Demoting news and readers

The leading Engish newspaper, The Times of India, provides a curious example of how a newspaper re-invented itself to meet market forces, even at the cost of media ethics

Sukumar Muralidharan Delhi

The career of the Times of India (TOI) since the early-1990s at least, has been a saga of how the race to the bottom is the most profitable enterprise for a media institution. When newspapers were mired in old habits of thought, clinging to outdated beliefs that they served a public purpose, the TOI boldly proclaimed its exclusive devotion to the commercial calculus. It tided over the storm of derision that it invited, striking out along the path of squeezing out the last rupee of advertising revenue available in the market. And it succeeded not merely in maximising advertising revenue yield, but even in sharply boosting circulation and profitability.

Ever since, the TOI has been the role model for the Indian newspaper in the age of globalisation. When the relevance of the medium to its traditional constituencies has itself been called into question, the TOI has not merely remained relevant, it has created new constituencies along with the lifestyle paradigms it has propagated.

As a case study, the TOI is important for understanding the media as a social and political institution in the new world order. This is particularly true in the Indian context where Bennett Coleman and Company Ltd. (BCCL) that owns the newspaper is replicating what has been done by large media conglomerates elsewhere — the subordination of journalism to the whims of advertisers.

The golden goose of advertising

The TOI by 1994 had long since internalised the most significant rule of competition in the market for advertisements. Simply put, the advertiser was king and the readership a distant abstraction that did not have any immediacy to the newspaper, except as a burden to be borne. A recent chronicle of the Indian media industry records that the history of the press in the country can be written in terms of a significant point of inflection. The print industry, for long mired in romantic recollections of its contribution to the Indian freedom struggle, deluded in the belief that it had a role in underwriting the quality of the public discourse, was shaken out of its reverie by Samir Jain who entered his family business as a decisive player around the mid-1980s… An account of the TOI’s breathtaking innovations in the newspaper industry informs us that Samir Jain’s achievement was to use “simple marketing principles and good business sense to transform a down-in-the-dumps publishing company into a profit machine”.

The TOI’s distinction was in being way ahead of the curve when it came to adapting its editorial content to the need of the advertiser. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the TOI began a shift of content towards fashion, lifestyle and entertainment that had its loyal readership thoroughly flummoxed, used as it was to an intensely political discourse, intimately engaged with public causes. But even as many among the older audience cancelled their subscriptions in disgust, the newspaper succeeded in attracting new readers from unexplored demographic segments, like the youth and the high purchasing power strata. The results were dramatic.

And the bottom line flourishes

In 2001 for instance, BCCL was the “second most profitable unlisted company in India”, recording a net profit of Rs 2,059 million, which was well over twice the figure registered the previous year. In comparison, other media companies turned in distinctly anaemic performances. Kasturi and Sons Ltd, publishers of The Hindu, declared a net profit of