Sunday, April 29, 2018

Need to Know the Truth

There is a famous Tamil movie line “enakku oru unmai therinjaganum” (I need to know the truth). So here goes.

Everyday I read news from 4 news organizations, Two American and two Indian. One of them is the online edition of NDTV News. I always wondered what they are thinking when designing their pages. They have a header with the title INDIA NEWS and on the same page SOUTH NEWS. Please see below.
 
 
 
I always thought South India is also part and parcel of whole India. Then why INDIA NEWS and SOUTH NEWS separately? I can understand if they show NORTH NEWS, WEST NEWS, EAST NEWS, and SOUTH NEWS. Don’t they consider South is also part of India?

If someone knows the answer, I would appreciate.

19 comments:

  1. Even I used to think the same. I am glad you pointed that out, will wait to see what are the views of other people on this!

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  2. I guess you are referring to the two links -- 'India News' and 'South News' -- on the Home page. My understanding is that they are two of the many sections on the Home Page. If you click any of those sections, you get news pertaining to that section.

    So, if you click on 'India News' section, you get news from across the nation.

    If you click on 'South News', you get news only from the south.

    Further, in the South News page, there is a drop-down menu, for each of the major five south Indian states. If you select 'Tamil Nadu', you can read news from that State.

    Similarly, there are two different sections 'Sports News' and 'Cricket News'. (Though cricket news is also sports news.)

    Some of the other such sections are Tech, IPL, Movies etc.

    If you noticed there is a section in Tamil language as well. If you click on that, you get to read news in Tamil. Unfortunately, since I can't read Tamil, I don't know what is written there.

    Just as there is no North News, or Football news, there is no section in Malayalam either!

    Such subsets like 'South News' and 'Cricket News' have been spun off into different sections, probably because there is a greater demand to read news pertaining to those sections.

    This is my understanding.

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    1. Thanks Pradeep for your comments. I understand what you are saying. INDIA NEWS covers news across the nation and SOUTH NEWS covers news only from South. My doubt is why there is no NORTH NEWS, WEST NEWS and EAST NEWS to cover their regional news?

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  3. I think South Indian traffic to the homepage of this site might be more, and hence they might have allocated a separate section for the South in order to guide them to regional news. That will reduce the bounce rate for their website (people who just read one page and leave).

    So I feel the reason might have to do more with traffic and revenue.

    Destination Infinity

    PS: But I should agree that while there is a good ration of common denominator within the North/West/Central India, South Indians are different. We should consider ourselves lucky for getting this kind of visibility, especially when compared to the North Eastern states which rarely get any mention in the national press!

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    1. Thanks for your comments Rajesh. So you are saying more people from South read NDTV so these people are getting preferential treatment. That is unfair for people from other region.

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  4. I feel the distinction is.... There is definitely a very strong set of people who would like to read only SOUTH news and do not need the rest of India News as the rest of India to them is all North. LOL... Maybe that's why the distinction.

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    1. Thanks for your comments Dee. You could be right.

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  5. Why is this so strange?
    In the USA, we do something very similar.
    We have news for “intelligent people” aka FOX news…and news for “stupid people who couldn’t spell CAT…even if you gave them a clue that the first two letters are C and A”.
    Those morons get their news from CNN, ABC, NBC, and MSNBC aka PMS-NBC.
    Perhaps your regional thing has to do with intelligence.

    Regards,
    FOX and Friends

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    1. Thanks for your comments FOX and Friends. As always, you are an out of the box thinker. Say hello to Steve Doocy.

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  6. At least they could add one more word Indian as South Indian News.

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    1. Thanks for your comments Sarala. Agreed.

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  7. Weird, really. Will love to read others'views too Interesting subject!

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    1. Thanks for your comments Sandhya. Yes, really weird.

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  8. India News, World News and next to that South News. I saw the website after I saw your post. That's so racist. :)

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    1. Thanks for your comments Ash. Very racist. That is the reason for writing this blog post.

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  9. I checked the NDTV site and I find that it is pretty weird. Interesting observation you have made, SG :)

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