| It’s a market that has voracious newspaper readers -- and it’s a crowded one too.
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| Today, Kolkata’s bhadralok wake up to five Bengali dailies vying for their attention. Leading the pack is the Sarkar-family owned ‘Ananda Bazar Patrika’ (ABP), Barun Sengupta’s ‘Bartaman’, the Ghosh family-promoted ‘Aajkaal’, businessman S S Bose’s ‘Pratidin’ and CPI(M) party mouthpiece ‘Ganashakti.’
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| Very soon, a sixth Bengali newspaper will be competing for eyeballs. By the end of the month, “The Statesman,” the city’s oldest English language daily, will launch “Dainik Statesman” in Bengali. So why is “The Statesman” launching a Bengali newspaper?
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| “The entry barriers are low and costs are manageable,” answers a top executive at one of Kolkata’s largest business houses. “In Bengali, the market is happy with 12 pages, and accepts okay newsprint. The English newspapers cannot afford to dip below 24 pages and must offer superior quality paper,” he adds. Journalists are less expensive too – you can get Bengali newsroom staff at half the cost of English newspaper personnel.
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| Unfazed by the competition, “The Statesman” is going full steam with its launch plans. To be sure, it has adopted a novel approach to do so. It has formed a special purpose vehicle for the venture. “Our Bengali newspaper ‘Dainik Statesman’ is being promoted through a newly formed company, Chowringhee Prakashan Private Limited (CPPL),” says Ravindra Kumar, editor and managing director of The Statesman Ltd (TSL).
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| How the venture is being funded has been puzzling the market. “Stock in the company has been taken up by our newspaper group and by investors with diverse interests in packaging and paper,” says Kumar. The project was appraised by SBI Capital Markets and the investment decision was based on the returns projected. “Thus funding is both internal as well as external,” he adds.
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| According to Kumar, the new company was floated to raise finance for the project and to create the work ethic necessary for such a venture. The new publication will be headed by veteran TSL journalist Manash Ghosh.
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| The relationship between ‘The Statesman’ and ‘Dainik Statesman’ is based on a series of agreements between TSL and CPPL. The agreements are aimed at ensuring that TSL is able to use some of its surplus resources – manpower, space and infrastructure. Similarly, ‘Dainik Statesman’ will plug into the managerial and distribution resources that “The Statesman” can offer.
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| In other words, the new venture will enhance TSL’s revenues because it will pay use-based charges that will raise the capacity utilisation of assets at TSL. “It would provide the new venture plug-and-play infrastructure, to use a new-economy term,” says an advertising industry heavyweight who declines to be named.
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| Besides, the two newspapers can now offer combined advertising rates which Kumar says “will be rational, cost-effective and, therefore, attractive.”
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| Still, capturing the hearts and minds of readers will be a challenge.Kumar, however, believes that the vernacular press has been growing and that there is a need – and a demand – for a liberal, independent Bengali newspaper.
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| But advertising industry men are puzzled by how ‘Dainik Statesman’ will be different within the “liberal, independent” identity that Ravindra Kumar talks about. Bengali readers expect leading authors and poets, film makers and sportsmen, not to speak of the state’s intelligentsia, to write in the papers they read. And they are in short supply – almost all are tied to one newspaper or another.
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| “It’s a difficult market,” cautions Amitava Sinha, vice-president of Rediffusion-DYR in Kolkata. “Except for the famous ‘Statesman’ crusading columns like the ‘Caveat’ in Bengali, I wonder what will tempt the reader,” asks Sinha.
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| There is confusion about the target segment too. “I do not see any manifest constituency that is not addressed by the present clutch of newspapers in some form or another. And I do not expect the older generation, who read ‘The Statesman’ and ‘ABP’ at home, to abandon ‘ABP,’” he says.
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| The existing newspapers have the advertising pretty well stitched up. “Ananda Bazar Patrika” from the Rs 300 crore ABP group is said to rake in nearly two-thirds of the total Rs 450 crore Bengali newspaper advertising market. “Bartaman” is a distant second, earning about one fifth of this; the rest is shared among the remaining newspaper groups.
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| At least one rival is dismissive of the new paper’s prospects. Says Ashok Dasgupta, editor of “Aajkaal”: “I do not see any slot for another Bengali paper other than a paper that pushes the BJP-RSS agenda.
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| Even then, I wonder what circulation numbers are possible – perhaps 25,000-30,000 at most.” Kumar replies that “Dainik Statesman” is not looking at a circulation figure of lakhs but of thousands. “We are not in the numbers game, we are in the quality game.”
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| To the advertising fraternity, the foray into Bengali appears to be a move to offer more options to the advertiser. Kumar chooses to downplay this. “‘The Statesman’ was already offering a bouquet of products to advertisers through its tie-up with ‘Bartaman.’ ‘Dainik Statesman’ will supplement this arrangement.” Rediffusion’s Sinha disagrees: “There will inevitably be some degree of cannibalisation between advertising intended for ‘Bartaman’ through ‘The Statesman’ and advertising for the ‘Dainik Statesman’.”
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| Still, Kolkata is a market with unusual reading habits, where middle-class Bengali households opt for a mix of English and Bengali newspapers.
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| Loyalties run deep even though newspapers like ‘Bartaman’ (launched a decade or so ago) have been accepted and older products like ‘Jugantar’ given the go by. The battle in a market, where storekeepers keep newspapers to draw in customers, will definitely be worth watching. |
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