Let the Truth Prevail | |
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![]() 20 August 2013 front page of The Times of India (Kolkata edition) | |
Type | Daily newspaper |
---|---|
Format | Broadsheet |
Owner(s) | The Times Group |
Editor | Jaideep Bose |
Founded | 3 November 1838 |
Language | English |
Headquarters | Mumbai, Maharashtra, India |
Country | India |
Circulation | 1,872,442(as of April 2023) [1] |
Sister newspapers | The Economic Times Navbharat Times Maharashtra Times Ei Samay Mumbai Mirror Vijaya Karnataka Bangalore Mirror Times Now News |
ISSN | 0971-8257 |
OCLC number | 23379369 |
Website | timesofindia |
The Times of India, also known by its abbreviation TOI, is an Indian English-language daily newspaper and digital news media owned and managed by The Times Group. It is the fourth-largest newspaper in India by circulation and largest selling English-language daily in the world. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] It is the oldest English-language newspaper in India, and the second-oldest Indian newspaper still in circulation, with its first edition published in 1838. [7] It is nicknamed as "The Old Lady of Bori Bunder", [8] [9] and is an Indian "newspaper of record". [10] [11]
Near the beginning of the 20th century, Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India, called TOI "the leading paper in Asia". [12] [13] In 1991, the BBC ranked TOI among the world's six best newspapers. [14] [15]
It is owned and published by Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. (B.C.C.L.), which is owned by the Sahu Jain family. In the Brand Trust Report India study 2019, TOI was rated as the most trusted English newspaper in India. [16] Reuters rated TOI as India's most trusted media news brand in a survey. [17] [18] In recent decades, the newspaper has been criticised for establishing in the Indian news industry the practice of accepting payments from persons and entities in exchange for positive coverage. [5]
TOI issued its first edition on 3 November 1838 as The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce. [19] [20] The paper was published on Wednesdays and Saturdays under the direction of Raobahadur Narayan Dinanath Velkar, a Maharashtrian social reformer, and contained news from Britain and the world, as well as the Indian Subcontinent. J. E. Brennan was its first editor he died in 1839 and George Buist became the Editor. It became a daily in 1850 under him.George Buist had a pro British editorial policy and a Parsi shareholder Fardoonji Naoroji wanted him to change his editorial policy particularly in background of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 .However, Buist refused to change his editorial policy or give up his editorial independence. After a shareholder's meeting he was replaced by Robert Knight. [21] [22] [23] [24]
In 1860, editor Robert Knight (1825–1892) bought the Indian shareholders' interests, merged with rival Bombay Standard, and started India's first news agency. It wired Times dispatches to papers across the country and became the Indian agent for Reuters news service. In 1861, he changed the name from the Bombay Times and Standard to The Times of India. Knight fought for a press free of prior restraint or intimidation, frequently resisting the attempts by governments, business interests and cultural spokesmen, and led the paper to national prominence. [25] [26] In the 19th century, this newspaper company employed more than 800 people and had a sizeable circulation in India and Europe.
Subsequently, TOI saw its ownership change several times until 1892 when an English journalist named Thomas Jewell Bennett, along with Frank Morris Coleman (who later drowned in the 1915 sinking of the SS Persia), acquired the newspaper through their new joint stock company, Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd.
Sir Stanley Reed edited TOI from 1907 until 1924 and received correspondence from major figures of India such as Mahatma Gandhi. In all he lived in India for fifty years. He was respected in the United Kingdom as an expert on Indian current affairs.
Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd was sold to sugar magnate Ramkrishna Dalmia of the industrial family, for ₹20 million (equivalent to ₹2.8 billionorUS$36 million in 2023) in 1946, as India became independent and the British owners left. [27] In 1955 the Vivian Bose Commission of Inquiry found that Ramkrishna Dalmia, in 1947, had engineered the acquisition of the media giant Bennett Coleman & Co. by transferring money from a bank and an insurance company of which he was the chairman. In the court case that followed, Ramkrishna Dalmia was sentenced to two years in Tihar Jail after having been convicted of embezzlement and fraud. [5]
Most of the jail term he managed to spend in hospital. Upon his release, his son-in-law, Sahu Shanti Prasad Jain, to whom he had entrusted the running of Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd., rebuffed his efforts to resume command of the company. [5]
In the early 1960s, Shanti Prasad Jain was imprisoned on charges of selling newsprint on the black market. [28] And based on the Vivian Bose Commission's earlier report which found wrongdoings of the Dalmia – Jain group, that included specific charges against Shanti Prasad Jain, the Government of India filed a petition to restrain and remove the management of Bennett, Coleman and Company. Based on the pleading, the Justice directed the Government to assume control of the newspaper which resulted in replacing half of the directors and appointing a Bombay High Court judge as the chairman. [29]
Following the Vivian Bose Commission report indicating serious wrongdoings of the Dalmia–Jain group, on 28 August 1969, the Bombay High Court, under Justice J. L. Nain, passed an interim order to disband the existing board of Bennett, Coleman & Co and to constitute a new board under the Government. The bench ruled that "Under these circumstances, the best thing would be to pass such orders on the assumption that the allegations made by the petitioners that the affairs of the company were being conducted in a manner prejudicial to public interest and to the interests of the Company are correct". [12] Following that order, Shanti Prasad Jain ceased to be a director and the company ran with new directors on board, appointed by the Government of India, with the exception of a lone stenographer of the Jains. The court appointed D K Kunte as chairman of the board. Kunte had no prior business experience and was also an opposition member of the Lok Sabha.
In 1976, during the Emergency in India, the Government transferred ownership of the newspaper back to Ashok Kumar Jain, who was Sahu Shanti Prasad Jain's son and Ramkrishna Dalmia's grandson. He is the father of the current owners Samir Jain and Vineet Jain). [30] The Jains too often landed themselves in various money laundering scams and Ashok Kumar Jain had to flee the country when the Enforcement Directorate pursued his case strongly in 1998 for alleged violations of illegal transfer of funds (to the tune of US$1.25 million) to an overseas account in Switzerland. [31] [32] [33] [34]
On 26 June 1975, the day after India declared a state of emergency, the Bombay edition of TOI carried an entry in its obituary column that read "D.E.M. O'Cracy, beloved husband of T.Ruth, father of L.I.Bertie, brother of Faith, Hope and Justice expired on 25 June". [35] The move was a critique of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's 21-month state of emergency, which is now widely known as "the Emergency" and seen by many as a roundly authoritarian era of Indian government. [36] [37]
The Bombay Times is a free supplement of The Times of India, in the Mumbai (formerly Bombay) region. It covers celebrity news, news features, international and national music news, international and national fashion news, lifestyle and feature articles pegged on news events both national and international that have local interest value. The main paper covers national news. Over ten years of presence, it has become a benchmark for the Page 3 social scene.
The Times of India - and thereby the Bombay Times - are market leaders in terms of circulation. The name of this supplement contains the word Bombay, which is the older Portuguese name of the city. It is not retained in the new supplement Mumbai Mirror that comes with Times of India.
In late 2006, Times Group acquired Vijayanand Printers Limited (VPL). VPL previously published two Kannada newspapers, Vijay Karnataka and Usha Kiran, and an English daily, Vijay Times. Vijay Karnataka was the leader in the Kannada newspaper segment then. [38]
The paper launched a Chennai edition, 12 April 2008. [39] It launched a Kolhapur edition, February 2013.
Introduced in 2013 [40] and awarded for the second time in 2016, [41] "The Times of India Film Awards" or the "TOIFA" is an award for the work in Film Industry decided by a global public vote on the nomination categories. [42]
TOI is published by the media group Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. The company, along with its other group of companies, known as The Times Group, also publishes Ahmedabad Mirror , Bangalore Mirror , Mumbai Mirror , Pune Mirror; Economic Times ; ET Panache (Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore on Monday to Friday) and ET Panache (Pune and Chennai on every Saturday); Ei Samay Sangbadpatra , (a Bengali daily); Maharashtra Times , (a Marathi daily); Navbharat Times , (a Hindi daily).
