The Jiah Khan case and a superstar’s ego—

Here’s something I wanted to write since last few years. Emptying my heart out here.

How I was “forced” to shut down my pet project because of extensive coverage of the Jiah Khan case—

(1/18)

2013.
Our main digital cinema news brand BusinessofCinema (BOC) was performing superb.

Clocking in over a million page-views per day, it was second most visited cinema news website, after Bollywood Hungama.

BOC was famous for the most accurate BO figures. (2/18)

I wanted to create another property, a glossy gossipy ‘uncensored’ online news brand, which would have a whole new kind of news reporting style.

Hence, a short lived property ‘BollywoodQ’ (BQ) was born.

It became a HIT instantly, because of the EXCLUSIVE blinds. (3/18)

I named the section ‘The JUICE’. It would feature extreme blind stories like these—

PRs started sending targeted blinds, but I would never feature them.

I would only go with my sources. The blinds were on all, unlike “paid” targeted blinds on Sushant. (4/18)

There was pressure and indirect requests to go slow on this blind section, sometimes specific requests to even remove some articles.

Same kind of requests I used to get on BOC by producers at times to release a wrong ‘fudged’ BO figure.

But I never gave it to them. (5/18)