World Statistics Day, or, Shooting in the Dark

20 October 2011 is World Statistics Day and I am tempted to comment and to provoke the industry with which I have been associated for over forty years — as a printer, publicist and publisher. These days I am not as isolated as I once was. I am not the only person decrying the lack of social conscience or a practical sense of community in the Indian printing industry.

In our research company IppStar, I often comment on the unreliability of government data, even GDP statistics and the RBI data, but I do not speak too loudly since my area is the print industry where I am more sure of the numbers which are based on a huge amount of face to face interviews of expert informants, as well as a healthily sceptical analysis of secondary data. I must admit that the general scepticism comes from our detailed work in the printing, packaging and publishing domain. The particular seems to give insight to the general and so we largely ignore the almost daily announcements of GDP projections and industrial data ups and downs.

On 17 October 2011, a young colleague who is an avid reader of the Economic Times brought me a clipping from the morning’s paper of an article by Mythili Bhusnurmath titled Economic Policy: Shooting in the Dark. She writes, “What was India's gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate during the first quarter of the year? Is industrial production rising or falling? What about services? What is the inflation rate? Is it rising or falling? The list can go on and on. For, the truth, unpalatable as it might be, is we really don’t know. “As a result, economic policy formulation has become more like a game of shooting in the dark. Policy authorities don't know which way to turn in a scenario where the three pillars of a sound statistical database — credibility, timeliness and adequacy — are absent.”

Bhusnurmath goes on to point out that even monetary policy decisions on serious issues such as inflation are being made on the basis of very poor data since there is very little real investment in the actual ground research. She writes, “Garbage in, garbage out! The RBI, in fact, has paid a heavy price for its reliance on dodgy data. As RBI governor D Subbarao pointed out in a recent speech, ‘Policy is framed real time and if the provisional data that these are based on are inaccurate, the resultant policies can turn out to be suboptimal choices.’”

So the printing industry is not alone in its ignorance of real data or its lack of investment in data collection, compilation and research. Nevertheless, to me it seems a miracle that bank loans for print projects upwards of Rs. 40 crore are approved mainly on the basis of relationships and trust since the data available is really quite sketchy. Of course our multi-client industry research has subscribers but in our current project every subscriber is a multinational company. Not a single Indian company or organisation is supporting a massive effort that could actually make their projects and growth viable.

What I have written may sound like a plug for IppStar’s research and why not? While a few leading printers actually support IppStar in its work, many more call us up for a few hints about the industry data. And many more ‘borrow’ it without acknowledgement (even for a Red Herring prospectus for an IPO) and sometimes even print our research articles in their association magazines without even a phone call or an email!

Like shooting in the dark, borrowing is our thing. I receive calls from Indian students every month who are doing a thesis in some foreign university. Investing in data and research doesn’t really seem to be our thing whether it is the government or industry or the individual. Actually our industry is vibrant and could easily play a leading role by investing in real on-the-ground statistical work. Perhaps this is something that the so-called leaders of the print industry can think about on World Statistics Day.

 Naresh Khanna editor@ippgroup.in

From convergence to engagement –WAN-IFRA Chennai

Apart from the reflected buzz emanating from hyperactivity of the Tamil and Malayalam newspapers in recent months, the WAN-IFRA conference was interesting. The newsroom summit discussed innovative concepts that can continue to leverage the content leadership of print, and there were many presentations that included case studies and examples from Asia and India.

This IFRA shifted from convergence to engagement. Raju Narisetti illustrated the example of The Washington Post, which a couple of years back had a website that was going nowhere, like many other newspapers and magazines. The solutions were to combine the print and web newsrooms which were earlier across the river — away from each other — into a common web-first operation. This meant a robust multimedia CMS or editorial system instead of the three separate systems that were in place. It also meant a new set of skills and as Narisetti said, “Traditional newsroom skills are not sufficient in the digital space.” He emphasised the need to populate the team with search, social and traffic experts.

As Narisetti illustrated, a print story just pasted into the CMS generally cannot work on the web. The web requires packaging and essential elements to make a story ready for the web. The story is ready when it contains some or all the following elements — hyperlinks, further reading, galleries, photos, graphics, video, database and interaction. He gave examples of how an interesting sidelight of a story highlighted by a blog or a tweet can drive huge traffic and often even displace the main story.

