I would like to analyze the following very good, long story running in the New York Times:
Soaring Above India’s Poverty, a 27-Story Home
By JIM YARDLEY
Published: October 28, 2010
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MUMBAI — The newest and most exclusive residential tower for this city’s superrich is a cantilevered sheath of steel and glass soaring 27 floors into the sky. The parking garage fills six levels. Three helipads are on the roof. There are terraces upon terraces, airborne swimming pools and hanging gardens in a Blade Runner-meets-Babylon edifice overlooking India’s most dynamic city.
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Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
The 27-story house of Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, in Mumbai, India.
There are nine elevators, a spa, a 50-seat theater and a grand ballroom. Hundreds of servants and staff are expected to work inside. And now, finally, after several years of planning and construction, the residents are about to move in.
All five of them.
The tower, known as Antilia, is the new home of India’s richest person, Mukesh Ambani, whose $27 billion fortune also ranks him among the richest people in the world. And even here in the country’s financial capital, where residents bear daily witness to the stark extremes of Indian wealth and poverty, Mr. Ambani’s building is so spectacularly over the top that the city’s already elastic boundaries of excess and disparity are being stretched to new dimensions.
“One family is going to live in that?” said Prahlad Kakkar, an advertising filmmaker and prominent city resident. “Either it is a landmark, or a symbol, or it is Mammon.” He added: “There is shock and awe — both at the same time.”
Mr. Ambani, his wife, Nita, and their three children are expected to move into the building after a housewarming party with 200 guests scheduled for Nov. 28. For his part, Mr. Ambani has refused to comment about the project and required his designers, decorators and other contractors to sign confidentiality agreements, as if a cone of silence could be erected around a skyscraper rising near the edge of the Arabian Sea.
Predictably, and perhaps by design, the opposite has happened. Details have spilled out — many of them confirmed or disputed anonymously. Some reports have estimated the total residential space at 400,000 square feet, though people close to the project say the real number is a humbler 60,000 square feet. Press accounts also have estimated the value of the building at $1 billion, a figure disputed by people familiar with the project.
Regardless, a gawking city has greeted the new tower with a mixture of moralizing and astonishment, envy and condemnation, all sprinkled with Freudian analysis of the most basic question: Why did he do it?
“We are all sort of perplexed,” said Alyque Padamsee, a long-time advertising executive and actor in the city. “I think people see it as a bit show-offy.”
A bit.
For decades, the Ambani family has been India’s most famous corporate soap opera. The father, Dhirubhai Ambani, was a brazen, rags-to-riches tycoon who established Reliance Industries after rising out of the city’s Dickensian tenements, known as chawls. Today, Reliance is the world’s biggest producer of polyester fibers and yarns and accounts for almost 15 percent of India’s exports, according to the company’s annual report. The two sons, Mukesh and Anil, inherited and divided the empire and have spent years feuding, including a nasty recent fight over natural gas rights that brought a reprimand from the prime minister before India’s Supreme Court settled the case in Mukesh’s favor.
Of the two brothers, Anil is the more flamboyant and outgoing, while Mukesh is regarded as more staid — less likely, at least, to build at 27-story house for himself. The new tower is located on Altamount Road, the same leafy residential street in south Mumbai where the father bought his first home after moving the family out of the tenements. Later, he purchased a 14-story apartment building named Sea Wind, where both Mukesh and Anil have lived with their families on different floors, even during their feud. (Their mother refereed from her own residence in the building.)
Now Mukesh is moving into a tower that makes Sea Wind seem like a guest house.
“It’s kind of returning with a vengeance to where they made it into the middle class and trumping everybody,” said Hamish McDonald, who chronicled the family’s history in his new book, “Mahabharata in Polyester: The Making of the World’s Richest Brothers and Their Feud.”
“He’s sort of saying, ‘I’m rich and I don’t care what you think,’ ” Mr. McDonald said.
Mumbai, once known as Bombay, is India’s most cosmopolitan city, with a metropolitan area of roughly 20 million people. Migrants have poured into the city during the past decade, drawn by Mumbai’s reputation as India’s “city of dreams,” where anyone can become rich. But it is also a city infamous for its poor: a recent study found that roughly 62 percent of the population lived in slums, including one of Asia’s biggest, Dharavi, which houses more than one million people.
