The Hindustan Times on the 1st of January came with some resolutions and one of those was that the newspaper would put on more weight. The plan to put on more weight by adding more content but I guess finding and providing new content is not always as easy as promising it.
The same content including the photos has been repeated in the two section of Hindustan Times - Splurge and Cafe
On Saturday I was going through the paper and I was a feature on photographer Rahgu Rai. When I saw it I had a deja-vu. I felt that I had seen the same pictures somewhere else as well in a little different layout. I thought maybe I am mistaken but no I was not. I later realized that they have repeated the same thing, and that too on the same day.
Here too the same news has been repeated unnecessarily
They have a section called Cafe and a section called Splurge and it was in both the sections. I am reading Hindustan Times since I can remember and didn't really enjoyed reading TOI and when they launched the paper in Bombay, I switched back to it. They are trying to build a reader base in a city owned by Times of India so they have to try hard but this is just ridiculous. It is not limited t only this but another news in the business section was repeated as well.
Coming back to the paper war. TOI introduced a tabloid called Mumbai Mirror and they have been very happy that it is number two in circulation on its first birthday which is hardly an achievement since it is given free of cost with every copy of TOI and I doubt if they sell even a single copy of it. In order to compete with Times of India, Hindustan times also thought of having something like that but they didn't want to be called copy cats so instead of having a separate tabloid, the included a new section called cafe that is in the shape of a tabloid and as you can see has recycled content.
On another note, the second news that was repeated in HT is quite interesting. When I looked at the photo the word that came to my mind was "Starbucks" and they is exactly what the people at starbucks thought too when they saw it so the took the Korean company to the court. The Korean court saw otherwise and they said the logo is not copied from Starbucks. You decide, are they really true or just favoring a Korean company over a foreign one.