It’s obvious that editors like Narisetti are both intrepid and persistent. In his presentation about the changes at The Washington Post he talked about creating a metrics driven culture — the mere idea of which would have had him laughed out of any newspaper a decade ago. And finally he said that even a measurable increase in traffic is not enough. The goal is engagement and this too is not rocket science. There are helpful open-source tools that can enhance daily stories, and increased social outreach can spark conversation on newspaper websites.

While Narisetti is of Indian origin and now heading a leading daily in the United States, Lin Neumann is of American origin with experience in several Asian newspapers. Neumann is the chief editorial officer of an English language start-up in Indonesia, The Jakarta Globe. His presentation at Chennai spoke about using Facebook and Twitter to build up the new daily and its website. Neumann hired a fresh college graduate to get young people to register on Facebook and Twitter through the Globe’s website. His single employee in turn went to schools, colleges and shopping malls to promote the newspaper and its website with the help of college students who wanted to be part of the new social networking media. The eight most active helpers were rewarded with a Blackberry each. Thus by enabling the social networking inclinations of the young people of the city, the new Jakarta Globe quickly gained traffic and importance in their lives. Neumann also concluded saying that now that the traffic is there, the issue is engagement. How long can you keep the reader on your site? How can you mobilise your readers as news sources?

—Naresh Khanna editor@ippgroup.in

Interactivity for print

In September 2010 IPP had started Interactivity in Print, a feature that enables our readers to share any article by sending an SMS with an email address. The article is instantly sent to people the reader wants to share it with. The sender can also include their email id to receive a soft copy of the article. Our readers are requested to make full use of this and give us their feedback.

We are keen on making print a two-way communication activity. When you either agree or disagree with the content written in the editorial you can convey your ratings and leave comments for the author on our blog, helping us to have a dialogue with you and bring more content relevant to your needs. This allows our readers and advertisers to do what they usually do on digital media — rate, comment, and share.

Naresh Khanna editor@ippgroup.in

50 Fastest growing Indian dailies

For the WAN-IFRA India special issue of Indian Printer and Publisher we took some help from our research colleagues at IppStar. Although our assessment of the fastest growing newspapers in India is based on the most recent publicly available ABC circulation and IRS data, we have also taken into consideration the start of new editions, the increase in pagination and colour pagination, the building of new plants, absorption of new technology, innovation in media, and serious attempts to take on the environmental challenges. 

Naresh Khanna editor@ippgroup.in

Breaking boundaries

At one time, certainly before 1990, there may have been a tacit understanding or even an agreement between newspaper publishers not to encroach on the each other’s territories, markets or languages. But the trend that began 20 years ago with what was considered predation then, has now flowered into a great expansion.

The newspaper industry in India over the last 21 years has grown well in almost all respects and matured in many just as the economy has. With a large parallel growth in literacy, it has weathered the privatisation and multiplicity of television news channels, as it takes advantage of the internet and gets ready for the convergent opportunities of a large base of cell-phones and a tiny but growing base of tablets. The key phenomenon has been expansion in circulation, new editions, more pages, more pages in colour, new media such as radio and television and new print media products as well.

In these years the first wave of FDI in newspapers has led to the first wave of foreign direct investment (FDI) and closely held family companies going to the stock market. Some consolidation has also taken place such as Bennett Coleman’s acquisition of the upstart Vijay Karnataka group and Jagran Prakashan’s acquisition of Mid Day Multimedia’s print assets. There have been fissures and cracks among owner families too, but what is significant is that in most cases they continue to work together while facing the market.

There is a new confidence amongst the Indian newspaper publishers which has erased the old linguistic and media boundaries. Every fast-growing newspaper group has crossed linguistic or geographic boundaries in the past ten years. No territory is sacrosanct as newspapers have to leverage their brands to survive.

It is also nice to see that there is a resurgence among some of the strong newspaper groups that had suffered setbacks in the past decade. Amongst these one sees the resurgence of the Rajasthan Patrika and Deccan Herald groups in winning back circulation and starting new editions as a reflection of the inherent strength of the Indian newspaper industry as a whole. 

Naresh Khanna editor@ippgroup.in

Rajivnama — Distasteful self promotion from the Congress party

Indian newspaper readers woke up to a bizarre print spectacle on 20 August, a day also celebrated as Sadbhavna Divas. Page after page contained advertisements issued by the Congress-led Central and state governments, and various public departments to commemorate the birthday of Rajiv Gandhi, former Indian Prime minister. Initial surprise gave way to shock which turned to irritation, and finally anger as the reader flipped through newspapers that carried the late Prime Minister’s handsome face staring somewhere into the space on almost every page.

