Rising newspaper circulations require aggressive
entrepreneurs who seek to expand their newspapers. Though most owners will
proclaim their desire to serve the public, their main goals are power and
profit. Publishers may
represent 'new money', people seeking to gain influence and notoriety through
ownership of newspapers.9 But longstanding family newspaper businesses also
show a capacity to become more commercially oriented. This sometimes occurs
when a younger, market-oriented generation takes over the management.
When the 'emergency'
ended in 1977, newspaper circulations spontaneously shot up-initially, without
new technology or notable efforts by publishers. It was obvious, however, that
an expanding market existed. To hold their ground against, or to steal a march
on, competitors, existing newspapers began to improve their printing,
distribution and promotion. Few successful new dailies were started. (The
Bengali Aajkal, begun in 1981, is one. Eentadu had started in 1974). But
existing dailies either expanded, or, if they did not, began to fail.
The logic of
capitalism has driven the expansion of Indian-language newspapers as strongly
as a thirsty potential readership. In 1978, the second National Readership
Survey (NRS-II), based on 45,750 inter-views in 474 towns, concluded that 55
per cent of literate urban adults read a daily newspaper and 78 per cent of
such adults read a publication of some kind' It was estimated that the printmedia now reached close to 50 million people. Between the first NRS in 1970
and the second in 1978, people exposed to the print media increased by
two-thirds, the largest increase being in provincial towns of fewer than
1,00,000 people. Such towns were largely served by newspapers in Indian
languages.
Major advertisers
and advertising agencies, who are the main sponsors of the National Readership
Surveys, thus had their attention forcefully drawn to the Indian-language
press. Previously, conventional wisdom held that the readers of Indian-language
publications did not have sufficient income to buy expensive goods. Major
advertising therefore flowed automatically to the English language press. NRS-II began to change such attitudes, and advertisers and agencies began to
attend with greater interest to the Indian-language press. Towns with fewer
than 1,00,000 people were calculated to contain more than 40 per cent of urban
India and a quarter of the residents of such towns fell into the top two income
categories of the NRS.2. To reach such people, advertisers would have to use
Indian language newspaper.
Change in the
organization and goals of a number of Indian language newspapers began from
about this time. At Eenadu in Andhra Pradesh, the proprietor, Ramoji Rao, had
begun his career in advertising, and he brought to Eenadu from its opening in
1974 the techniques of capitalist, market-oriented industry with a 'product' to
sell. Older news-papers came and are coming to this position more slowly. K M
Mathew, editor-proprietor of Malayala Manorama, convinced that without
professional management techniques the newspaper could not flourish, called in
consultants in 1979 and reorganized the entire newspaper in 1980. The thrust of
such changes has been to bring professional managers into circulation and
advertising departments-now usually called 'marketing' and to introduce the
language of the Master of Business Administration (MBA). As one MBA, recently employed
to transform the circulation department of an-other major Malayalam daily, put
it, those in charge of advertising and circulation in the old set-up were
'responsible' but not 'ac-countable'. His task is to "implant a marketing
culture". Now targets are set and must be met; sales records are examined.
From the mid-1980`s,
competition for advertising became three sided: the English language press vs
the Indian-language press vs television. Indian-language newspapers like Hindustan began to
attract a much larger share, though even in 1987, the most impressive year. English
language newspaper retained more than 50 per cent of expenditure on press
advertising. Television now attracted the major share of advertising
expenditure for a number of products. For example, Unilever , India
More significantly
for the future, advertisers are placing their ads with "'leaders within
each language" and moving away from medium sized publications. A process
has begun in which only the large and aggressive will survive. The need for
advertising fuels the drive to increase circulation. Major advertisers generally
buy space in the largest circulating publications, which can charge higher
rates because of their high circulations. For ex-ample, the advertising tariff
in Malayala Manorama, India's largest-selling daily, was Rs 310 a column centimetre
in 1993; in Mathrubhzumi, its nearest Kerala rival (4,42,000: ABC,
July-December 1992), the rate was Rs 285.
Newspapers are in a
paradoxical position. Because the cost of production is greater than the
selling price, rising sales may mean lost money. Yet to be able to raise their
advertising rates, they must convince advertisers that the paper's
circulation-its 'reach'-has increased.
