Quality never compromises with money – Deccan Chronicle vs The Hindu
Jul 16th, 2006 by Karthick
Started the day today with Deccan chronicles’s e-paper. Thumbing through the pages, I was in for a shock when I reached the supllementary (chennai chronicle). It had an article on how cine stars are pestered by over-enthusiastic fans and how they should tackle them. It related certain incidences where cine stars are bugged by some of their own fans. Excerpts from certain stars were also given. Arya’s (an upcoming tamil actor) views shocked me. I am quoting tha daily’s exact words here.
Arya feels that Kollywood is a far safer industry than Bollywood. “Compared to the kind of mafia threats that Bollywood stars face, the Tamil film industry is much more peaceful. Take the case of Martina Hinges who was stabbed by her fan. Her career is ruined. A situation like Suriya’s is critical and sensitive and it is definitely unwarranted. We as stars try and satisfy our fans to a large extent, but they expect us to talk to them whenev er they want and always be nice and approachable. When we don’t due to work pressure, they tend to resort to such means, which is ridiculous,” he says. ”
Is it not Monika Seles who was stabbed on her back by a die-hard Stefi Graf fan?
I am not sure whose negligence this could be. Is it DC’s or Arya’s ? Deccan chronicle has made it a habit of committing mistakes often. I am thinking of switching back to “The Hindu“.
“Quality never compromises with money“. It is true. For one rupee, you cannot expect quality. 
romba correct than da
i still prefer hindu
yes man! I am gonna stop buying deccan and start subscribing to Hindu again.
i second you
HT ePaper’s edge over competition (The Hindu as a recent case in point):
I have been a regular reader of ‘The Hindu’ and the ‘Hindustan Times’ for the last ten years. With both their ePapers now live with their digital versions, I find major differences in their interface quality and features:
Here is why my family & I think the Hindustan Times epaper scores over The Hindu epaper ePaper/digital paper/online paper.
HT epaper: http://epaper.hindustantimes.com/
Hindu epaper: http://epaper.thehindu.com
1. A big visual difference is the look and feel. The HT has a state-of-art interface which is user-friendly and has a cutting-edge feel to the digital edition of the newspapers – digitized by pressmart as it is.
2. Navigation across HT is phenomenal; it’s so simple and convenient. This makes reading experience so much easy.
3. Real-time news gets displayed in a presentable format, which can be personalized according to one’s preference.
4. In today’s world of the News coming to you, HT has an automated RSS feed generation of the print content and I also receive the mailer (Morning Dispatch) of Newspaper every morning the minute the newspaper goes Live. The best part is I get the MD even before I wake up – not that am lazy
5. Well here is another difference though not visual but equally important, HT’s news can be heard in audio format using text-to-speech technology.
6. Then there is the option of interacting with HT News via Mobile.
7. The fact that every news story can be blogged and also linked with social network sites (Del.icio.us), content rating service (Digg) is sure to increase its base and reach over the Web world.
8. I believe Users any day would prefer HT’s archival technology and their solution providers XML/RSS based interface.
9. By the way, I have also observed multimedia news clips and Ads which are interactive and this way one can contact the advertiser directly.
10. Finally, it’s very easy to find the HT ePaper’s news on the web. It seems to be prioritized on Google, Yahoo & MSN.
Other points:
1) A separate specialized flash and XML based interface for eMagazine, eCatalogs and small-format publications.
Article text-view well formatted. Article text size can be increased or decreased to suit individual preferences.
2) Automated generation of podcastable content from the print content
3) Additional navigation options on right-mouse click menu giving instant access to navigation features
4) Articles integrated with multimedia news clips.
5) Ads integrated with multimedia and interactive ads.
6) Search works on all types of news content, including articles, display ads, classifieds, tender notifications, pictures, etc., even from historic archives, unlike other offerings that work only on news stories. Search results are displayed seamlessly from current day’s ePaper and past archives.
7) Picture and Ad Gallery displays slide shows of print pictures and ads. Pictures get picked up by image search engines giving additional inward traffic to the digital editions.
9) Detailed user-level personalization allows the users to select the pages that need to be displayed and change interface themes to suit individual tastes.
The HT epaper has scored 9/10 and surely has an edge over The Hindu. Then there are lots of technology differences too one needs to look into before signing up – one of the biggest being the user experience, one is usually disappointed by the “404 page not found errors” on Hindu ePaper – that is being maintained by consistently.
The Hindu needs to do something about its epaper features and technology soon – change its technology or its provider. The comparisons and making a choice between the ePapers is easy, even from me an ardent fan – my choice is clear and I shall continue and stay with HT ePaper.
Anil Sekhar
PS: The author has over 20 years of experience in writing books and articles.
Anil, First of all, welcome to karthickraghavan.com .The post is not related with the differences between HT and The Hindu. I don’t subscribe to HT as it is not published in the city where I live. Neither am I interested in it. This post is all about Deccan Chronicle’s irregularities. Neither am I posting about Hindu’s or DC’s e-paper sites. I hope this makes things clear.
Anil’s article is found all over the web ,that is wherever people discuss Hindu.
Who is this Anil by the way? Is there a website for him?
http://anilshekhar23.blogspot.com/ .he commented from that id.but nothing is there.Escapes me!!
Yea! I visited that site and there was a single post named Hello and one comment. That guy could have very well used the comment he posted here in his site.