The Century Times

In this times of century, where communications are at lightning speed, I feel sorry for the job done by The Times of India’s team to cover Dehradun.

Although Times of India doesn’t have any special edition for the state of Uttarakhand, but it has a weekly supplement viz. Doon Plus circulated in the Dehradun and Haridwar districts of Uttarakhand, every Saturday. It contains just four pages, most of which are advertisements. The rest carries copies of articles written for other editions which are hardly relevent here. If you pick up the copy of Doon Plus (circulated yesterday), you will find articles with the opening lines like “When 2007 dawns this Monday…” or “The coming Bikex show on 5th January” or “Pragati Maidan in your neighbourhood”. Sometimes words like this prompt me to check the date of the newspaper, I’m reading through. Its obvious that these articles are atleast a week old and are written for the audience of Delhi.

Most of the times, I’d already read the articles printed here in Delhi or in some other editions available online at www.epaper.timesofindia.com .

So in effect they are harrassing me (and other readers) by feeding outdated & irrelevent content and wasting my valuable time!

Instead of an article, there was a sports news item on its front page this week and that too of half page. I dunno how they position their supplements. There must be problems with their editorial team or content logistics, as columnists do their job pretty well. But may God bless them, some of their coloumns come without their names here. e.g. see the coloumn of Jugal Kishore ( I recognised as the photograph is there but not the name) or a coloumn on aquarium (I won’t like to guess who wrote it, as I am not sure this time) in this issue.

Sorry, I am unable to provide you any permalink for you to see as they haven’t yet hosted this edition on their website! Perhaps you may be able to check it later at www.doonplus.com …if you are fortunate enough

I am surprised to learn that they are making this supplement twice-a-week from the next week. Who demanded for it? Surely not the readers like me. Might be their advertisers …as this is the monopolistic English media here in Uttarakhand with no distant competition. People at Times of India should know that readers love better content more than the advertisements. Perhaps they are still learning this lesson.

Might be they are confusing their media with another local paper circulated to Times of India’s readers carrying only advertisements and zero content viz. Dehradun Classified ( www.dehradunclassified.com). As of now, Dehradun Classified’s revenue are many folds higher than the Times of India’s Doon Plus and that too despite of its zero content and lower circulation. Perhaps it has an influence over the strategy of Doon Plus. But there are many factors and reasons influencing this marketing battle. Will write more about this later in a different post.

So far the bad news is that Doon Plus is going twice-a-week and I’m afraid I’ll be fed with the same old, duplicate and irrelevent content more frequently! Is Nilakshi Bhattacharyya listening?