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by fifty per cent, to twenty-four billion ANNALS OF COMMUNICATIONS dollars, according to the Newspaper Association of America, and net-profit margins now average five per cent. In CITIZENS JAIN India, which has a population of a billion two hundred million, newspaper circula- Why India’s newspaper industry is thriving. tion and advertising are rising. There are an estimated eighty thousand individual BY KEN AULETTA newspapers, eighty-five per cent of which are printed in one of India’s twenty-two official regional languages, and the circu- lation of English-language newspapers is expanding by about one and a half per cent annually. Many non-English news- papers are growing three times as fast, as about twenty million more Indians become literate each year. But, because English-language papers attract an up- scale readership, they draw seventy per cent of the available ad dollars. The Times of India has a daily circula- tion of four million three hundred thou- sand, the largest of any English-language newspaper in the world. The Economic Times is the world’s second most widely read English-language business newspa- per, after the Wall Street Journal. Both are owned by B.C.C.L., along with eleven other newspapers, eighteen magazines, two satellite news channels, an English- language movie channel, a Bollywood news-and-life-style channel, a radio net- work, Internet sites, and outdoor bill- boards. The company generates annual revenues of a billion and a half dollars, a paltry sum compared with an organi- zation like News Corp., which produces thirty-three billion. But the pre-tax profit margin of B.C.C.L.’s newspapers is a re- markable twenty-five to thirty per cent. The company commands half of all En- he square that borders the Dadar driver in exchange for their daily stacks of glish-language print advertising, half of Railway Station is the largest of newspapers and magazines. Afterward, English-language-newspaper readers, a sixty-fiveT newspaper-delivery depots in with helpers, they sit on the sidewalk in- third of TV news-channel ads, and al- Mumbai. At 4 A.M., forty trucks and serting supplements and sorting the most a quarter of all radio and Web ads. vans packed with newspapers and maga- stacks into neat bundles. Then they pass It is the largest outdoor advertising com- zines have parked and slid open their the bundles to deliverymen—there are pany in India. The company has no debt. back doors; the trash-strewn streets are some eighty-three hundred in Mum- One reason that Indian newspapers otherwise deserted, and the loudest noise bai—who pack as many papers as they thrive is the absence of digital competi- comes from the cawing of crows. During can onto motorbikes, rickshaws, bicycles, tion. Less than ten per cent of the popu- the next few hours, two hundred and and shoulders, and set out to slip them lation has access to the Internet, and, thirty-one thousand newspapers will be one by one under or beside the doors of with two-thirds of the population surviv- unloaded, half of them published by the city’s residents. ing on less than two dollars per day, ex- Bennett, Coleman & Company, Ltd., India is one of the few places on earth pensive smartphones and tablets aren’t India’s dominant media conglomerate. where newspapers still thrive. In the about to replace print media as the news- Venders cluster around the back of each United States in the past five years news- reading platform of choice. Also, Indian truck, handing up wads of rupees to the paper advertising revenues have plunged papers are cheap, costing between five and ten cents daily. There are few news- Samir and Vineet Jain. Their success is a product of anunorthodox philosophy. stands in India—only five per cent of BISWAS SAPTARSHI GROUP/GETTY; INDIA TODAY NARENDRA BISHT/THE RIGHT: LEFT TO PHOTOGRAPHS ALEX WILLIAMSON; BY ILLUSTRATION 52 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 8, 2012 TNY—2012_10_08—PAGE 52—133SC.—LIVE ART R22652 papers are sold over the counter—and stories are rare. The Times of India sees home delivery is free, paid for by the pub- itself not as an agenda-setter but as a bul- lishers. The actual price of each paper letin board, a mirror to what happened is even lower, because of what Indians yesterday. The first section had many call raddi, their recycling program. Sub- ads, and there were several advertising scribers save their newspapers, which are supplements. picked up by raddiwallahs each month; The paper’s innovations begin in its the customer receives about ten cents per eight-page second section, which is titled pound, and the raddiwallahs sell the the Bombay Times but is known in- bundles back to the paper companies to house as Page Three. The