Pitching it right

ESPN is not just a television channel, it's also a magazine, and will be coming to India soon.

Cricinfo, the online cricket publisher which stopped publication of its monthly cricket magazine this August, is trying to resurrect it as a multi-sports magazine under the ESPN brand.

Walt Disney Company-controlled ESPN, which owns Cricinfo, is looking at bringing its "ESPN The Magazine" to India. Of course, the format will be different and will include Indian sports, especially cricket, sources say.

"We will increasingly move under the ESPN umbrella, in terms of brand guidelines. We have stopped publishing as a cricket magazine. We are evaluating if there is a bigger opportunity in an all-sports magazine with ESPN as the parent brand. In India, our focus will be on local sports," says R Ramesh Kumar, commercial director, Cricinfo.

Cricinfo ventured into the print segment with Cricinfo in January last year. Over 40,000 copies of the magazine were being sold every month, reveal official sources.

The cricket-only magazine was published by the Infomedia Group, under a licencing agreement with the Wisden Group, erstwhile owner of Cricinfo.

ESPN The Magazine is a bi-weekly sports magazine, which covers baseball, the NBA and NFL leagues, besides college basketball and football. Premiered in the US in March 1998, the magazine boasts a circulation of over 1.85 million.

The multi-sports magazine that ESPN is planning to launch in India will have over 70 per cent of its content devoted to cricket. The rest of the content might include other popular Indian sports like hockey, football and volleyball.

At present, the most popular all-sports magazine in India is SportsStar. "We realise that print is going to be a difficult business in India unlike the Internet where we can realistically set expectations of 100 per cent growth year-on-year. Therefore, we would like to position the magazine as an ESPN all-sports magazine, targetting a different set of readers," adds Kumar.