Kolkata's new print war
The arrival of Ei Samay has stirred the Ananda Bazar Patrika group out of its complacency.
Like gladiators, TOI and ABP are circling around with the youth brigade
as the prize, says SHIKHA MUKERJEE Pix: Ei Samay
Entrenched incumbent of Bengali newspapers, the 90-year-old Ananda Bazar Patrika, has been challenged by India’s biggest media house, Bennett, Coleman, & Co and owners of The Times Of India, the Economic Times et al, on home turf. Ei Samay was launched on October 15 soon after E Bela hit the market on September 16. The fact that ABP needed to create another newspaper in Bengali, 90 years after the flagship, is an indication of just how seriously it has taken the challenge. For TOI, it was a shorter gap between the launch of its last Indian language daily 50 years ago and Ei Samay.
The scramble to mop up the “latent demand”, larger than the three lakh subscribers and counter-sales buyers of its new product, E Bela, according to Supriyo Sinha of ABP, began as a reaction, presumably to signals from TOI that it was finally entering the Kolkata market with a new Bengali product. The belated recognition of an unmet demand sounds good, but is probably not true. ABP has tried attracting the young and trendy in recent years with among other initiatives, Unish-Kuri, a magazine for the 19-20 age group. India’s demographics which put an estimated 65 per cent of the population under 35 years and with some education, and, the growth of the regional language newspaper market, probably influenced the TOI decision. This in turn created pressure on ABP, the output being the tabloid-sized rapid page-turner that is not the weighty and wordy Ananda Bazar, Bengal’s newspaper of record.
Undeniably the arrival of Ei Samay, a regular-sized Bengali daily with all the usual segments, local, national and global news, sports, and significantly a slick business section, aiming to capture the long vacant second slot in the regional language newspaper market, has stirred the ABP out of its complacency. Its reaction, however, was to mimic what TOI had done in Mumbai when the Old Lady of Boribundur was assailed by the entry of two newspapers into its captive market--DNA and the Hindustan Times. TOI launched the Mumbai Mirror to cover all segments of the market in terms of age, interests, and aspirations. ABP has followed that strategy by producing E Bela, a punchy, entertainment-soaked daily that arrives to whet the appetite for news of a younger, time stressed generation.
ABP’s anticipation of the direction of TOI’s challenge is clearly the “young at heart.” Whereas, TOI has created a regular Bengali daily even though it is colourful, fluid, and has a busy look and feel. The editor’s note on the front page of TOI's Kolkata edition said it all: the paper was an “opportunity to start a conversation.” Reading between the lines of what Jaideep Bose wrote and the newspaper as it is printed it is evident that Ei Samay is trying to be credible, fair, balanced, sophisticated, and edgy at the same time. This is TOI’s classic formula, of combining “brave new thoughts and trends” with focus on “critical inflection points.” In Kolkata, the critical issue has been spelt out--the city’s past glory as an industrial powerhouse. The direction is unequivocally stated: without industry there can be no growth in terms of jobs and so no glory.
Ever since Jugantar was run into the ground by the Tushar Ghosh family in the 1990s, Ananda Bazar became the unassailable leader. It was so far ahead of the other newspapers that it could take its position and the loyalty of its readers for granted. The arrival of Aajkaal, with a masthead designed by film maestro Satyajit Ray and led by a former Ananda Bazar star, Gour Kishore Ghosh, in the early 1980s produced a slight ripple but petered out as the paper had neither the resources nor the style of Ananda Bazar. Aajkaal, nevertheless, set off a trend of offering a difference to readers unhappy with the usual Ananda Bazar fare. In the 1990s, Bartamaan, the brainchild of Ananda Bazar’s brightest star, the venerable Barun Sengupta, produced a similar surface disturbance in the Bengali newspaper world, but it still did not pose a challenge to the primacy of Ananda Bazar. These newspapers sparked off a slew of new papers, but none of them posed any threat to Ananda Bazar.
Readers intrigued
The Times Of India’s Ei Samay is in a different class, going by the interest among journalists in Kolkata. Readers seem to be intrigued by the possibility of a choice that is not a single man’s vision on the state of politics in West Bengal. That has been the limitation of Bartamaan, as much as it was the weakness of Aajkaal. As an alternative, Ei Samay has all the resources to succeed in filling up the number two slot in newspapers in Bengali. It is a TOI product; it has the capacity to buy talent at market rates. It has experience in making the market; a feat it pulled off when it launched the Kolkata edition of The Times Of India, as the alternative to ABP’s The Telegraph.