section brims be recycled. with color pictures of seductive women The success of Indian papers, espe- and muscular men, along with stories of cially the Times of India, is also a product Bollywood stars, handsome cricket pros, of their content and the unorthodox phi- and international celebrities. The lead losophy behind it. B.C.C.L. is a family- story that day described how aspiring ac- owned business, run by Samir Jain, the tors, including a sultry Saiyami Kher, “are vice-chairman, and his brother, Vineet keen to start their innings in Bollywood.” Jain, the managing director. “Both of us Jain explained that, like the surrounding think out of the box,” Vineet told me on stories, it was written by members of the a recent afternoon. “We don’t go by the reporting staff and paid for by the celeb- traditional way of doing business.” His rities or their publicists. Most of the company’s dominance can be explained section was filled with ads, or with sto- simply, he added, though its methods are ries that were ads; a similar section ap- not taught in most Western journalism pears in each city in which the Times is schools. “We are not in the newspaper published. An internal company report business, we are in the advertising busi- in June lauded the strategy as “so impor- ness,” he said. With newspapers sold so tant that today nearly all Bollywood cheaply and generating little circulation movie releases pay for promotional cov- revenue, newspapers depend more on ad erage ahead of movie releases, and actors/ revenue, he said, and, “if ninety per cent actresses pay to develop their brand of your revenues come from advertising, through coverage in the paper.” Tucked you’re in the advertising business.” under the section’s masthead, four words Jain sat behind a small wooden desk in small type inform the reader that the in an office the size of a large closet; the contents are an “advertorial, entertain- windows were covered by white shades, ment promotional feature.” Jain insisted drawn against June’s monsoon rains. At that this meets the transparency test. “It’s forty-six, Jain looked professorial, in dark on my masthead,” he said. “It says ‘adver- slacks and a pale-blue dress shirt, black- torial’ clearly. All newspapers in the framed eyeglasses, and short, parted hair world do advertorials.” But in the Jains’ that has begun to turn gray. “Earlier, the newspapers the advertorials are written newspapers were written more for the in- by staff reporters, and a reader needs a tellectual élites,” he said. “It was too seri- magnifying glass to be alerted. ous at some point. It was not relevant to Jain got the idea for this section sev- our readers.” eral years ago, after reading an interview Jain picked up a copy of the Times of with Richard Branson, the owner of the India from his desk. The front page of Virgin Group, in which Branson re- the paper displays not six or seven stories marked that the reason he parachutes but ten or eleven, plus a jumble of small from airplanes and performs similar boxes containing disparate news items, stunts is that, with this free publicity, he with no large photographs or design ele- annually saves his company tens of mil- ments to provide a sense of neatness and lions of dollars in advertising. “When I symmetry. Jain flipped through the front read it, I said, ‘Oh, my God, eureka—I’m section, which featured a mixture of na- stupid!’ ” Jain said. “Why these guys are tional, local, and international news: a not advertising in my paper is because monsoon alert, graft charges against a I’m giving them free P.R.” If a Bolly- Presidential hopeful, a Mumbai train wood studio or a car company sponsored collision, and a story about the Taliban’s a fashion show, the show won’t be ig- praise for India’s refusal to get militarily nored by the paper, Jain said, but the involved in Afghanistan. Investigative name of the studio or the company won’t THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 8, 2012 53 TNY—2012_10_08—PAGE 53—133SC. appear. “They are promoting a brand,” ads that appeared on the papers’ front in a chapter on the Indian press, in Nich- Jain said. “Pay me for it.” The Jains call pages. At the Times of India, or the olas Coleridge’s book “Paper Tigers.” In- this ad-sales initiative Medianet, and Jain Times Group, as the company is often dian news-service photographers are contends that it is more honest than what called, the business side need not ask per- under standing orders to snap his picture, existed before, when reporters were mission. The entire front page might be but they rarely succeed, because he at- slipped envelopes with cash or accepted sold as an ad, for four hundred and fifty tends few public functions.

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