Asia
is driving the global newspaper industry, says the
World Association of Newspapers, with China, Japan
and India leading growth. Pre-dawn tribes of
harried news sellers outside railway stations face
no extinction as yet.
Even as the first
BAW (Born After the Web) generation grows into
adulthood, print media - rather than TV - is
combining better with the Internet in the world's
news and analysis market.
Proliferating TV
channels have not dimmed Asia's love affair with
the
published word. Ninety two percent of Japanese see
newspapers as necessary, according to the annual
Yomiuri Shimbun study released on October 14,
ahead of the ongoing annual "Newspaper Week" in
Japan from October 15 - 21.
Eighty seven
percent of 3,000 Japanese respondents in the
Yomiuri Shimbun study said they "greatly trusted"
or "moderately trusted" reports carried by
newspapers.
"Seven of 10 of the world's
100 best selling dailies are now published in
Asia," Larry Kilman, director of communications at
the Paris-based World Association of Newspapers,
informed Asia Times Online. "China, Japan and
India account for 60 of them."
Round 2 of
the Indian Readership Survey 2007 released on
October 17 says six of the top 10 dailies declined
in readership, but the market leader, Hindi daily
Dainik Jagran (16.5 million readers), and the
Times of India (6.5 million) moved upwards.
India owns over 4,000 newspapers and
there's room for more. Industry estimates place
print media reaching 222 million people. But 359
million literate people do not read any
publication, a huge market that foreign media
companies too are keen to grab.
In Indian
villages, a literate farmer can be seen sitting on
a rope cot reading aloud from a newspaper, with
eager listeners squatting around on their
haunches. The number of readers in rural India
(110 million) is now nearly equal to urban India
(112 million).
A PricewaterhouseCoopers
study for the Federation of Indian Chambers of
Commerce and Industry (FICCI) published this March
says print media is the favored segment for global
investors and enjoys maximum foreign investment.
This FICCI report expects the Indian media
and entertainment industry to grow at 18% a
compound annual growth rate at overall value of
US$25.26 billion by 2011 from its present $11
billion size. Media insiders say non-English
newspapers generally display better circulation
marketing skills to be in step with the changing
preferences of their readers. "Hindi language
dailies like Dainik Jagran and Dainik Bhaskar have
this down to an art form," says Ralph Pais,
three-decade media veteran and Mumbai-based
Regional Manager of The Statesman. "They ensure
every new edition achieves requisite number of
readers, and have even proved themselves against
established giants as competitors."
With
the new circulation auditing approach in the US to
combine a newspaper's print and electronic
versions to measure marketing impact, newspapers
could also gain more advertising revenue. Media
analysts say newspapers, than TV news channels,
are proving better at combining resources with the
Internet.
Marketing value would also grow
with newspapers now partnering with mobile phones.
A cellular phone devise 'M-Paper' was launched in
the South Indian city of Hyderabad this month,
giving access to 10 complete English newspapers
from India through Wireless Application Protocol
(WAP) enabled mobile phones.
The
Hyderabad-based Pressmart and IMI Mobile Limited
jointly inaugurated the facility that they said
was largely to reach out to the Indian diaspora.
It's the first of its kind in India and in
the world, A R Vishwanath, Chief Executive Officer
of Pressmart, told the media. "Internationally
also only a part of newspapers is available
(through cellular phones) but here the whole
newspaper is being made available and that is
unique."
Asia Pacific newsrooms too have
evolved with technology and time. Gone are scenes
such as in the newsroom of The Statesman,
Calcutta, circa 1990: the clatter of news agency
teleprinters and reporters' type writers, steaming
hot cups of lemon tea and hungry copy editors
hollering to the visiting dhoti-clad vegetable
cutlet seller for their 11am snacks.
World
Editors Forum Blog noted how the New Delhi-based
Hindustan Times (HT), India's second largest
English daily, is shaping its integrated newsroom
to combine content from its print edition that
sells 1.4 million copies daily with its website
that gets an average of 1.6 million monthly unique
visitors (80 million page views).
Pankaj
Paul, HT's newly imported managing director from
the US, set about an integrated multi-media
newsroom with a basic video studio in the
newsroom: a small room, with a Sony HD handheld
camera. One of the HT photographers became the
paper's first videographer and HT's first
experiment with multimedia, a slideshow of a
terrorist attack, scored the website's second best
traffic ever.
Regional newsrooms will see
more changes, as in Australia's Fairfax group
equipping over 400 Sydney Morning Herald and
Melbourne Age journalists with the all-purpose
multimedia mobile Jasjam devices costing US$1,300
a piece. The i-Mate JasJam lets reporters file
stories in wirelessly in multi-media format, and
in real time.
Influential advertising
professionals continue to vote for the virtue of
the written word, particularly in dealing with
complex issues. "I see newspapers still retaining
their credibility, compared to television news
that's getting increasingly sensational,"
Prabhakar Mundkar, COO of advertising major
Percept H, told Asia Times Online.
"Newspapers have been better innovators in
delivering online video news content and
advertising," says Larry Kilman of the World
Association of Newspapers. "Perhaps it has to do
with the need to rapidly develop new competencies
for the new digital distribution channels -
newspaper companies did not have this expertise by
definition but have succeeded in developing it
quickly." He expects "bright" growth prospects for
Asian newspapers.
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