Sunday, October 9, 2011

Nothing romantic about a candle-light newscast

Loadshedding, power cuts, outages, 2-phase supply etc are near-permanent words in the lexicons of news organisations in a country where electricity shortage is an everyday occurence.

So how can the media bring some life to such a routine news story?

In Karnataka, where scheduled loadshedding will be in force from today, Suvarna News, the 24×7 Kannada news channel owned by the member of Parliament Rajeev Chandrasekhar, took an unusual step on Sunday.

All day, from 6 am to 11 pm, anchors sat in suitably darkened studios and read out the news with a candle on top of their desks to convey the impact the loadshedding was going to have on viewers.

According to the channel’s editor-in-chief Vishweshwar Bhat, the candle was used as a symbol of the looming power crisis; not as if there was no electricity in the channel’s studios.

Hopefully, the channel’s viewers had electricity back home to see the candle-light bulletins.

Kannada Prabha, the daily owned by Rajeev Chandrasekhar and edited by Bhat, followed up on Monday with an all-black front page with a candle as the lead image.


Filed under: A bit of fun, [...]



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