TOI has its editions in major cities such as Mumbai, [43] Agra, Ahmedabad, Allahabad, Aurangabad, Bareilly, Bangalore, Belgaum, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Coimbatore, Chandigarh, Chennai, Dehradun, Delhi, Gorakhpur, Gurgaon, Guwahati, Gwalior, Hubli, Hyderabad, Indore, Jabalpur, Jaipur, Jammu, Kanpur, Kochi, Kolhapur, Kolkata, Lucknow, Ludhiana, Madurai, Malabar, Mangalore, Meerut, Mysore, Nagpur, Nashik, Navi Mumbai, Noida, Panaji, Patna, Pondicherry, Pune, Raipur, Rajkot, Ranchi, Shimla, Surat, Thane, Tiruchirapally, Trivandrum, Vadodara, Varanasi, Vijayawada and Visakhapatnam.[ citation needed ]
![]() | This article or section appears to be slanted towards recent events.(December 2019) |
TOI has been criticised for being the first to institutionalise the practice of paid news in India, where politicians, businessmen, corporations and celebrities can pay the newspaper and its journalists would carry the desired news for the payer. [5] [47] [48] The newspaper offers prominence with which the paid news is placed and the page on which it is displayed based on the amount of the payment. According to this practice, a payment plan assures a news feature and ensures positive coverage to the payer. [5] In 2005, TOI began the practice of "private treaties", also called as "brand capital", where new companies, individuals or movies seeking mass coverage and public relations, major brands and organisations were offered sustained positive coverage and plugs in its news columns in exchange for shares or other forms of financial obligations to Bennett, Coleman & Company, Ltd. (B.C.C.L.) – the owners of TOI. [5] [47] The B.C.C.L., with its "private treaties" program, acquired stakes in 350 companies and generated 15% of its revenues by 2012, according to a critical article in The New Yorker . The "paid news" and "private treaties" practice started by TOI has since been adopted by The Hindustan Times group, the India Today group, the Outlook group, and other major media groups in India including Indian television channels. [5] [49] This division of the company was later renamed Brand Capital and has contracts in place with many companies in diverse sectors.
The "paid news" and "private treaties" blur the lines between content and advertising, with the favourable coverage written by the staff reporters on the payroll of TOI. [5] The newspaper has defended its practice in 2012 by stating that it includes a note of disclosure to the reader – though in a small font – that its contents are "advertorial, entertainment promotional feature", that they are doing this to generate revenues just like "all newspapers in the world do advertorials" according to TOI owners. [5] [47] According to Maya Ranganathan, this overlap in the function of a journalist to also act as a marketing and advertisement revenue seeker for the newspaper raises conflict of interest questions, a problem that has morphed into ever-larger scale in India and recognised by India's SEBI authority in July 2009. [47]
Under an ad sales initiative called Medianet, if a large company or Bollywood studio sponsored a news-worthy event, the event would be covered by TOI but the name of the company or studio that sponsored it will not be mentioned in the paper unless they paid TOI for advertising. In 2010, a report by a subcommittee of India's Press Council found that Medianet's paid news strategy had spread to a large number of newspapers and more than five hundred television channels. [5] [50]
Critics state that the company's paid news and private treaties skew its coverage and shield its newspaper advertisers from scrutiny. The Hoot, a media criticism website, has pointed out that when a lift in a 19-storey luxury apartment complex in Bangalore crashed killing two workers and injuring seven, all the English language and Kannada language newspapers with the exception of TOI called out the name of the construction company, Sobha Developers, which was a private-treaty partner. An article titled "reaping gold through bt cotton," which first appeared in the Nagpur edition of TOI in 2008, reappeared unchanged in 2011, this time with a small print alert that the article was a "marketing feature". In both cases, the article was factually incorrect and made false claims about the success of Monsanto's genetically modified cotton. According to a critical article published in the Indian investigative news magazine The Caravan , when the Honda Motors plant in Gurgaon experienced an eight-month-long conflict between management and non-unionised workers over wages and work conditions in 2005, the Times of India covered the concerns of Honda and the harm done to India's investment climate and largely ignored the issues raised by workers. [5]
Vineet Jain, managing director of B.C.C.L., has insisted that a wall does exist between sales and the newsroom, and that the paper does not give favorable coverage to the company's business partners. "Our editors don't know who we have," Jain said, although he later acknowledged that all private-treaty clients are listed on the company's Web site. [5] Ravindra Dhariwal, the former CEO of B.C.C.L. had defended private treaties in a 2010 interview with the magazine Outlook and claims that the partners in the private treaties sign contracts where they agree to clauses that they will not receive any favourable editorial coverage.