Real estate prices are among the highest in the world, pushing many working-class residents into slums, even as developers have brazenly cleared land for a new generation of high-rise apartment towers for the affluent. High-rises are considered necessary, given the city’s limited land, yet the rising towers have further insulated the rich from the teeming metropolis below. With his helipads, which still await operating approval, Mr. Ambani could conceivably live in Mumbai without ever touching the ground.
“This is a gated community in the sky,” said Gyan Prakash, author of the new book “Mumbai Fables.” “It is in a way reflective of how the rich are turning their faces away from the city.”
Along Altamount Road, which is also home to other industrialists, the reaction to the new neighbor is mixed. Some senior citizens along the street worry about the noise from the comings and goings of helicopters. But Utsav Unadkat and Harsh Daga, college students who grew up in the neighborhood, stared up at the tower on a recent afternoon as if it were a dream realized.
“I heard he has a BMW service station inside,” said Mr. Unadkat, dragging on a cigarette (unconfirmed). “There’s also a room where you can create artificial weather,” Mr. Daga added (apparently true).
Standing nearby, Laxmi Kant Pujari, 26, a decorator’s assistant, waited to carry glass samples into the building. If his samples are selected, Mr. Pujari, a migrant, would handle the installation — a task he considered an honor. “Whether it is a beggar or an Ambani, the desire to be rich is in everyone’s heart,” he said.
Farther down the street, Sushala Pawar admitted struggling to comprehend the difference in Mr. Ambani’s life and her own. She cooks for a family in a nearby apartment, earning 4,000 rupees a month, or about $90. She sleeps on the floor of the hallway after the family has gone to bed.
“I’m a human being,” she said. “And Mukesh Ambani is a human being. Sometimes I feel bad that I live on 4,000 rupees and Mukesh Ambani lives there.”
But then, nodding toward the building, she perked up.
“Maybe,” she said, “I could get a job there.”
By JEREMY W. PETERS
Published: September 5, 2010
Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times
The Washington Post newsroom displays traffic data. Raju Narisetti, a managing editor, said it helped to decide where to cut staff.
Now, because of technology that can pinpoint what people online are viewing and commenting on, how much time they spend with an article and even how much money an article makes in advertising revenue, newspapers can make more scientific decisions about allocating their ever scarcer resources.
Such data has never been available with such specificity and timeliness. The reader surveys that newspapers relied on for decades took months to produce, often leaving editors with stale data.
Looking to the public for insight on how to cover a topic is never comfortable for newsrooms, which have the deeply held belief that readers come to a newspaper not only for its information but also for its editorial judgment. But many newsrooms now seem to be re-examining that idea and embracing, albeit cautiously, a more democratic approach to serving up the news, particularly online.
“How can you say you don’t care what your customers think?” asked Alan Murray, who oversees online news at The Wall Street Journal. “We care a lot about what our readers think. But our readers also care a lot about our editorial judgment. So we’re always trying to balance the two.”
Editors at The Journal, like those at other large newspapers, follow the Web traffic metrics closely. The paper’s top editors begin their morning news meetings with a rundown of data points, including the most popular search terms on WSJ.com, which articles are generating the most traffic and what posts are generating buzz on Twitter.
At The Washington Post, a television screen with an array of data — the number of unique visitors to washingtonpost.com, how many articles those visitors view and where on the Web those visitors came from — is on display for the entire newsroom. A red or green marker designates each data point, indicating whether the Web site’s goal for the month on that particular metric has been met. About 120 people in The Post’s newsroom get an e-mail each day laying out how the Web site performed in the closely watched metrics — 46 in all.
Rather than corrupt news judgment by causing editors to pander to the most base reader interests, the availability of this technology so far seems to be leading to more surgical decisions about how to cover a topic so it becomes more appealing to an online audience.
The Post, which provided extensive coverage of the recent elections in Britain online and in its print editions, found that online readers were not particularly interested in the topic. One of the five most viewed items on The Post’s Web site in the last year, in fact, was not a political project at all but a piece on Crocs, the popular foam footwear. Editors attributed that to Yahoo, which linked to the article.
But that did not translate into more Croc coverage. And coverage of the British elections was not scaled back.
Raju Narisetti, The Post’s managing editor overseeing online operations, said he saw reader metrics as a tool to help him better determine how to use online resources.
