Newspaper Innovation

On December 10 2007 the first Indian free daily was launched in Chennai (formerly know as Madras), the fourth biggest city in India. The tabloid Ergo, has a page count of 16 and is published by Kasturi and Sons Ltd, also publisher of paid daily The Hindu and Sportstar. The print run of Ergo is 50,000 while there are a dozen people on the staff of the paper. Ergo is mainly distributed to the target audience: IT professionals in their twenties and thirties.

The publisher is also thinking about launching Ergo in other cities with a high number of IT-profressionals, like Bangalore and Hyderabad. India does have many community based free weeklies like City Plus, Downtown and Neighbourhood Flash, many of them with a substantial circulation. (Mint)

Metro International has been talking earlier to the ABP group (Anand Bazaar Patrika) to launch an India Metro edition. When it became clear that Metro International was looking in India for partners, leading English language dailies The Times of India (circulation 2.5 million) and the Hindustan Times (circulation 1.1 million) joined forces. Together they launched Metro Now on February 5 2007: a 48-page morning tabloid with a circulation of 85,000 and a cover price of one rupee (less than 2ct). Plans are to increase circulation to 350,000. Metro International needed a partner because foreign firms can only own one quarter of an Indian media company.

Newspaper circulation in India went up from 59 million in 2001 to 79 million in 2005 which makes it one of the fastest growing markets in the world together with China. It is after China also the biggest newspaper in the world.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 6:34 pm and is filed under Launches. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.