In response to a similar advertising blitzkrieg on the death anniversary of Rajiv Gandhi in 2010, Ramchandra Guha had written, “A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that on May 21, 2010, perhaps Rs 60 or 70 crore were spent by the taxpayer — without his and her consent — on praising Rajiv Gandhi. Since the practice has been in place since 2005, the aggregate expenditure to date on this account is probably in excess of Rs 300 crore.”

If spending Rs 300 crore of the taxpayers’ money in self promotion through hero worshipping its former leader (incidentally, named in the Bofors scandal and accused of owning Swiss bank accounts) isn’t corruption, then what is? As the Congress-led UPA government struggles to save its reputation in the wake of accusations of corruption in almost everything it has undertaken in its second term in power, such shameless self advertisement can only ruin its image even further.

Pritam Sengupta from sans serif estimates that there were a total of 108 advertisements amounting to 48¼ of the published pages in the well known English dailies Hindustan Times, The Times of India, The Indian Express, Mail Today, The Hindu, The Pioneer, The Statesman, The Telegraph, The Economic Times, Business Standard, The Financial Express and Mint (Berliner).

‘Sadbhavna’ in Hindi refers to noble thoughts and having good feelings for others. But sadly the action of the Congress party at the centre and across some states displayed little nobility of thinking or action even on the day it has set aside to entertain noble thoughts.

For more on this, please visit
http://wearethebest.wordpress.com/2011/08/20/rajiv-gandhi-birthday-108-ads-across-48-pages/
http://www.wahsarkar.com/2011/05/saare-jaha-se-accha-gandhistan-humara/
http://charts.medianama.com/indian-governments-print-advertising-spend-2009-2010-part-2/
http://sahaas.blogspot.com/2011/08/sycophancy-at-taxpayers-cost.html

- Avinandan Mukherjee

The Murdoch effect

Phones have proved to be the nemesis for Britain’s oldest newspaper — News of the World (NoTW) — and the news of the world is that the symbiotic relationship between phones and journalists has become cancerous. That the latter cannot exist without the former has been the joke in the journalistic world for long. Talking on phone is easier than trudging up to meet somebody in person. It also saves time. Once cultivated, sources usually divulge the big news on phone and stories carrying information about one part of the world can be written sitting in another. But all is fine as long as we tread within the ethical domain and do not turn news gathering into eaves dropping, or worse.

NoTW, which published its last edition on 10 July after 168 years of existence, did just that. In its zeal to be on top of news it got inextricably enmeshed in the process of creating news. It hired services of investigative agencies which would hack into voice mails of people to gather information. In the case of a then kidnapped teenager Milly Dowler, the hacking of the voicemail box led her parents into the false belief that she was alive when she had already been murdered. Stories of the dirty tricks being adopted by NoTW reporters had been doing the rounds since 2005. But it was a whistleblower on the Dowler case published in The Guardian on 4 July that did NoTW in.

The paper had already been incurring losses. The immediate reaction of Rupert Murdoch — folding up the paper — initially looked like a tactical move by the media mogul to save the chances of being able to buy a lucrative television channel BSkyB. It never came to that. The public outrage over the revelations was so great that Murdoch had to withdraw the bid. Several conciliatory and remedial steps were subsequently taken but to little avail. The damage had been done.

The Murdochisation of media (read: thinking only of profits and treating the newspaper not as a medium of social communication but as a product which can be and has to be sold at any cost just like shampoo and soaps) has not left even India untouched. Though so far no media organization has been accused of tapping phones for the sake of getting stories, that being the preserve of the government and the intelligence agencies here, there have been enough cases of journalists being caught on tape discussing ministerial berths and passing information from one party to the other with obvious implications.

There have been very many other instances as well of Indian media houses entering into unethical barter deals and ‘creating news’ for money or planting biased reports in return for favours. The issue is not of journalists tapping phones but a broader issue of ethics. NoTW used phones to pry into the lives of people for the sake of stories, Indian journalists have been schmoozing with corporate brokers for the sake of personal gains. Some may argue that this is worse than trying to collect information for the good of the paper or making sales grow.
Amidst wide-spread condemnation of the tactics adopted by Murdoch and sons for the sake of sensationalism, there are also some voices of dissent which say he brought life to British media and revived its fortunes. This can also be said for one of the most successful media empires in India. But Indian media still respects the privacy of people’s lives to a large extent and doesn’t stoop to the level that tabloids in Britain have.

The NoTW case also brings to light the inevitability of news gatherers going to extremes for the sake of unearthing something different. In the age of Facebook and Twitter when everything and every information is available at the touch of a button, how does one create content which is exclusive? Cut-throat competition legitimises going to any extent for the sake of a scoop. Reporters are hounded endlessly by desperate editors to bring something different. Discussing private lives in public is what we have learnt from social networking. Is it any surprise then that a media house resorted to tapping phones of ‘news worthy’ people? What would have they learnt by tapping the phone of Afghan war veterans — possibly what kind of excesses were being committed by both the sides on war front. That would be both sensational and interesting. And if in turn it helps bring to light injustice done in the name of war, probably no harm in it either. But the same thing becomes unacceptable if it destroys somebody’s reputation or jeopardizes somebody’s life. As happened in the case of Dowler. If the girl had not been murdered or if the tapping had led to the murderer, probably it would all have been for a good cause.

Media houses which engage in sting operations take this risk all the time. It is the ultimate thrill for a reporter to be present at the scene of ‘crime’ while it is still being committed. There would have been nothing better for the ‘rogue’ NoTW reporters, when they were eavesdropping on phone conversations, than getting the story from the horse's mouth. Even if they had been able to see the outcome of their actions some years later, it is unlikely that any of them would have liked to trade their places with someone else. It is only when a sting goes badly wrong that everybody's wrath turns on the third person who had been trying to pry too deep rather than on the actual culprit. There is ultimately a thin line between right and wrong here.

(Aside: Etymologists would find an uncanny similarity between Murdoch and murder. Co-incidently, the name is also close to Mordor: the fabled dwelling place of the evil one — Sauron — in JRR Tolkien's mythical universe of Middle-Earth in Lord of the Rings).

- Shalini S Sharma

The Save Food Conference

Something that most of us are taught in childhood — to finish everything on our plates or to take only what we can finish eating, was the subject of another international conference at this year’s interpack in May in Dusseldorf. I attended a similar conference during the iPackIma event in Milan in 2009 as well, but the recent conference was better organised, attended and focussed.

On the first day of the Save Food Conference we were told that consumers with high levels of education and those who fail to write a shopping list are more likely to waste food. A survey carried out across seven European countries by the German packaging group Cofresco found that more than 20% of household food expenditure in Europe was spent on food which is thrown away, and that more than half of that waste could have been avoided with better planning. Half of the wasted food consists of fruits and vegetables while 30% of packaged food is thrown away without even being opened. Dirk Lohmer, the CEO of Cofresco told the participants, “Only 6% of the respondents even admit that they throw food away.”

Subsequent presentations at the conference estimated world food losses at around 1.3 billion tonnes with the greatest share of this being fruit and vegetables. Europe throws away 71 million tonnes of food each year. Ulf Sonesson of the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology said that a study conducted last year had found major differences in food wastage between the developed world and developing economies. In developed countries, food losses were very low at the start of the supply chain — at the farm end — but very high at the retailer/consumer end of the chain.

However, in the poorer and less developed economies, the opposite trend was observed — very high wastage at harvest and low wastage by consumers. According to Sonesson, a lack of supply chain infrastructure, including packaging, was at the heart of the food waste problem in developing economies.

The conference had some interesting presentations such as how to reduce food losses through international cooperation and exchange of post harvest technologies. Kenneth Marsh who made this presentation recommended a knowledge supermarket. The conference clearly tried to encourage entrepreneurship and investment in food processing and packaging technology in the less developed and emerging economies. As far as what packaging can do for the food supply chain, it was well argued that when packed, food waste and food losses are reduced by a factor of ten. That increase in packaging cost by Rs 50,000 can reduce food waste by as much Rs 15 lakh.

However, it was also clear that while international bodies talk this talk and even support institutions in the developing countries, there are miles to go before there is global harmonisation of phytosanitary standards. The issue of trade barriers by the rich countries and their huge subsidies to their farmers was also raised both by the moderator of the conference and by a participant in the audience without any real response. Thus there is still a huge disconnect between do-gooders, consultants, and even businesspersons who appreciate the opportunity to invest in food processing and packaging in the emerging economies on the one hand, and the governments of the rich countries who have been holding up the international talks on trade barriers for agricultural products, on the other.

- Naresh Khanna

Kasturi and Sons

The issue is transformation in the face of competition and change

Excerpt from paragraph 8 of the CLB order of 20 May 2011 by Judge Lizamma Augustine.

“The far reaching consequence of the proposals is that a shareholder of the company will be perpetually debarred from holding the post of editor of The Hindu, which in my view is contrary to the tradition and practice followed by the company since its inception. Besides, it is doubtful whether the proposed advisory board which consists of members of the rival groups would be able to effectively guide the non family editor in discharging his duties. I am of the prima facie view that except ‘the wholesale removal of the family editors’, the present proposals do not take in any other aspect. The board had not addressed the aspects (retirement entry and exit norms etc), referred to in my earlier order. It also appears that the Board has given a go by to the idea of framing guidelines for succession or rather they have limited the directions of the CLB only to the extent of removing the entire family editors.”

 

It is not easy for us to add anything sensible to the dispute amongst the owners of the company that publishes The Hindu and Businessline daily newspapers, and the periodicals Frontline and Sportstar. Nevertheless as usual we tend to barge in where angels fear to tread. The dispute has been covered in the daily press which in India is generally loath to write about each other’s problems — most notably and in the main quite respectfully in Business Standard and The Mint. However the headlines and slugs have included, ‘Family Fight’, ‘Family Matters,’ ‘The Hindu battles to transform.’ Expressions such as ‘beleaguered’ have also been used.

We agree that the discussion, dispute and even the court cases are about change and transformation of the reputed family owned newspaper. The main issue is who will lead the transformation of the third largest circulated English daily in the country. The transformation is necessary if the The Hindu is to stand up to Bennet Coleman’s Times of India which has already made an impact with its Chennai edition and will soon add to its South India campaign with three new editions in Kerala in cooperation with Mathrubhumi. Meanwhile The Hindu continues to call itself India’s national newspaper without having editions in the major metros of Mumbai and Kolkata.

Transformation goes beyond new editions or contemporary design — it implies innovation, futurism and the building of a new publishing paradigm which turns several technology and media threats  into a cross media opportunity. The organisation has a very strong production infrastructure which  is wasted on a paper that is crying out for editorial innovation and juice. The professionalisation of the paper’s editorial, design and business functions is overdue and cannot be limited to one appointment, albeit even the first non-family member to be appointed as editor. Transformation will require many steps which have been stayed for a variety of reasons not by the court but by the dysfunction and inability of the owners to congenially map out and implement the plans for change.

It is apparent that in the Kasturi and Sons dispute, one side believes that only they can lead the transformation. This side not only wants to professionalise the paper but also wants to retain some kind of editorial control — ideological and political. Currently enjoying a majority of 7 to 5 on the board, this rival group wants to get rid of N Ravi and Malini Parthasarathy on the editorial side and is largely using the appointment of a professional editor as an excuse to deprive Ravi and Parthasarathy of the responsibilities and power that would have naturally and sequentially come to them as educated and experienced editors as well as part owners of the group’s publications.

While the Company Law Board in its order on 20 May 2011 gave relief to N Murali and restored his responsibilities as Joint Managing Director, it has postponed judgement on whether the 7 to 5 decision of the Kasturi and Sons board to throw out all the family editors including Ravi and Parthasarathy amounts to oppression and whether a special resolution calling for more than a simple majority is needed. The real issues are of editorial control and of who leads the transformation and who ultimately wields power in the process of the company’s growth as a newspaper business. Put simply, transformation may mean taking on Bennett Coleman and bringing in new investment. At this juncture, it may behoove the owners of Kasturi and Sons to remember that newspaper owners have to choose between fame, power and wealth. According to a sage editor, newspaper owners can aspire to any two of these at best, but not all three.                                                                      

— Naresh Khanna (June 2011)

The parallel importation of books amendment

Democracy at work

At the time of the Jaipur Literary Festival in January, there was a rash of articles in the English dailies that enlisted leading publishing luminaries in decrying an Amendment to the Copyright Act that will likely be enacted in the current budget session of parliament. Frankly the rash of articles where  journalists suddenly became very knowledgeable, and publishers and authors very adamant, smelled like clever spoonfed journalism. This is a type of article that appears in several papers with the same outrage caused by a company or group or association doing a bit of strong PR or waging a campaign in order to use the power of the English language press in the capital to influence seemingly unwitting members of parliament on a fairly obscure subject.