“We ask, ‘What can we do online to make it more attractive?” ’ Mr. Narisetti said. “Can we do podcasts? Can we do a photo gallery? Can we do any kind of user-generated content?”
He said the data has proved highly useful in today’s world of shrinking newsroom budgets. Mr. Narisetti said that when he had to reduce his staff last year, he looked at what kind of content was not performing well with readers. He discovered that long-form video had a low audience, so he reduced that department by a couple of people.
At The Journal, editors use traffic data to inform decisions on how articles should be presented on WSJ.com. “We look at the data, and if things are getting a lot of hits, they’ll get better play and longer play on the home page,” said Mr. Murray. Conversely, articles getting low audiences will be moved down more quickly if there is no compelling news reason to keep them prominent.
But Mr. Murray explained that the data was not always used as a blunt tool. In the case of a rather dry business development last month involving the Potash Corporation, the Canadian fertilizer maker, Journal editors decided to prominently display articles on the subject despite very low traffic numbers.
“We didn’t put it there because it was going to be a big traffic getter. We put it there because it’s big important news in the business world,” Mr. Murray said.
The New York Times does not use Web metrics to determine how articles are presented, but it does use them to make strategic decisions about its online report, said Bill Keller, the executive editor. “We don’t let metrics dictate our assignments and play,” he said, “because we believe readers come to us for our judgment, not the judgment of the crowd. We’re not ‘American Idol.’ ”
Mr. Keller added that the paper would, for example, use the data to determine which blogs to expand, eliminate or tweak.
As newspaper Web sites use technology to learn more about readers’ habits, they are also developing new ways to persuade readers to tell them more about what they want. The Los Angeles Times features what it calls a “personality quiz” for readers on its Web site. The feature adds a spin to the personalization options that Web sites have offered for the last few years with a 17-question test that asks readers things like “What does success mean to you?” and has them pick from 12 photos. A few options include images of a wedding, a gleaming sports car and a man embracing a peasant child.
At the end of the quiz, readers are assigned a personality type like “dynamo,” who, as the quiz explains, is someone “always seeking new adventures that broaden your horizons and take you out of your comfort zone.” A customized news feed then appears each time a reader visits the Web site from the same computer.
“It helps me understand the readers in a way that I can’t with just the metrics,” said Sean Gallagher, managing editor for online operations at The Los Angeles Times, explaining that he now pairs sports articles with food articles because surveys have shown a correlation.
As the technology advances and allows papers to look more deeply at performance metrics, newsrooms may find that there is just some data they would rather not know.
At a recent meeting with the top online editors of The Los Angeles Times, a consulting group that helps media companies enhance profits from their Web sites pitched new software that it said could change the industry. The newsroom would be able to know how much money — down to the penny — each of its articles online was making when readers clicked on ads.
“I could see a business case for it,” said Mr. Gallagher, who hastened to add, “I don’t agree with that business case.”
Software developers acknowledge that the questions can be difficult as newspapers try to reinvent their business models. But they say the dialogue is ultimately constructive.
“By having this data and making it available, we’re spurring the conversations to take place,” said Tim Ruder, chief revenue officer for Perfect Market, the company that developed the tracking software for ad clicks. “And it’s especially healthy to have those conversations in the context of experience and not in an abstract way.”
Such data has never been available with such specificity and timeliness. The reader surveys that newspapers relied on for decades took months to produce, often leaving editors with stale data.
Looking to the public for insight on how to cover a topic is never comfortable for newsrooms, which have the deeply held belief that readers come to a newspaper not only for its information but also for its editorial judgment. But many newsrooms now seem to be re-examining that idea and embracing, albeit cautiously, a more democratic approach to serving up the news, particularly online.
“How can you say you don’t care what your customers think?” asked Alan Murray, who oversees online news at The Wall Street Journal. “We care a lot about what our readers think. But our readers also care a lot about our editorial judgment. So we’re always trying to balance the two.”
Editors at The Journal, like those at other large newspapers, follow the Web traffic metrics closely. The paper’s top editors begin their morning news meetings with a rundown of data points, including the most popular search terms on WSJ.com, which articles are generating the most traffic and what posts are generating buzz on Twitter.
