NEW DELHI, 19 September 2006 — In his airy second-floor office above the clogged arteries of India’s capital, Raju Narisetti is explaining that reports of the newspaper’s death are premature. Narisetti, whose last job was editing the Wall Street Journal Europe, says that in India they are just being “invented”.
Born an Indian, Narisetti left for America 15 years ago and began on local dailies before rising to the editorship at the Journal. But earlier this year the 40-year-old decided to return to the land of his fathers to start a new business title for the Hindustan Times group, whose full-color flagship papers sell one million copies a day each in Hindi and English.
Narisetti says he wants to be where the “action is”. “There are three countries where starting a paid-for newspaper is now possible. They are Brazil, China and India. China is not open yet, I do not speak Portuguese and India is, well, home in a way.”
Narisetti joined the Hindustan Times, whose profits rose more than 50 percent last year to 520 million rupees (6.5m pounds sterling), just after the Wall Street Journal agreed to supply branded content for the new paper.
“In Brussels we would be in meetings and people were saying ‘we have 2 percent growth’ and were getting pretty excited about it. Here people talk about 35 percent annual growth (in revenues) and we are coasting.”
Such talk is bracing stuff for a readership in the West that widely perceives the print media to be at death’s door. Narisetti says many of his friends in America have e-mailed him asking for jobs. “The wages might put them off because top reporters in India earn 80,000 rupees a month. That’s what an entry-level metro reporter gets in the US.”
That foreign journalists consider swapping Manhattan for India’s capital speaks volumes of the gloom enveloping some newsrooms in the developed world.
It is not hard to see why such sentiments are so pervasive. While US newspapers have only posted one full-year gain in average daily circulation over the past 20 years, Indians are buying newspapers in ever increasing numbers. According to the country’s latest National Readership Survey, newspapers added another 12.6 million readers in the past 12 months to reach 204 million Indians.
These eye-grabbing numbers have attracted foreign interest. The International Herald Tribune started printing in India earlier this year. The Financial Times, which paid 3.4 million pounds for a 26 percent stake in India’s Business Standard, aims to launch a South Asian edition in Bombay next year. Metro, the world’s fastest-growing newspaper group, is also planning an Indian version.
A number of mainstream British groups, most notably the Daily Mail, have run a slide-rule over the Indian market. The group that includes the Independent has paid 2 million pounds to buy a quarter of a Hindi newspaper group, Dainik Jagran. Sanjay Gupta, the CEO and editor of Dainik Jagran, says that the chairman of Independent News and Media, Tony O’Reilly, was quick to recognize the Indian press’s potential. Dainik Jagran has more than 21 million readers and is officially the most-read newspaper in India. “We will print an international version of the Independent in India very soon,” says Gupta. “But it will be in English.”
The reasons for the success of Indian newspapers go beyond a fast-growing economy and rising advertising revenues. Literacy rates are low — less than two-thirds of the population can sign their name. But this is rising every year, ensuring a steadily increasing potential readership. The most significant difference is that Internet penetration remains low, enabling newspapers to retain readers who in the West have long ago shifted to the web for news and analysis. Also media groups in India are not subject to intense competition for advertising revenue from online rivals.
“There’s a range of estimates for Internet penetration from 13 million to 50 million users, both of which are tiny for a population of 1 billion people. My estimate is about 20 million, about a fifth of China’s internet users,” says N. Ram, editor-in-chief of the Hindu newspaper, which sells more than one million copies a day.
However global newspaper trends are shaking up the industry. Rising newspaper costs mean the arrival of new, smaller formats. The Hindu, a serious paper, is cutting its width next month.
“We are not repositioning the title,” says Ram. “But I am concerned that tabloidization is taking place across the board with less serious, more celebrity news where books pages and opinion columns disappear.” This dig is aimed at India’s biggest press group, Bennett Coleman, which owns the Times of India. With annual newspaper revenues of more than 350 million pounds, the company is worth billions.
