Telangana to have a new English daily next month

Telangana Today will be the second publication from Telangana Publications, the company in which the CM has an investment of a little over Rs 4 crore

India's newest state will have “its own newspaper”, two years after it was created. Next month will see the launch of an English-language daily by a company in which state chief minister K Chandrashekar Rao has an investment.

Telangana Today, the new daily, will be the second publication from Telangana Publications, the company in which the CM has an investment of a little over Rs 4 crore (as disclosed in a 2014 affidavit). The company’s first newspaper was a Telugu daily, Namasthe Telangana. This was launched three years earlier, at the height of the Telangana separation movement.

Rao also has interests in a company called Telangana Broadcasting. It runs T-News, a Telugu news channel.

For Telangana Today, the company has hired veteran journalist K Srinivas Reddy as editor and began hiring people from rival newspapers. Reddy was associate managing editor of The Hindu in Hyderabad before  taking this role. He was not available for comment.

PLANS FOR THE NEWSPAPER

• The firm has hired veteran journalist K Srinivas Reddy as editor for Telangana Today
• It began hiring people from rival newspapers
• The 32-page daily would be launched in all major cities of the state in the first phase, say sources
• It is to be positioned as the ‘Voice of Telangana’

Sources in the know say the 32-page daily would be launched in all major cities of the state in the first phase. It is to be positioned as the ‘Voice of Telangana’, and look to create its own niche, away from the likes of Deccan Chronicle, The Hindu and The Times of India, informed sources said. “None of these newspapers are based out of Telangana. Where is the question of them ever being the voice of the state and its people?” asked an official from Telangana Publications.

Media experts see the launch as continuing a trend where political parties and their supremos either back or launch media publications and channels. In Tamil Nadu, for instance, the DMK is close to Sun Group, promoted by Kalanithi Maran, grandnephew of M Karunanidhi, the party's supremo. The state’s chief minister, J Jayalalithaa, has her own television channel, Jaya TV.

Telangana Publications is expected to push the new daily aggressively, as with Namasthe Telangana.

The latter is published not only from the state capital but regions such as Karimnagar, Warangal and Nizamabad in the north of the state, Khammam in the east, Nalgonda (central area) and Mahabubnagar in the south. At 300,000 copies a day, it is the third-largest Telugu daily, after Eenadu and Sakshi. The English daily is expected to use its sister publication's distribution network and will also use the digital medium to build its subscriber base.