At The Washington Post, a television screen with an array of data — the number of unique visitors to washingtonpost.com, how many articles those visitors view and where on the Web those visitors came from — is on display for the entire newsroom. A red or green marker designates each data point, indicating whether the Web site’s goal for the month on that particular metric has been met. About 120 people in The Post’s newsroom get an e-mail each day laying out how the Web site performed in the closely watched metrics — 46 in all.
Rather than corrupt news judgment by causing editors to pander to the most base reader interests, the availability of this technology so far seems to be leading to more surgical decisions about how to cover a topic so it becomes more appealing to an online audience.
The Post, which provided extensive coverage of the recent elections in Britain online and in its print editions, found that online readers were not particularly interested in the topic. One of the five most viewed items on The Post’s Web site in the last year, in fact, was not a political project at all but a piece on Crocs, the popular foam footwear. Editors attributed that to Yahoo, which linked to the article.
But that did not translate into more Croc coverage. And coverage of the British elections was not scaled back.
Raju Narisetti, The Post’s managing editor overseeing online operations, said he saw reader metrics as a tool to help him better determine how to use online resources.
“We ask, ‘What can we do online to make it more attractive?” ’ Mr. Narisetti said. “Can we do podcasts? Can we do a photo gallery? Can we do any kind of user-generated content?”
He said the data has proved highly useful in today’s world of shrinking newsroom budgets. Mr. Narisetti said that when he had to reduce his staff last year, he looked at what kind of content was not performing well with readers. He discovered that long-form video had a low audience, so he reduced that department by a couple of people.
At The Journal, editors use traffic data to inform decisions on how articles should be presented on WSJ.com. “We look at the data, and if things are getting a lot of hits, they’ll get better play and longer play on the home page,” said Mr. Murray. Conversely, articles getting low audiences will be moved down more quickly if there is no compelling news reason to keep them prominent.
But Mr. Murray explained that the data was not always used as a blunt tool. In the case of a rather dry business development last month involving the Potash Corporation, the Canadian fertilizer maker, Journal editors decided to prominently display articles on the subject despite very low traffic numbers.
“We didn’t put it there because it was going to be a big traffic getter. We put it there because it’s big important news in the business world,” Mr. Murray said.
The New York Times does not use Web metrics to determine how articles are presented, but it does use them to make strategic decisions about its online report, said Bill Keller, the executive editor. “We don’t let metrics dictate our assignments and play,” he said, “because we believe readers come to us for our judgment, not the judgment of the crowd. We’re not ‘American Idol.’ ”
Mr. Keller added that the paper would, for example, use the data to determine which blogs to expand, eliminate or tweak.
As newspaper Web sites use technology to learn more about readers’ habits, they are also developing new ways to persuade readers to tell them more about what they want. The Los Angeles Times features what it calls a “personality quiz” for readers on its Web site. The feature adds a spin to the personalization options that Web sites have offered for the last few years with a 17-question test that asks readers things like “What does success mean to you?” and has them pick from 12 photos. A few options include images of a wedding, a gleaming sports car and a man embracing a peasant child.
At the end of the quiz, readers are assigned a personality type like “dynamo,” who, as the quiz explains, is someone “always seeking new adventures that broaden your horizons and take you out of your comfort zone.” A customized news feed then appears each time a reader visits the Web site from the same computer.
“It helps me understand the readers in a way that I can’t with just the metrics,” said Sean Gallagher, managing editor for online operations at The Los Angeles Times, explaining that he now pairs sports articles with food articles because surveys have shown a correlation.
As the technology advances and allows papers to look more deeply at performance metrics, newsrooms may find that there is just some data they would rather not know.
At a recent meeting with the top online editors of The Los Angeles Times, a consulting group that helps media companies enhance profits from their Web sites pitched new software that it said could change the industry. The newsroom would be able to know how much money — down to the penny — each of its articles online was making when readers clicked on ads.
“I could see a business case for it,” said Mr. Gallagher, who hastened to add, “I don’t agree with that business case.”
Software developers acknowledge that the questions can be difficult as newspapers try to reinvent their business models. But they say the dialogue is ultimately constructive.
“By having this data and making it available, we’re spurring the conversations to take place,” said Tim Ruder, chief revenue officer for Perfect Market, the company that developed the tracking software for ad clicks. “And it’s especially healthy to have those conversations in the context of experience and not in an abstract way.”
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