In yet another tragic case of Flat Earth News, first local, then national, now global media has jumped on what appears to be a completely made-up story (screenshot from UK's The Mirror website)

NLU Jodhpur law student Pranita Mehta had died on Sunday while on holiday in Gokarna but her former co-students and alumni are up in arms about the sensationalist misreporting of her death by media.

“It was absolutely false, she was sitting on the beach when the tide came and she was trying to fight for her life for 45 minutes,” said an NLU Jodhpur alumnus.

The student campaign’s purpose was to make sure that “her memory is not maligned by these media houses”, she said.

Out of the below websites, which were shared by email and listed in a post on popular content sharing website Reddit by an anonymous NLU Jodhpur student, only Scoopwhoop has removed its original article headlined “Law student dies after falling 300 feet while trying to take a perfect selfie in Karnataka”.

The post stated that the true version of events was that she and her friends:

were at Kumta beach, and were sitting on some rocks which were about 10-15 feet above sea, when due to unexpected high tide, 3 of the youngsters, including the deceased, were flown away by a giant wave. Two of them were brought back to the shore by another wave, but the deceased, whose glasses had come off, continued to struggle as she held on to a rock for support she bravely struggled and tried to swim for 45 mins. Unfortunately, she lost her grip, and was carried towards the deeper end of the sea by the waves.

They also annexed an FIR report to the post as evidence of the misreporting.

However, the news item has now gone truly global, with the UK tabloid, the Daily Mirror for instance reporting “‘Perfect selfie kills student' who plunges 300ft from lighthouse while trying to take photo of herself”, citing “local media reports

The other videos and many other articles are still online, with even The Hindu soberly still (mis)reporting:

Pranita Sunil Mehta (21) of Jodhpur in Rajasthan died while taking a selfie near the Lighthouse at Gokarn in Kumta taluk on Sunday, according to reports reaching here on Monday. She slipped into the sea from a boulder while taking the selfie.

The below post on Reddit has attracted 585 upvotes at the time of publication, making it by far one of the most popular recent posts in the so-called sub-reddit r/India.

In early 2014, Nalsar Hyderabad students were successful in their protests against media’s misreporting, winning a Rs 1 lakh fine against a local TV channel that flawed, one-sided and misleading story” on them when they filmed them outside a local pub in April.

Update: Follow up story on the students' successful campaign

It is understood that the content of the post was based on an email letter that has been circulated to media houses, etc: