Wednesday 31 August, 2011

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

Sunday 21 August, 2011

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