‘None of us knew anything about the Internet when Rediff began’: interview with the journalist Prem Panicker

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Our special guest this week is Prem Panicker, a veteran journalist who has been writing on cricket for over 25 years. Prem was one of the founding journalists at Rediff.com and a pioneer with regard to online commentary and internet radio.

• Falling in love with cricket in the late 1960s and ’70s
• The granular detail with which one remembers games from one’s childhood
• Listening to the radio and enacting the action based on the commentary
• The arrival of television to India and the magic it brought forth
• Entering the world of journalism
• The brave new world of the Internet – and the leap of faith it entailed
• Figuring out the internet while writing on cricket during the 1996 World Cup
• How Indian cricketers embraced the new reality of online coverage
• The BCCI’s contradictory stance with respect to online portals like Rediff
• JY Lele and his famous quote that predicted India would lose 3-0 in Australia
• The match-fixing saga and falling out of love with cricket
• The lure of blogging and the flexibility it offered
• Twitter as a second-screen in the cricket viewing experience

Participants:

Prem Panicker (@prempanicker)

Siddhartha Vaidyanathan (@sidvee)

Related:

Prem Panicker’s blog – Smoke Signals

Prem Panicker’s column archive – Rediff.com

The Prem Panicker files – The Seen and the Unseen podcast with Amit Varma

Money in cricket – Prem Panicker and Gideon Haigh on The Seen and the Unseen podcast with Amit Varma

Prem Panicker interview from 2011  – Couch Talks

Lele unplugged – Faisal Shariff – Rediff.com

The day naivety, not football itself, died – Jonathan Wilson on Brazil’s loss to Italy in 1982 – The Guardian

Radio Frequency – Srikanth Natarajan – 81allout.com

Ghostwriting for Imran, beach-cricket with Viv, working for Pataudi – 81allout podcast with Mudar Patherya

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Lead image from here.