Interesting Links in India-US Media

Rolling Stone magazine was reincarnated in India at the end of February, appearing with five different covers, only one of them featuring an Indian performer: sitar princess Anoushka Shankar, the daughter of Ravi Shankar. The other four covers featured Led Zeppelin, Bruce Springsteen, Amy Winehouse and Jay-Z.

The Indian Rolling Stone is being published monthly by a company owned by autoparts and appliances biggie Anand Mahindra, whose wife Anuradha will be the editor-in-chief. The Editor and Publisher under her will be Radhakrishna Nair, a graduate from Mahindra's other media venture, Men's World. Nair told reporters at the launch party at Bombay's Hard Rock Cafe that he hoped for a circulation of 50,000, rising to 80 or 90,000. About a third of the editorial content will be generated in India, which has a flourishing music industry; the rest will reproduce content from the 14 other editions of the magazine.

Another significant US-India media alliance is between NBC and India's largest private television company, NDTV (it began as New Delhi Television). NBC is reported to have taken a 26 per cent equity stake in NDTV, which was allied for five years with Rupert Murdoch's Sky TV. That relationship ended because of a quarrel over editorial independence. Under Prannoy Roy, NDTV has mushroomed into a multifaceted television conglomerate which now offers 24/7 news and a number of specialized channels.

Also interesting is the contract Foreign Affairs has signed with Pune-based Sakaal Group to issue a monthly journal, India and the World or India and Global Affairs (we await clarification on what the name really is; the former title was mentioned by Foreign Affairs editor James Hoge at Columbia Journalism School; the latter was in an email from the Council on Foreign Relations, the publisher of Foreign Affairs). It seems that the Indian magazine will carry a number of articles from the American parent. Whether the editor of the Indian magazine, former Times of India editor Dileep Padgaonkar, will have the power of refusal or broader editorial independence is not clear.