India Today group to launch tabloid in partnership with Daily Mail
India Today group to launch tabloid in partnership with Daily Mail
New Delhi: Britain’s top-selling Daily Mail and the India Today group are set to launch a newspaper targeting women readers in India.
India Today group said Mail Today, backed by Daily Mail publishers Associated Newspapers, was expected to hit the Delhi market by the end of the week with an initial print run of 1,20,000 copies.
The 48-page tabloid will be gradually rolled out across India, jostling for readers in competition with a host of new publications that have been launched in recent years.
“Mail Today will be a completely different newspaper from the other existing newspapers and it will be a newspaper that the whole of India would be proud of," said India Today chairman Aroon Purie in a statement.
India Today plans to adopt the highly successful formula used by the Daily Mail in targeting middle class women readers.
Purie said women’s content was an area not covered by existing Indian newspapers and Mail Today would have it as a “differentiating factor."
The nearly century old Daily Mail, the second largest selling daily in Britain after the Sun, was the first paper to have a women’s page and position itself as a middle class publication, embracing such themes as family values.
Mail Today’s editor Bharat Bhushan said the paper’s content would stress taking a stand and highlight people who believed in “raising their voices for the good of society."
The statement gave no ownership details but there is a limit of 26% foreign ownership in the print media.
There have been a slew of newspaper and magazine launches in India including two new general dailies in Mumbai — Daily News and Analysis, or DNA and the Mumbai Mirror — and a new business paper Mint which was launched in February in both New Delhi and Mumbai. Also, HT Media Ltd, publishers of Mint, and arch-rivals Bennet Coleman and Company Ltd, publishers of the Times of India, got together to publish Metro Now, a tabloid.
Driving the media spurt in the country of more than one billion people is a booming economy which has created a surge in advertising.
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