Hi guys,

I am a huge fan of your podcasts and I listen very regularly to Hafta and Awful & Awesome. 

I have heard you guys talk about firecrackers and its relationship with air pollution two years in a row. When I was in school we were given a different perspective on this issue. I grew up in Bombay and graduated from school in 2005. Back then, we were taught about child labour and how thousands of children in smaller towns are being forced to work in these unsafe factories with no windows … all so we can enjoy a few loud pops and a bright display of colours?! We were also shown some documentaries on the condition of children and young adults working in these factories, which really left an impression on my friends and me. We were encouraged to plant one tree every Diwali instead as a pledge to put an end to child labour and help decrease pollution as opposed to adding to it. The idea was that if an entire generation could boycott firecrackers, we can put the industry as a whole out of business. So more than air and sound pollution, schools in our neighbourhood (Bandra, Mumbai) shifted the focus to child labour and incited a feeling of empathy for kids no different from ourselves. Most people I grew up with stopped lighting firecrackers at the age of six or seven.  

I now live in the US and here each state has its own rules for firecrackers. Some states where there is a constant risk of wildfire, a citizen is not allowed to set off fireworks on private property. I understand this would never work in India but I just wanted to put out my thought on the matter. 

Thank you for being my reliable source of all Indian news, politics and pop culture included!

Cheers!

Apurva Ayyangar

***

All,

I am Abhiram Kolli, I live in Chicago and have been a subscriber for a year or two now. I am from Hyderabad and I have a question about South Indian politics. Let me be honest, I am an admirer of Chandrababu Naidu because of his vision for the state. It could because of my age as I remember in 1998-99, all the national media was praising him for his vision and India Today even called him the CEO of Andhra Pradesh. But something interesting happened last week which led me to write this email. He visited Delhi last week and held a press conference but not a single media house reported him live, and they did not give him coverage at all in any of their news reports. I have seen the same thing for the last four years.

This brings me to two questions.

1. How does the national media coverage work? Would political parties normally hire a PR agency, and that PR agency pays media to get their leader live/more coverage? 

2. I know many national media channels tie up with regional media houses for news and reports. I know for sure that Sakshi (YS Jagan’s channel) has tie-ups with a few news media shops in Delhi. Even I feel you rely heavily on TS Sudhir for your news reports about the South, who writes mostly for Sakshi in Telugu. Because I can read Telugu too, most of his articles are a simple translation of his articles written in Sakshi, from Telugu to English. Do you think these tie-ups with regional media houses and news correspondents influence the coverage about the South and also their views about South politics?  

Cheers,
Abhiram

***

Hi all, 

First things first. I won’t apologise for my last email since I made no strawman argument, I would suggest Abhinandan listen to himself on Hafta 195. I will agree to disagree and leave it that. But I would own up to the fact that my intention was to be provocative and offensive in the Twitter way. (By the way, the irony is I don’t use Twitter, so I don’t understand how provocation works there.) So in this aspect, I will accept I am guilty as charged. 

But this email has more important things to discuss (with respect to NL) than #MeToo. 

1) NL Hindi has great content but its graduation should not be to a wider NL Hindi audience but to NL Regional instead. Yes, multilingual edits may be a problem but ask your subscribers with experience with artificial intelligence or machine learning. They could be of great help. Have you ever tried Google Translate?

2) The question of audience. Are you marketing yourselves right? I as a subscriber don’t expect you to be an Amazon, Hotstar or a Netflix but with an audience of reportedly 1.1 crore, 7.5 crore and 0.75 crore respectively, surely advertisements are not their only catches. I am sure they have audiences who aren’t necessarily very cash rich. This is with respect to the Hindi audience conundrum. Something to think about, don’t you think? You aren’t really looking for a subscriber pool of more than 10,000, at the maximum, one lakh. So…

3) Collaboration and crowdfunding. There is an election coming: have you been striking deals with regional media (albeit local) like you did of sorts in Karnataka? I think 101reporters was one. Where is the NL Sena for the election? Look, elections and #MeToo are subjects everybody is interested in. What’s happening? I will be disappointed if your coverage is anywhere short of the standard you had for Karnataka. The ground report/scoop on Kalladka Prabhakar Bhat was mind-blowing! 

4) Subscriber grouse. Every week, subscribers give you loads of suggestions, but I’ve never seen any great action. I understand the constraints. My suggestion is to just put these onto an excel sheet with idea/suggestion, comment, the problem being faced. Put it up on the Facebook Newslaundry subscriber-only page. If any subscriber can give you a solution, he/she will post it as a comment. 

That’s all for now.

Yours grumpily, 
Dhiraj