News Broadcasting
CNN Young Journalist Award 2006 winners announced
NEW DELHI: While Tejeswi Pratima Dodda and Rohit Vishwanath won this year’s CNN Young Journalist Awards, announced at a glittering function yesterday punctuated by rank bad compering, it was the inevitable choice of Ajit Jaykar as the CNN Citizen Journalist Awardee that drew the loudest applaud from the audience.
Jaykar had done the ‘biggest story of the year’ shooting from his video camera, the first person to capture footage of the Mumbai blasts. It was thus sad that Jaykar was unable to collect his award at the function, for as Rajdeep Sardesai of CNN-IBN said, “like all good Indian journalists, he must be working somewhere on a Friday evening.
Jaykar will receive a trophy, citation, Rs 20,000 in cash and a digital camera.
Dodda – from NDTV 24×7, Hyderabad bagged the TV category award for her reporting “Children for hire”, on kids being used as domestic help, which was aired on CNN-IBN and which provoked the CM of AP to order a probe into the issue.
Vishwanath, who works for Business World from Mumbai, won the runner-up award for his report on “Shop floor jobs are hot once again” a report on the fact that engineering jobs and not just those in IT, are still a favourite among Indian youth.
Sonia Faleiro of Tehelka (Mumbai) won the runner up award in the print and online category and Poonam Agarwal from NDTV Delhi won the runner up in the TV category.
CNN Aspiring Journalist Award was won by Raksha Kumar from Lady Shri Ram College in the TV category.
The jury decided to give a special mention to Piyush Bhatia from Indian Institute of Mass Communication for his notable performance in the final rounds of the selection process.
Satinder Bindra, CNN’s Senior International Correspondent, along with Rajdeep Sardesai and other jury members said the selections were a tough fight between young people who had at least two things in common: passion and determination.
For the Young Journalist Awards, the contestants were given repeated inputs from incidents taking place in Iraq and were asked to report – depending on the medium – either stand in front of a live TV camera and report, or file in print or online.
The winners in all categories were given a trophy and citation. The winners of the YJA will be sent to the CNN headquarter to work for a month.
However, as Gurbir Singh, media editor of Hindustan Times, pointed out, despite the fact that there was a lot of zeal and passion, somehow, in terms of print, basic things like grammar, syntax, writing skills and expression remain to fulfil the highest standards, and “the industry needs to look inwards and see what can be done about this”
News Broadcasting
News TV viewership jumps 33 per cent as West Asia war draws audiences
BARC Week 8 data shows news share rising to 8 per cent despite T20 World Cup
NEW DELHI:Â Even as individual television news channel ratings remain under a temporary pause, the genre itself is seeing a clear surge in audience attention.
According to the latest data from Broadcast Audience Research Council India, television news recorded a 33 per cent jump in genre share in Week 8 of 2026, covering February 28 to March 6.
The news genre accounted for 8 per cent of total television viewership during the week, up from 6 per cent the previous week. The spike in attention coincided with escalating geopolitical tensions involving the United States, Israel and Iran, which have kept global headlines firmly fixed on West Asia.
The rise is notable because it came at a time when cricket was dominating television screens. The high-stakes stages of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, including the Super 8 fixtures and semi-finals, were being broadcast during the same period.
Despite the cricket frenzy, viewers appeared to be toggling between sport and global affairs, boosting the overall share of news programming.
The surge in genre share comes even as the government has enforced a one-month pause on publishing ratings for individual news channels. The move followed regulatory scrutiny of the television ratings ecosystem.
While channel-level rankings remain temporarily out of sight, the genre-level data suggests that when global tensions escalate, audiences continue to turn to television news for real-time updates.
