Asia's papers keep print flag flying

By Raja M

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.

(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.)