By Sajith Pai in News Media No Comments Tags: Broadsheets, HT Media, Mint Newspaper
Mint, a financial daily from HT Media Group, went from a Berliner to the larger Broadsheet format today.
Why did they do this?
Mint’s Executive Editor R Sukumar explained the change here. In the article he cites only one reason; that the earlier Berliner format was better suited to carrying longer in depth investigative pieces (“more of less” as he calls it). Today, he says, consumers prefer to get …
By Sajith Pai in Book Discovery No Comments Tags: Amazon, Book Discovery, Bookstores, Curation, Libreria, Morioka Shoten, One Grand Books
Benedict Evans, tech blogger and VC with a16z, recently had an interesting series of tweets, polling his followers about their perception of various industry facts, such as android devices vs iOS devices, in an attempt to contrast the polled results with reality. One of the polls was about perceptions of Amazon’s share of the U.S. Consumer print book market.
Perception: the correct answer is around a third, depending on definitions
By Sajith Pai in News Media No Comments Tags: Content Discovery, Curation, Twitter
Twitter recently announced its Q1 2016 results. While its revenue grew by 36% to ~$600m, and losses halved to ~$80m, the numbers didn’t impress Wall Street analysts or tech pundits. After all, revenue growth is slowing, audience numbers are barely moving and there are newer more exciting kids (snapchat, medium etc) on the block. The stock dropped as much as 13% on the news, and is now trading at its …
By Sajith Pai in Higher Education No Comments Tags: MOOCs, Online / Digital, Universities
An open letter to Mr T S R Subramanian & fellow committee members drafting the New Education Policy
Dear Mr Subramanian & fellow panelists
Congratulations on being appointed to the panel.
This is only the third time since independence, that an education policy is being drafted. The previous policies, be it the Education Policy of 1968 that resulted in the 10+2+3 system of education that we follow today, or the …
By Sajith Pai in Book Reviews 1 Comment Tags: Book Review, History, India, Politics
Reading Sunil Khilnani’s Idea of India nearly two decades after its original appearance to considerable acclaim, and nearly fifteen years after I purchased a copy (yes, I have waited that long to read it!) I am struck by
By Sajith Pai in Book Reviews No Comments Tags: Books
Of these 28 books that I read in 2015, three-fourths were non-fiction. The average page-length was 377 pages. Over a third of these were books written in 2015, and all but two were written in the last 7 years.
I know all this, because I have been keeping tracking of the books that I read, rather obsessively for over a decade now. Every year, at the beginning of the year, …
By Sajith Pai in News Media No Comments Tags: 2015 Review, Adblockers, Content
Let’s face it: 2015 wasn’t really a great year for media companies. From television majors that saw cord-cutting making a sharp dent in their valuations to online players that saw the looming threat from ad-blocking impacting the flow of advertising dollars, there hasn’t been too much good news this year.
And if we take news media – the smaller subset of the media industry that we call home – then …
By Sajith Pai in Book Reviews No Comments Tags: India, Startups, Valuation
I first met Kashyap Deorah sometime late ’08 in Gloria Jeans Coffee in Bandra. We were introduced by Sudhir Sitapati, a junior of mine from IIMA, and a then-advisor to Kashyap’s Chaupaati Bazaar. I was then in the Brand Capital division of Times Group, and the conversation likely revolved around our funding model and whether it made sense for Chaupaati to access it (It didn’t).
We lost touch subsequently, though …
By Sajith Pai in Book Reviews, Higher Education No Comments Tags: Online / Digital, Unbundling, Universities
University Ventures (UV) is one of the rare creatures of the VC/PE investment universe; a fund that claims to be the “only investment firm focused exclusively on the global higher education sector”. UV has made some interesting investments over the years, riding the current wave of technology-led transformation in one of the most stodgy sections of the economy. Underlying these plays is a strong and well-defined investment philosophy, expressed in …
By Sajith Pai in Higher Education No Comments Tags: Engineering, Higher Education
I recently came across a post on the migration patterns of engineering students from India to the U.S. It is authored by Dr Rahul Choudaha & Megha Roy from WES Research, well-regarded for their research around international education. The post said that 5.4m engineers are enrolled in undergraduate education, citing Planning Commission data. This implies that about a fourth of this, barring drop-outs and failures, graduate annually.
Assuming a drop-out …
