When India hosted the World Newspaper Congress last year, Indian editors and owners were a conspicuously cheerful minority at a gathering dominated by doubts over the future of newsprint.
While many papers in industrialised nations have been laying off staff or folding in the face of freefalling circulation figures and competition from Internet news and television, the printed press in India is booming.
A fast-expanding economy, mushrooming advertising budgets, rising disposable income and, above all, increasing literacy rates have fuelled a newspaper renaissance, with new titles and fatter editions appearing by the month.
Since 2005 the number of paid-for daily newspaper titles in India has grown by 44 percent to 2,700, according to the "World Press Trends 2010" survey published by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN-IFRA). That makes it the world leader ahead of the United States with 1,397 titles and China with 1,000. India also has the world's highest paid-for daily circulation, having surpassed China for the first time in 2008.
"What we have is education levels and purchasing power improving -- there's a hunger among Indians to know," Bhaskar Rao, director of New Delhi's Centre for Media Studies, told AFP. Even with 125 million households owning a television, "TV only seems to serve as an appetizer -- after watching the evening news they want to read more about the stories the next day," Rao said. Indian newspapers are also incredibly cheap, with revenue driven by advertising rather than sales.
Most have a cover price of less than four rupees (eight US cents), allowing many households to subscribe to more than one daily.
Full report here AFP
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