The mix of local, national, and global news--with less wordy stories that are crammed to fit into the available space and less pontification--has created a format that the reader has endorsed through purchases reflected in the circulation figures. Ei Samay is a product of the same class. It is designed to attract readers, who either want to move up from the other Bengali papers in the market or readers wanting a change from Ananda Bazar. According to TOI quoting distribution trade numbers, Ei Samay is selling 35-37 copies against every 100 sold by Ananda Bazar Patrika. Given Kolkata’s complex geopgraphies, where language-communities cluster in some locations, the numbers cannot explain the total circulation of Ei Samay, even though its market is only Kolkata and its peri-urban surround.
Exercising a choice, in October or November or for the first six months of Ei Samay (the introductory subscription package) does not mean, however, that the reader has made a firm and permanent shift. Therefore, Ei Samay has a window of opportunity of six months in which it has to prove its credentials as a substantially different and professionally competent newspaper if it wants to establish its second place in the Bengali newspaper market.
ABP, which has done its homework, wanted to create a newspaper that would be “relevant” to the youth category, primarily the 16-30 age group. Given that a mere 25 per cent of this age group that can read Bengali actually does so was the spur that goaded ABP to produce E Bela. There was a segment within the market that had not been tapped. Supriyo Sinha, vice president, articulated the challenge and the opportunity that ABP saw as follows: ABP needed a product that would sustain its position as the number one market leader for the next decade if not the next 90 years. It wanted to catch hold of the new generation that was not reading Bengali newspapers. It wanted E Bela to satisfy this cohort and so build the brand.
Record sales
The sales of E Bela have overturned expectations, Sinha said. Ananda Bazar had budgeted and planned for an initial circulation of 60,000 to 70,000 copies but was “overwhelmed” by the three lakh who bought Ebela. If The Telegraph took 30 years to touch a circulation of 3.7 lakh, Ananda Bazar took 90 years to reach 13. 8 lakh, then in six weeks E Bela has all the signs of breaking the existing records. Instead of cannibalising Ananda Bazar’s readers, E Bela has generated a new interest in the mother paper, Sinha said. The introductory offer, he admits, may have had something to do with it, since the combination of the original paper and E Bela at Re 1, was only marginally adding to the household newspaper budget. Its shortlist of strong propositions includes strips on Bengal’s favourite sleuths--Byomkesh, Kakababu, and Feluda. Ananda Bazar, as the mother paper was for the conservatives and the new baby for generation next.
Like gladiators, Ei Samay and Ananda Bazar are sizing up each other, in Kolkata and its neighbourhood market. Neither is venturing beyond this urban location. Up against Ananda Bazar’s staggering overall circulation of 13.7 lakh, of which a whopping 6.9 lakh comes from the Kolkata market, Ei Samay’s biggest test will be to define its product and capture the attention of readers who do not read Ananda Bazar and those who buy Ananda Bazar as a default option. Ei Samay’s intentions seem to be to produce a credible, politically fair, balanced paper that aims to use critical sensibility to examine what goes on in Kolkata. The first days’s paper on October 15 led with a story that imagined Mamata Banerjee as the Prime Minister, 20 years in the future, though the Trinamool Congress was not the party in power in West Bengal. As a foretaste of Ei Samay’s position in the intensely competitive and polarised world of news media in West Bengal, it was an interesting exercise in crystal ball gazing.
Having recruited a former Ananda Bazar star, Suman Chattopadhyay, as its editor and picked a team of talent from every newspaper including Ganashakti, the Communist Party of India Marxist’s daily, Ei Samay has made it obvious that it intends to fight hard, including using its experience of putting pressure on the cover price to push its way into the market. In order to do so, it also needs hard-hitting stories that tell it as it is, holding power to account as it were. This is the one slot that is unoccupied in Bengali print media.
For the present it is balance and fair play on Trinamool, but a very strong message on the positives of industrialisation for West Bengal. Credibility has been a casualty among Bengali newspapers that tend to be defined in terms of political polarisations. Ei Samay is untested on this. It needs to get started. Whether it does so, ever, remains to be seen.