There have been claims that TOI would strike deals with advertisers only if they removed their advertisements from other competitor newspapers. [5]
TOI is also embroiled in an active lawsuit against the Financial Times . In 1993, when the Financial Times was preparing to enter the Indian market, Samir Jain, the vice-chairman of B.C.C.L., registered the term "Financial Times" as a trademark of his company and declared it his intellectual property in an attempt to stymie the Financial Times and prevent them from competing with The Economic Times , which is owned by B.C.C.L. [5]
In 1994, when the Hindustan Times was the top-selling paper in New Delhi, TOI slashed their prices by a third, to one and a half rupees after having built up their ads sales force in preparation for the price drop to make up for the lost circulation revenue. By 1998, the Hindustan Times had dropped to second place in Delhi. TOI took a similar strategy in Bangalore where they dropped the price to one rupee despite protests from Siddharth Varadarajan, one of the editors of the newspaper at the time, who called the strategy "predatory pricing". [5]
In 2018, Vineet Jain, managing director of B.C.C.L., and Sanjeev Shah, executive president of B.C.C.L., were caught on camera as part of a sting operation by Cobrapost agreeing to promote right-wing content through the group's many media properties for a proposed spend of ₹500 crore, some of which the client said could only be paid with black money. [51] B.C.C.L. has responded to the sting claiming that the video that was released by Cobrapost was "doctored" and "incomplete" and that the CEO Vineet Jain was engaged in a "reverse-sting" of his own to expose the undercover reporter during the filming of the video. [52] The company is yet to release the video evidence.
Publisher
Mumbai — the official name until 1995) is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra. Mumbai is the de facto financial centre and the most populous city of India with an estimated city proper population of 12.5 million (1.25 crore). Mumbai is the centre of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, the sixth most populous metropolitan area in the world with a population of over 23 million living under the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation. Mumbai lies on the Konkan coast on the west coast of India and has a deep natural harbour. In 2008, Mumbai was named an alpha world city.
Maharashtra is a state in the western peninsular region of India occupying a substantial portion of the Deccan Plateau. It is bordered by the Arabian Sea to the west, the Indian states of Karnataka and Goa to the south, Telangana to the southeast and Chhattisgarh to the east, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh to the north, and the Indian union territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu to the northwest. Maharashtra is the second-most populous state in India and the fourth-most populous country subdivision globally.
Bennett, Coleman and Company Limited is an Indian media conglomerate headquartered in Mumbai, Maharashtra. The company, which is a family-owned business, publishes The Times of India newspaper, which is the highest selling daily English-language newspaper in India, in addition to several radio stations, television channels such as Times Now, the film magazine Filmfare, and the women's magazine Femina. The Sahu Jain family continues to own a majority of the stake in the group, and in May 2023, the Times Group was split into two separate business entities between brothers Vineet Jain and Samir Jain, such that its radio and broadcast properties would remain with Vineet Jain and its print properties would be under Samir Jain.
The Economic Times is an Indian English-language business-focused daily newspaper. It is owned by The Times Group. The Economic Times began publication in 1961. As of 2012, it is the world's second-most widely read English-language business newspaper, after The Wall Street Journal, with a readership of over 800,000. It is published simultaneously from 14 cities: Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Chandigarh, Pune, Indore, and Bhopal. Its main content is based on the Indian economy, international finance, share prices, prices of commodities as well as other matters related to finance. This newspaper is published by Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. The founding editor of the paper when it was launched in 1961 was P. S. Hariharan. The current editor of The Economic Times is Bodhisattva Ganguli.
Filmfare is an Indian English-language fortnightly magazine published by Worldwide Media. Acknowledged as one of India's most popular entertainment magazines, it publishes pieces involving news, interviews, photos, videos, reviews, events, and style. The magazine also annually gives the Filmfare Awards, the Filmfare Awards South, the Filmfare Awards East, the Filmfare Marathi Awards, the Filmfare Awards Punjabi, the Filmfare OTT Awards, the Filmfare Short Film Awards, and the Filmfare Style & Glamour Awards.
Pav bhaji is a street food dish from India consisting of a thick vegetable curry (bhaji) served with a soft bread roll (pav). It originated in the city of Mumbai.
Navbharat Times (NBT) a Hindi newspaper distributed in Delhi, Mumbai, Lucknow and Kanpur. It is from the stable of Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd (BCCL), which also publishes other dailies including The Times of India, The Economic Times, Maharashtra Times and also magazines such as Filmfare and Femina. NBT is one of the oldest product of the BCCL group.
