New Delhi: At his home in Chennai’s Mylapore neighbourhood, Jagadish Kumar Gandhimurthy, a 24-year-old software engineer working with HCL Technologies Ltd, reads The Hindu and The Economic Times. And that used to be it.
These days, since 10 December to be precise, he has been getting one more paper, a tabloid called Ergo, in the office. Since he doesn’t have to pay for it, he doesn’t mind reading it. Unlike the papers he reads in the morning, Ergo has news that is local and immediate: Yoga among the IT community, adventure sports in Chennai, and anonymous scrapping (or messaging) on social networking sites that bothers women.
Most importantly, as far as Gandhimurthy is concerned, Ergo is free. “It’s good... It’s peppy,” he says.
Ergo may be free, but it is actually published by Kasturi and Sons Ltd, the Chennai-based family-controlled media giant that also publishes the 129-year-old newspaper The Hindu, among other publications.
Ergo, a 16-page, all-colour tabloid, is India’s first free daily from a large media house. Free newspapers try to recover all their costs—of publishing and distribution—from advertising. Globally, such free newspapers are now published in at least 52 countries.
According to Piet Bakker, an associate professor at the University of Amsterdam, 42 million copies of free newspapers are read every day by 70 million people across Europe, the US, Canada, South America, Australia, Asia and Africa.
Since August 2004, Bakker has been chronicling the rise of free dailies on his blog, Newspaper Innovation.
The advertiser profile of free dailies—or least the ads they hope to attract—isn’t very different from the “paid” dailies
While
Ergo is the newest offering, the model itself is not entirely new to India. A host of small local publishers have been bringing out weekly community newspapers, such as
Neighbourhood Flash in New Delhi,
Ontrack Suburbs in Mumbai and a host of them in Chennai, including
Suburban Voice and
Mylapore Times, for some time. But unlike
Ergo, they have mostly tended to be from boutique publishers and very tightly focused in terms of their geographic reach.
In recent years though, major publishing houses, such as Jagran Prakashan Ltd, the publisher of India’s largest circulated daily, the Hindi Dainik Jagran, and Kasturi, have also begun such “community” papers. Jagran launched its weekly tabloid, City Plus, in September 2006 with an initial print run of 40,000. Today, the company claims a circulation of 370,000 through 18 editions in and around New Delhi. Kasturi’s Downtown and Neighbourhood Flash also claim a healthy circulation.
These weekly community papers, though, are significantly different from the emerging “freesheeters” such as Ergo, in terms of both their readers and the advertising they usually attract. Community papers—and their advertising—is essentially local.