Of course these articles were written without finding out or describing the offending amendment or bothering to find out if there was another side to the story. But weekends are a good time to get such stories into the dailies since our editors are even more asleep, and desperate for a live story with a byline and quotes from literary personalities.

In our print issue dated March 2011 we have published a debate where both exponents (bloggers in this case) say that there has not been adequate discussion and consultation on this subject. We concur, although we do not think that the Federation of Indian Publishers or the Association of Publishers in India or the Authors Guild are innocent in this matter. Associations in our country rarely discuss anything transparently with their constituents, let alone with each other, or their common constituencies — in this case the reading and book buying public. (Not to speak of authors and editors).


The Indian book market is large and in fact threatening to become huge. This phenomenal growth in the creation, production and consumption of content and books is impinged by technology allowing both easier and more transparent trade. The content and publishing industry will eventually have to reckon with electronic publishing and eBooks and eContent. The amendment on parallel importation of books threatens the territorial monopolies of some of the large publishers. It especially seems threatening to the English language multinational publishers. As Shalini has pointed out in her Alphageria column in the same issue, the Indian textbook market is itself worth US$ 2 billion.

During the Globalocal event in Delhi in November 2010, we asked the international publishers’ of English books, why there were separate publishing rights for Canada, Australia, India, the United States and Europe and we also asked them how long would this last in an eBooks world without borders. The answer given by Emma House representing the Publishers Association was, to say the least, a bit ingenuous. She said that the current system may last another 25 years and that if it was changed it would threaten the availability of inexpensive English language textbooks that are exported to India.

It is increasingly becoming apparent that the large international text book publishers are in fact generating original content in India for use around the world. This, coupled with the excellent and competitive book manufacturing capabilities of our printers, means that this is an important and interesting discussion. In a democracy there is an opportunity for us (however difficult and onerous) to create and shape the future. Serious publishers and printers need to talk more regularly and sensibly to each other and not merely leave it to their associations. Especially when the associations of the multinational publishers are far more media savvy.

March 23, 2011 | By Naresh Khanna 

Chennai Book Fair robbed of relaxed ambiance thanks to cramped conditions

The St George’s Anglo-Indian Higher Secondary School on Poonamalle High Road is Chennai’s oldest school tracing its origins to the St Mary’s Church Charity School established in 1715. The red-brick buildings on campus are an unmistakable sign of heritage. The playgrounds are simply huge, occupying most of the 21-acre space. The school has played host to the annual Chennai Book Fair the past few years, after the fair moved from St Ebbas in Royapettah.

Despite the huge space available, the book fair itself is confined to smaller space and there is no doubt that the venue may be ideal if only its sprawling grounds are put to better use. For example, instead of the huge area outside the stalls being used for hoardings, posters and welcome arches, it can serve as space for stalls. And that would result in roomier stalls, perhaps even individual stalls for the bigger publishers and, most importantly, enough space for visitors to walk around freely and spend more time with books without being pushed and elbowed around.

This is something the organisers, the Booksellers and Publishers Association of South India (BAPASI), should seriously consider if they want visitors to enjoy the going-to-the-book-fair experience. It is one thing having 600-odd stalls, issuing 500,000 free tickets to school students in Chennai, Tiruvallur and Kanjeepuram and talking about numbers or quantity, and quite another providing a top-quality feel to a book fair in southern India’s largest metropolis.

Most of BAPASI members are made up of small publishers and a couple of those-in-the-know IPP spoke to said that the publishers want equal space for everybody and are not in favour of bigger publishers (read English language publishers such as Penguin or Harper Collins) hogging the limelight with larger space.

“The space in St George’s School is relatively limited but they can use the available space better. The fact that the school operates during the day also provides some constraints. The other option is to have it at the Chennai Trade Centre but the feeling is that the venue in Manapakkam would not draw crowds,” is what K Satyanarayan, director, New Horizon Media Pvt Ltd, a top Tamil publisher told me when I asked him whether the space allotted to stalls was adequate.  Satyanarayan went on to say that there is a general feeling among smaller publishers that if bigger publishers are given more space they will attract proportionately larger crowds. Since there are a lot of small publishers in the association who have a single stall at the fair, their words are likely to carry weight.

