Small is beautiful: Delhi Mid Day and Today

It’s probably the Delhi print media market’s biggest open secret. The city is set to see the launch of two new tabloids ? one by Bennett, Coleman & Co, owners of The Times of India (ToI) newspaper, and the other by Hindustan Times Ltd. While ToI is bringing its Mumbai Mirror to the capital as Delhi Mirror, HT is believed to be scouting around for a foreign partner to launch its own tabloid. The buzz is that the company has been in negotiations with UK’s Daily Mail and General Trust, which owns London’s largest circulated tabloid Daily Mail.

However, neither publishing group is willing to confirm that it’s launching a tabloid. ToI brand director Rahul Kansal explains: “Since we already have the Mumbai Mirror brand, it is natural to examine the possibility of extending it. But that does not mean we are ready with a plan.”

It’s not that Delhi has not had its share of tabloids. Delhi Mid Day is run by hotelier Lalit Suri while the India Today group launched Today, an afternoon tabloid, over four years ago. However, both papers are languishing. Says advertising agency Lintas India’s director (media services) Lynn De Souza: “Their content is miserable. I really don’t know what their raison d’etre is.”

It’s believed that India Today group’s editor-in-chief Aroon Purie plans to convert Today into a morning broadsheet. “I’m not willing to comment on this,” he said, when contacted.

So why is the 597mm X 375 mm newspaper format, associated with sensational stories and light reading, suddenly becoming the flavour of the season with media companies?

For starters, the broadsheet market, especially in Delhi, is saturated. “With ToI and HT fighting, the Delhi broadsheet market has expanded roughly from 5 lakh copies to 14 lakh copies a day in the last 10 years. One really wonders how another broadsheet will do here,” says Kansal.

So media companies are cocking an eye at tabloids ? a product that’s under-exploited, cheaper to produce and more suited to the changing media consumption habits of Indian readers.

Around the world, mid-morning and afternoon papers are a huge category. “Even the media companies that own them are robust and profitable,” says Kansal. Agrees Dainik Bhaskar group director Girish Agarwal: “India has only seen morning papers. You will now see community papers, tabloids and free papers come in.” Agarwal says that his company is not closed to the idea of exploring opportunities in the tabloid area.

The fact that newsprint cost has escalated by about 60 per cent in the last four years may also be pushing media companies to look at tabloid-size newspapers. Says Midday Multimedia’s executive vice president and chief financial officer Manajit Ghoshal: “For those keen to launch new products, it’s economical to produce a tabloid.” The arithmetic is simple. If a 40-page broadsheet takes 10 newspaper sheets to produce, a 40-page tabloid will use up only 5.

In the UK at least three newspapers, The Independent, The Times and The Scotsman, have become tabloid size and call themselves “compact” newspapers. Observes Lynn de Souza: “Tabloid is only a format?and it is quite possible that we will see business papers in the small, tabloid format in the near future to make for easier hand-held reading, especially while commuting.”

De Souza says that print medium is rapidly losing its young readers who are moving on to other information and entertainment sources, usually digital in nature. “Offering content that is more likely to appeal to them is the only solution,” she says. Says Outlook Group publisher Maheshwar Peri: “When we needed to target the under 30 crowd, the media agency advised us to buy space in Mumbai Mirror.”

From the viewpoint of media companies, launching tabloids makes sense to advertisers. Television is eating away into the ad share of print companies, which, in turn, rely on frequent price increases to generate growth. “A free Mumbai Mirror with ToI is seen as a value add,” observes Gopinath Menon, vice president, media, at advertising agency TBWA India.

Whatever the reasons for newspaper groups looking at the tabloid segment, the fact remains that the complexion of Delhi and the media habits of its readers are also changing. The metro rail is expanding its network to cover the entire city and its suburbs. “In general, more and more people are reading while commuting in cars, buses or the metro. And broadsheet is not a convenient format for the purpose,” says Ghoshal.

Yet those planning to launch tabloids must keep the city’s infrastructure bottlenecks in mind. Today and Delhi Mid Day failed to create any effective distribution system for their products. Critics also argue that readers may not want to spend more than what they are already spending on their newspapers. “The issue is not just about money but also about time. Will the reader have time to read, considering the fact that the average time he spends on the print medium is declining,” asks Menon.

Nevertheless, print medium experts believe that several international newspaper brands such as the Sun group are looking at the Indian market. In their home turf, the circulations of these papers are barely growing by between 3 per cent and 4 per cent a year. The India media story, on the other hand, is still buoyant with a growth rate of nearly 19 per cent a year.

The Delhi advertising market is said to be growing faster than that of Mumbai. English newspapers garner Rs 900 crore in advertising in Mumbai while Delhi’s English dailies rake in Rs 1,000 crore. Expect a dog fight among the tabloids for a share of this market. Readers, meanwhile, are unlikely to complain.