department which are also in some cases known as corporate communication and public affairs (although there are slight differences among the three) are responsible for communicating with internal as well as external stakeholders like employees, the general public, media, government authorities, public representatives and many others make sure that a favorable image of the organisation is created and maintained amongst them. In this context, the book, Public Relations: Concepts, Practices and Applications is of great significance to all those associated with the field in some way or the other. The book offers a lot of food for mind for public relations practitioners, teachers, researchers as well as students.

The book, with its 14 chapters and three case studies on crisis management, sheds light on several aspects of public relations ranging from its historical and sociological account to how it is playing a role in attaining sustainability. The chapter titled, PR in India: A Historical and Sociological Perspective written by JV Vilanilam takes the readers through an interesting journey of public relations’ evolution in India right from the times of the Great Ashoka’s rule during which the emperor had created rock edicts and pillar inscriptions aimed at establishing communication with the subjects of his empire spread across a vast region to that of Gandhi who used PR, press and publicity for political Conscientization and rural development. The chapter also traces the recent developments in the field of public relations in Indian as well as the global context by discussing the formation of institutions like Public Relations Society of India (PRSI) and how government machineries including the prime ministers’ offices gave special emphasis on the public relations functions. However, the chapter does not very clearly discuss the sociological perspective of the public relations even as it claims to do so in the title.

The chapter titled, Government Public Relations: In the world’s largest democracy provides very rich content in a very systematic way about the goals, needs justifications for government public relations functions. Contributed by Dr. CV Narasimha Reddi, this chapter of the book can be very useful for the teachers as well as students of the public relations wanting to understand the public relations functions of the government sector in India. It offers a very detailed outline of public relations functions at both central as well as state government level and the different organisations and agencies established for the job.

The chapters like Communication Challenges in Public Sector Undertakings written by Jitender Bhargava and Tools of Public Relations in a Challenging Environment by B. Balaswamy underlines the modern day challenges of the field where the work of public relations departments is extremely fast-paced. While the former brings to the fore the emerging challenges in the field especially in terms of the PSUs, the latter provides a comprehensive description of the different tools which could used to meet those challenges in different circumstances. 

Considering the changing landscape of the public relations as a field, any book which tends to provide a useful insight to its readers would not be complete until it throws some light on the news kind of public relations through new and the social media in the age of internet. In this context, the two chapters of the book titled, Digital Communication for PR and PR in the Internet Age: The Increasing Role of Social Media expose the readers to the new-age challenges posed by the internet practices and new practices like social media campaigns, PR through social media, blogs, emails etc.

Besides, the book also discusses how public relations sections are helpful in leveraging marketing benefits in different ways since PR activities are also considered as important tools. The book argues that since public relations helps the organisations win trust of the customers and other stakeholders, it eventually leads to increasing the sale of the products and services of the organisations. These arguments are backed by the success stories of companies like – Dabur, Apollo and others. 

The book also touches upon the aspect of PR and sustainability through the chapter titled, Public Relations, CSR and Sustainable Development contributed Ram Awtar Yadav wherein it points out how CSR activities as effective PR tools are helping the organisations in attaining their sustainability goals. Besides, it also has a comprehensive chapter on public relations research contributed by K. Stevenson which could be of great significance to the researchers of the field as well as the academicians and the students. It provides a detailed account of need, approaches and types of the research being carried out in the field and their functions.

However, the book apparently misses out on some of the key concepts like corporate communication, public affairs, media relations etc. which are very closely linked to the subject of public relations. Although these terms emerge on a few occasions in some chapters of the book but it fails to delve deeper into these concepts which are vital to those trying to develop a substantive understanding of the field. Nevertheless, the book is worth reading if one takes into account the insightful readings that it provides through different chapters on various dimensions of the public relations practices in the present world.    

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Reviewed By: Prof. Pavitra Shrivastava

Dean-Academic

Professor & Head, Department of Advertising and Public Relations

Makhanlal Chaturvedi National University of Journalism and Communication, Bhopal   

डिजिटल पत्रकारिता

डिजिटल पत्रकारिता

I am delighted to inform you that a young journalist, Vishwanath Garut has authored a Marathi book on on Digital Journalism. There are scores of media schools in Marathi, but there was no book for teachers and students. His book will fulfill the need of both of them.   News websites were emerging as a new media just after the internet came into existence in the field of Journalism. Marathi online journalism would complete two decades. This book discusses the major incidents; happenings which took place during that period, the current challenges before the new media & the future of news websites. This would be the very first-of-its-kind book in Marathi. The author has worked for more than 12 years with all leading Marathi news websites. This book would prove to be an important resource material for journalism students, professors, avid readers & the new media researchers. #डिजिटल पत्रकारिता (#Digital Patrakarita) Author – Wishwanath Anant Garud गमभन प्रकाशन Price – 150/- Discounted price till 23 February 2019 Rs. 100/- Contact Details for booking – Jaydeep Kadu (9823105457) OR Prachi Kulkarni-Garud (9822493880)  Account Details  Gamabhana prakashan  Bank of Maharashtra  154, narayan peth branch  Account number 60119349473  IFSC code MAHB0000154 ReplyForward

Future of Storytelling

Following from
Dr Manju Rughwani

Extended Deadline for abstract submission: February 5, 2019: International Conference on The Future of Storytelling, March 14 & 15, 2019

Greetings from Ajeenkya DY Patil University—School of Film & Media--Pune Campus!

We take immense pleasure of inviting you to the two-day inaugural International Conference on ‘The Future of Storytelling-Global & Multidisciplinary Emergence (ICFST-2019) which will be held on March 14 & 15th, 2019.

Invitation for Research Paper Abstract

The Conference invites research papers in the following key-tracks (sub-themes details in the brochure)

·         Digital Storytelling

·         Storytelling and Language

·         Storytelling and Society Change

·         Storytelling in Commercial & Business World

The Last Date for Abstract Submission is February 5, 2019. You could submit your abstract on icfst2019@adypu.edu.in

You could explore our website on www.adypu.edu.in/icfst2019

The final selected paper submission is February 15, 2019.

Selected Papers will be submitted in a peer-reviewed UGC listed journal.

We request you all to extend your support by sharing this communication with your friends/peers in the academia, research and industry fraternity and reach out in large numbers.

Look forward to your participation and contribution to the 

Emerging discourse in the World of Storytelling from a Multidisciplinary Perspective!

from:

,
Dr Manju Rughwani
Convener-ICFST 2019
Head: School of Film & Media
M. +91 9860149305

Dear All,
This blog, http://mediasceneindia.blogspot.com/, was set up as an authentic and dependable platform to exchange information about conferences, seminars, workshops and other events concerning print journalism, and research in India. This has been built up painstakingly without any monetary or other considerations for the last 15 years.
With the popularity of social media, I have a feeling that the blog is not any more required. I plan to discontinue the blog if all of you feel the same way. Let me please know your views,