Indian Newspaper industry

March 4, 2007 in Media

I recently subscribed to the Economist (I’m a fan of the magazine, but just never got around to subscribing) and an article titled "Let 1000 titles bloom" about the Indian newspaper industry caught my eyes. The paragraph below is an extract from the same article.

Competition is forcing once-staid publications to spice up their content. Mumbai’s Midday tabloid has introduced a bikini-clad version of Britain’s topless “page-three girls”, called the “Midday
mate”. Most broadsheets offer similar enticements in colourful
“entertainment” sections full of Bollywood stars. – The Economist, Feb
15, 2007

Mumbai’s Midday is a tabloid I grew up with. The bikini-clad version of Britain’s topless page-three girls called the Midday Mate is NOT a result of the competition nor is it a recent feature. The Midday Mate is a part of India’s pop. culture that kids in the 90’s grew up with and it continues (I think) to be a popular fixture of the tabloid.

The Economist wrongly points out that this feature was introduced to beat competition. When Midday introduced this feature, only a handful of newspapers existed in Mumbai/Bombay. It is only in the last 2-4 years has there been such an influx of new entrants in the field. When I was last in Bombay in 2005, the billboards and every available adv. space in the city was saturated with ads from DNA, The Hindustan Times and Mumbai Mirror– three newspapers that launched around the same time in 2005.
I agree with the article that competition is intense but I wish it had been more thorough in researching the article.

Also, I’m surprised that unlike Time and Business Week, The Economist does not allow for reader comments.

To read about the state of media (TV & newspapers) I strongly recommend Rashmi Bansal’s blog, Youth Curry.