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Ok, I am starting to lose my touch with titles on blog posts. That title is so lame. So let me first explain what this post is about.

This post is not about callipygian features. It’s about allegiances and disappointment, specifically my allegiance to the the Old Lady of Mount Road and the disappointment resulting from reading her newest stable-mate.

There was a point, even after I came to the US that The Hindu was the place I’d go first for my news, soon after I walked into the lab in Ohio. And you could argue that I lost my fan-boy like blind following when I found a report in The Hindu about a “100 days” celebratory event for Saamy.

Then, sometime last year I found out that The Hindu had a new stable-mate. This paper, Ergo, is circulated apparently in an “all-color format” and has been described (on its website) as a free sheet targeted at young, salaried professionals of Chennai initially “targeting the IT corridor”. I found that the web edition had a proper RSS feed and almost immediately I added it to my Google Reader feeds.

Then suddenly, the feeds stopped and started again after a gap of a couple of months.But from the feeds, I think that the content leaves much to be desired. With headlines such as “Nicole Kidman poses nude for magazine“, “Jordan set for fifth boob job“, “Christina Aguilera back in shape” and “Gemma Molloy off to party with Hefner“, it looks like Ergo is positioning itself as a supermarket tabloid or what could pass off as one in Namma Chennai.

First thing, who is Gemma Molloy? Apparently she is an Australian model. And Michael Jordan has man boobs? And Cuba, did you get an eyeful of his Airness’s man boobs when you did all those commercials for Hanes? Oh, they are talking about Katie Price? Whew!

Jokes apart, it looks like most of the entertainment news is recycled trash from TMZ or Perez Hilton. Not that there is anything wrong with it, but what’s the point of doing it in Chennai? What’s the core value that this “tabloid” is shooting for? Dumbed down news to the email forward creating, fast food chomping BPO types? Now that would sound like a sound business plan to my father. To me, going by what I see online, it seems like the editorial team’s priorities are muddled.

I am not sure if Page 3 Australian celebrities are worth newsprint acreage in India. I am not sure even Hollywood page 3 celebs are worth it. Wait, am I wrong? Do people in India really care if Kim Kardashian took a public shower in a bikini top and a sarong, which the people from thesuperficial.com very kindly brought to my attention last week (I have thesuperficial in my feed reader, solely for the illuminating commentary about Amy Winehouse’s skin ailments, honest!).

If recycled trash was the first thing that strikes me, the last straw is this gallery that showed up on the Ergo feed today. It made me do a double take and wonder if this was a feed from Ergo or one of those Kollywood type websites that post publicity photos from movies that never get made publicity photos that almost always show skin. You know, the one’s that make you think later that the pictures were probably from one of those movies that ended up as soft porn?

I went back and looked at the About page and found this line -

The team was handed total editorial freedom, with just two riders: to follow the “rule of the land”; and keep a check on issues pertaining to taste.

Well, there is no law that prevents “galleries” such as the one that I linked above, but I thought it was in poor taste for a publication that is a stable-mate of The Hindu.

The website itself looks like it is still in beta, though a footnote in the About page indicates to the contrary. For quite sometime (when the feeds weren’t being updated), on the main page, the link to their feeds took me to The Hindu’s main page. The section naming doesn’t make sense (Featured story 1 and Featured story 2?). This Podcast link leads to nowhere, though there are podcasts available (there is an error in the Wordpress category id used in that link). Frankly looking at all of this, I think the beta testing was a sham and the design looks amateurish.

I would be willing to look past the website because I am willing to make the assumption that this was intended to be an offline till someone decided that they should have a web presence. It is stupid to give the online edition step-motherly treatment, but India being India, I guess that happens.

However considering that the website design is credited to a company owned by someone who is considered by many as a doyen among Chennai bloggers and that the “Editor, Publisher and Printer” for Ergo used to be a notable Chennai blogger at one point (if it’s the same person!), I am appalled.

Even then, if someone tells me that the offline version is better, I’d be inclined to believe. The restaurant reviews in the Saapad subsection are pretty informative, considering that I haven’t lived in Chennai for sometime. The Lifestyle section has had some interesting articles that make for nice light reading. And the Entrepreneurs sub section that aims to bring new business models into the open is a brilliant idea.

So if all of those articles (that I read and appreciated in the online version) found a place in the offline paper, then it is all good. However my visibility is limited to the online format alone and frankly if I were to go solely on the basis of this underwhelming online evidence, Ergo is doomed. While I want to root AGAINST that, I don’t think I will win that bet.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 1:27 pm and is filed under Blogs, India, WTF, enna kodumai sir idhu, madras, media.