A strange thing I noticed was that although there were several make-shift ticket counters, most of them had the ‘closed’ sign and only one counter operated despite a steady stream of visitors. 

                                                                                                                                   Sashi Nair

A 100-year-old press moves with the times

The MWN Press in Chennai’s busy Royapettah area, on Lloyds Road, has just completed 100 years. It was in 1910 that N.R.K Tatachari, a lawyer practising lawyer in the Madras High Court, launched the Madras Weekly Notes (MWN), a legal journal. A press was then set up to print the journal and it thus came to be called MWN Press. Tatachari soon took up jobbing work and produced the LIFCO dictionary (a sort of Bible for students in Tamil Nadu in those years), Sanskrit publications of the Sri Ramakrishna Mission, as well as publications of Orient Longman.

NT Ramanujam continued the good work started by his father, Tatachari, and managed MWN Press during the letterpress days. Under NR Srivas, Ramanujam’s younger son, MWN welcomed the offset press. Srinivas had studied printing technology from the School of Printing and it was he who really improved the equipment and set the tone for adopting a quality culture in the organisation.

A single-colour offset machine was purchased in 1984 and MWN quickly established a name as a quality single-colour printer. A second-hand, imported, reconditioned, 5-colour manroland arrived in 1995. Sadly, Srivas’s bright spark did not last long – he died in a road accident in 1998. This led to his elder brother, NR Kumar, a management consultant, stepping in.

It has indeed been a long journey for a press that started on a one-ground property – a dilapidated house with a courtyard. If the cramped space has been suffocating to a degree, business has not been smooth over the years. For example, in the 1990s, when pre-gummed labels for Hindustan Lever formed a major chunk of the business, Levers suddenly slashed volumes and prices because the MNC was going through a problem. It affected MWN Press quite badly, but Kumar says it was in retrospect one of the best things to have happened. It questioned the company’s survival and Kumar and his team knew that if they did not completely transform their style of operation, they would be in deep trouble.

And so, the focus shifted to controlling wastage and adopting a constant quest-for-quality culture in the form of Kaizen. To show that he meant business, Kumar ‘let go’ of four senior staff. That sent the message to the rest of the staff. In 2002, Kumar bought the Mitsubishi Diamond 1000 5-colour press.

Today, MWN Press is all set to shift completely to a new facility, an energy-efficient building, on 12-ground premises in Mangadu. The process has already begun. Paperwork has been reduced and accounting operations have been speeded up, with supplier payments being made by electronic transfer and staff salaries being credited directly to bank accounts. The present office may be serve as a marketing hub.

In six months, MWN Press is likely to add another 5-colour machine, complete with coater and extended delivery. Will it be another Mitsubishi? Kumar hasn’t decided yet, but he says technology has hit a plateau and he sees no difference between the Mitsubishi Diamond and V series. He doesn’t mind taking a look at reconditioned European machines. One thing he is certain about though, is that the new addition will double volumes for MWN Press.

Sashi Nair

Community for Governance of Intellectual Property

Copyright owners launch forum for protection of digital rights

There are many areas of our working and professional lives that need solutions that are sometimes bigger than us as individuals or even the organisations that we work for. For instance the issues of colour quality standardisation or environment guidelines for printers. As most of our readers know, these and many other serious issues have not yet been addressed in any serious way by the local and national printers associations. Nor have they been dealt with any of manufacturers associations as a group – be it the ink manufacturers association, the paper makers, or even the equipment and consumable manufacturing associations.

Don’t feel bad about this. The rest of the society with the exception of Nasscom and Mait (both deal with information technology) is also sitting on top of growth with abundant chaos. We are all so busy either surviving or making money, building new plants, buying new presses and attending exhibitions that we really have no time for all that stuff. Let the government do it and let those who are pleased to be part of government committees do what they can. May be they will call us as experts and even give us a free trip to forren.

The issue of copyright and intellectual property is based on the idea that people need to be compensated for their work even if that work consists of an idea, or producing a photograph, or a packaging design, or a machine design, or a type font, or a story or book. Software, music, videos and films are also intellectual property – creative and professionally processed work that according to the current state of civilisation and the Indian constitution need to be paid for.