Indu Jain was an Indian media executive and philanthropist. She belonged to the Sahu Jain family and was the chairperson of India's largest media group, popularly known as The Times Group.
The Sahu Jain family is an industrial family of India. They own Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd., which owns The Times of India, the most-circulated English-language newspaper in the world. The members of the extended family have interests in education, chemicals and finance.
Sahu Shanti Prasad Jain was an Indian industrialist and philanthropist. He was the son-in-law of Ramkrishna Dalmia and former chairman of Bennett, Coleman. His family, Sahu Jains, owns the Times of India newspaper group.
Casimiro Emérito Rosa Teles Jordão Monteiro, also known as Agente Monteiro, was a Portuguese covert operations military intelligence officer and law enforcement officer during the Estado Novo regime. He carried out state-sanctioned bombings and assassinations in Portugal, Mozambique and Goa. His actions were mostly focused against members of independence movements that existed in the Portuguese colonial empire.
Samir Jain is an Indian publisher and the Vice-Chairman and Managing Director (VCMD) of Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd., also known as The Times Group, a leading media conglomerate with its primary base of operations in India, which publishes The Times of India and has many other interests. Jain belongs to the Sahu Jain family, an industrialist family of India.
Navshakti is a Marathi newspaper based in Mumbai, India. The newspaper has a circulation of 83,910 across the state of Maharashtra. This paper was started by S. Sadanand. P. R. Behere was its first editor.
Ei Samay Sangbadpatra is a Bengali-language daily newspaper from The Times Group. It was launched as a broadsheet daily newspaper with a motive to enter into a head-to-head competition with Anandabazar Patrika. It is owned and published by Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. which is owned by the Sahu Jain family.
Ashok Jain was the Chairman of Bennett, Coleman & Co., the parent company of The Times of India and other large newspapers.
Vineet Jain is an Indian entrepreneur and current Managing Director of Bennett, Coleman & Co. Limited, India’s oldest and largest media group in India, also known as Times Group. The Times Group is present across the media spectrum with a presence in Print, TV, Internet, Radio, Events and OOH. The Times Group has legacy of 180+ years and publishes leading Indian general and business newspaper – The Times of India and The Economic Times.
The Media in Gujarati language started with publication of Bombay Samachar in 1822. Initially the newspapers published business news and they were owned by Parsi people based in Bombay. Later Gujarati newspapers started published from other parts of Gujarat. Several periodicals devoted to social reforms were published in the second half of the 19th century. After arrival of Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian independence movement peaked and it resulted in proliferation of Gujarati media. Following independence, the media was chiefly focused on political news. After bifurcation of Bombay state, the area of service changed. Later there was an increase in readership due to growth of literacy and the media houses expanded its readership by publishing more number of editions. Later these media houses ventured into digital media also. The radio and television media expanded after 1990.
Dalmia Bharat Group (DBG) is an Indian conglomerate, which traces its origins to the businesses established by brothers Ramkrishna Dalmia and Jaidayal Dalmia in eastern India in the first half of the 20th century. In the 1930s, the group merged with the businesses of the Sahu Jain family to form the Dalmia-Jain Group. In 1948, the two families decided to split the businesses; the Dalmia businesses were further divided between Ramkrishna and Jaidayal.
Newslaundry is an Indian media watchdog that provides media critique, reportage and satirical commentary. It was founded in 2012 by Abhinandan Sekhri, Madhu Trehan and Prashant Sareen, all of whom earlier worked in print or television journalism. It was India's first subscription-driven website when launched, and since then other platforms have followed a similar model. In contrast to news websites such as The Wire, The Quint, ThePrint or Scroll.in, Newslaundry solely relies on public subscriptions, instead of donations or advertisements, for revenue.
Pradeep Guha, also known as PG was an Indian media personality, advertising professional and film producer. He is best known for his work at Bennett, Coleman and Company (BCCL), the publisher of The Times of India, where he served for almost three decades (1976-2005) and transformed the flagship newspaper and magazine brands such as Filmfare and Femina. He also served as CEO of Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd, and managing director of 9X Media Private Limited. He was credited with introducing several innovative practices in the Indian media industry. He was also known for producing films such as Fiza (2000) and Phir Kabhi (2008).