Editor

Yesterday afternoon I met with the Madurai bureau chief of The Hindu, a national newspaper, just to get a general sense about the media here (can't totally throw away all my old interests), and see about writing a couple of freelance pieces if I can think of anything worthwhile to say.

As noted in the LA Times last month (and I think elsewhere before that), India is one of the only places in the world where newspapers are actually thriving. With increasing literacy rates -- and not terribly good Internet access -- more and more people here actually read the print pages. The editor I talked to, who was a little cautious in characterizing his paper, said that the Hindu was kind of "above the fray," and less interested in tabloid scandals that its competitors (he says that he competes equally with newspapers in English as well as others in Tamil).

I'm still having trouble compressing the video to a feasible size. It keeps coming out kind of low-quality, but my computer isn't letting me adjust that. For these interviews, though, it's more about the words anyway, I think. Maybe not as interesting for non-journalism nerds, but there we are ...