The issues are complex and the associations who are nominally supposed to be active on this front particularly with regard to authors, publishers, and printers rights and obligations in the area of what could be called ‘content’ are not particularly accessible, active or transparent. This is why yet another organisation is emerging – the Community for Governance of Intellectual Property.

At its first half-day meeting on 6 December 2010 at the IIC in Delhi there were 35 plus authors, publishers, printers and lawyers who discussed a host of things that need to be discussed and to get done – either by discussion and agreement, alerting the government, or by taking action in the broader interest as was done last year in the filing of an Indian authors and publishers point of view in the New York Court that is hearing the case against Google by the Authors Guild of America.

There were many good ideas – too many to discuss properly in just half a day. And those present were an assortment of extremely knowledgeable and forthright intellectual and professionals.

On 6 January 2011, the first follow-up meeting of the CGIP was held. It was jointly organised by the CGIP and our own Ipp Services, Training and Research Pvt Ltd. IppStar as it is known, felt the need to support this meeting with the help of the Delhi Master Printers Welfare Association because the printers need to contribute something positive to the publishing, software and content society of which they are a part. And the copyright issue is one that they face everyday since they have to be sure that their customer is actually bringing them an something for which he has the legal right to print. Printers are equally liable for counterfeiting and piracy under the law, as the publisher is. In addition, we everyday use copyrighted software and fonts – these are the tools of our trade.

The meeting on 6 January 2011 although it brought together printers, packaging desingers, software developers, authors, journalists, publishers and booksellers on a common platform once again, was not as exciting or well-attended as the first meeting. Nevertheless it was an interesting and mostly focussed discussion of the issues of publishing, software and piracy. Moreover, the CGIP will continue to hold such meetings on or around the 12^th of every month in Delhi. It will continue to address these important and complex issues issues with seriousness and transparency. Further details are available on http://www.cgip.org.

Of China scoring in commercial printing … and the plight of Indian writers

From rotary printing presses (used in rotogravure, offset and flexography) to screen-printing, and now, to digital and web-based printing, commercial printing has come a long way and perhaps become just a little too complicated for a beginner trying to understand how the business works. While the gravure method is not much in India these use these days except for flexible packaging (because it runs on cylinders that are pretty expensive), according to Raju Seshadrinathan, Executive Director, Nagaraj & Co., a leading printer in Chennai, it’s digital printing that has gained considerable ground in recent years.

Although the cost per page is considerably higher than offset printing, digital printing is far less cumbersome. However, it is said to be suitable only for small volumes of print requirement. Seshadrinathan says that offset printing still rules in India as far as commercial printing work (annual reports, brochures, leaflets, danglers and point-of-sale material) and book printing are concerned.

While mentioning that commercial printers in Chennai and several other places are an unhappy lot, thanks to volumes having dipped and margins having reduced drastically, Seshadrinathan makes another interesting point – that the recession in the United States and Europe has indeed affected printing volumes in Chennai. China seems to have taken over the volume business from Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai, he says, adding that the sheer speed with which the Chinese printers execute deliveries is “simply amazing.” He feels the Chinese Government is providing the print industry there with a lot of subsidy in terms of logistics, and shipping among other areas. “By and large, they have a stable currency. The only problem is language, and they have middlemen for that,” says Seshadrinathan.

Back to the Indian scene, and Seshadrinathan says sale of children’s books is picking up but writers, especially small authors (across the spectrum), are having a big problem with publishing houses. Reason: they may have to wait two years to get money! So, not many people set about writing a book although they may have a book in them. Seshadrinathan gives a simple example of how a book is priced in the market in Chennai. If the printing cost of a book is Rs 150, the price is suitably hiked so that 15 per cent goes to the author, 40 per cent to the publisher, and 60 percent to the seller. The customer thus ends up paying upwards of Rs 320 for the book. Books, fiction or otherwise, do not really sell in large numbers in India. An author is happy if his or her work has sold 2000-odd copies. Not everybody is a Khushwant Singh or Shobhaa De to touch the 25,000 mark, a number that is far, far below what an international author would expect to sell. That, of course, is another story.

The other aspect is also about writers in India generally not having a clue whom to approach and how to get their work published. Only if you know somebody who knows somebody else who matters in the publishing industry, does a project at least get a boost. Seeking a meeting with a publisher is sometimes almost like making a visit to the police station.

Sashi Nair