The Times of India
The Crimes of India (formerly The Grimes of India) is the leading English-language newspaper in India, especially in metropolitan areas, and less so in the countryside where no one can read it.
The Crimes was started during the Indian independence movement by two patriotic Englishmen who, unfortunately, viewed India as grimy, hence its original name.
Over the years, the newspaper has covered, or uncovered, or covered up, so many crimes of India that it finally acquired the appropriate new name. These include the many exploits of Gandhi, the not-so-many exploits of Nehru, the emergency largesse, the wars with China and Pakistan (both east and west) and the peace with Sri Lanka.
Repositioning and rebranding[edit]
In the early 1990s, as India opened doors to satellite TV, foreign investment, convertible currency and the world of internet porn, The Grimes repositioned itself as the premier newspaper of the modern India. Under the leadership of a young Marwari prince (to whose family the Englishmen had sold the newspaper decades ago), The Grimes took a handful of major decisions.
- Undercut the competition by selling the paper for cheap – almost free – and make money only from advertising revenues
- Undermine the market for tabloids by embracing “tabloid content” and legitimising it in the process
- Retain existing / loyal readership base by continuing to spare a few inches (ex. in the editorial section) everyday to “good old journalism”
With the above changes done, Grimes established a clear lead in the newspaper market and, in the late 1990s decided it needed a new name that more clearly represented what the new newspaper stood for and what happens most often in the country. In a brainstorm session purportedly held in a notorious brothel in Mumbai, the board of directors chose the name The Crimes of India.
The name change effected an immediate positive impact on both the market and the bottom line. Now abbreviated as CoI, the paper has emerged not merely as the harbinger of all criminal news in the country, but has increasingly been controlling what crimes happen and how they get reported. In the early 2000s, CoI launched multiple TV channels as a front to co-create news that feeds the newspaper by night and the airwaves by the day.
Recent developments[edit]
Management have recently decided that the first-person "I" is not to be used, as though every copy-editor, whether a junior lion-tailed monkey from Kerala or a senile arm-chair orangutan from Ouyesht Bengal, were a swarthy "e e cummings" who is too swell for the SHIFT key. This decision came in the wake of the "dot-com bust" in the late 'Nineties. Management explained that, with the lowercase "i" being used for the first-person pronoun, The Crimes would singlehandedly repair the dot-com bust by adding many additional dots to each edition. After all, having violated all the norms of decency with its daily photography of swaying mammaries, the Rules of Grammar are for chumps.
As if that weren't enough, Management announced that they would only publish one page per day. Of course, this page would be the single page of The Grimes that all its randy readers were expecting: Page 3. Since not all news can possibly fit on a single Page 3, issues came to have multiple Page 3s, numbered sequentially with 1.
The typical edition now sports 16 Page 3s, usually followed by a city-based supplement of 4 to 6 additional Page 3s. Although each page is numbered sequentially starting with 1, experienced readers know that the page number is an index into Page 3s. So page number 5 is the 5th Page 3 for the day and Page 11 is the 11th Page 3 and so on.
Every Sunday, there is a supplement focusing on spirituality and old-school journalism. Four non-Page-3 pages per week compensate for the 16 Page 3s in the usual daily edition.
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