MEDIA: New Figures on Indian Newspaper Circulations

[Update: Although we've used the word 'circulation' we should've said 'readership.' Please scroll down to the comments section for a rather illuminating discussion of the terms, involving Subir Ghosh, a member of Newswatch.in]

Newswatch.in, a media watchdog organization, has just released new statistics on newspaper circulations in India. The results make a fascinating read and are a wake-up call to anyone who, like me, has a lot more contact with the English media in India than with vernacular newspapers.

The Times of India is the country’s largest circulation English daily (13 million) and yet there are newspapers in five vernacular languages whose readership figures demolish that of the Times. Furthermore, the English dailies’ circulations have tended to contract slightly since last year while over the same period the Hindi dailies have made gains on the order of 1 to 3 million additional readers.

In Hindi, the top paper, Dainik Jagran, has a circulation of 56 million and the second place paper, Dainik Bhaskar, is read by 34 million people.  Indeed, all five of the Hindi papers listed by newswatch.in have higher circulations than any English paper.

In Bengali, Ananda Bazar Patrika has a circulation of 15 million (while the local English-language paper, the Kolkata-based Telegraph, has a circulation of only 3 million).

Additionally, papers in Marathi, Tamil and Telegu have a higher circulation than the Times and if we lower the standard of comparison to the second-highest circulation English daily, Hindustan Times, which has 6 million readers, then there are more widely read papers in Gujarati, Kannada and Malayalam. 

Of course these general statistics cannot answer some of the most interesting questions we might ask, such as whether the Hindi papers are read much outside the “Hindi belt” of north-central India or whether the English papers, smaller circulation figures notwithstanding, are actually more influential than any of the vernacular papers. Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that it is indeed the case that the elite read English papers, and yet the statistics indicate that Hindi papers are rapidly expanding while three of the five English papers listed are slowly losing readers.

In any case, since the total readership of the top five Hindi papers is 160 million compared to 31 million for the top five English papers—which is a staggering difference, it looks like I should add Dainik Jagran to my daily media overload.  

More SAJAforum coverage of India's media:

• Murdoch to beef up India presence
• International magazines, Indian twist
• India's hot media market
• A look at new business dailies
• More on the business press
• James Mutti essay on India, democracy & the press
• Questions for Sevanti Ninan on monitoring South Asia's press
• Courting Dalits as readers
• Can journalism keep up with India's media explosion?
• One problem with Indian media
• News investors, turn to India (and ditch America)

Comments

[Subir Ghosh]

Hi Arthur:

Some clarifications are necessary here.

The main story we (http://www.newswatch.in/) carried is about "readership" and NOT "circulation". There's a palpable difference here. And more than what you can imagine. Let me explain briefly. People outside India need to be explained this. In fact, most in India too are not aware of the difference, which is slightly more than being just semantical in nature.

Circulation figures come only from the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC). The numbers in this case are obviously those of circulation i.e number of copies circulated (bot sold and gratis copies). Readership, on the other hand, is more about eyeballs. i.e how many people read a copy of a publication. the two, needless to say, are NOT the same. On an average, readership figures are 5 times that of circulation figures.

The two radership surveys carried out in India are the Indian Readership Survey (IRS) and the National Readership Survey (NRS). The two come up with figures that are not the same. And quite often someone or the other challenges the numbers. It is not too difficult to guess why.

All publications use either the IRS or the NRS figures to advertise their readership figures. Mind you, never about circulation. It is very rarely that you will see either a newspaper or a magazine pegging their advertisement to an audited figure of the ABC.

What I am pointing out is nothing new. All advertisers know about it. All those in the print media industry (repeat, industry) know about it. Others usually don't.

So if you need to write about circulation figures, you will probably need to get audited statements of publications individual from India's ABC (which they don't do anyway, unless you are a client yourself), or you can just divide the numbers here by 5.

Readership figures are used primarily to give an inflated opinion about the scenario. Let me give another example:

Suppose today TOI sells its paper only to one household which has a husband-wife pair and two under-teen children. This year, its readership will be 2. When the two kids are eligible to be counted as readers (I don't remember the exact age.. I think it is 13 or 15), TOI will have a readership of 4. And its circulation will still remain the same!!!

Our main story: http://www.newswatch.in/newsblog/1802 does say that readership figures, in fact, in most cases is falling. The readership figures, of course, appear to be huge in terms of sheer numbers. Especially to those living in the West. Do your elementary division-by-five, and most people will come down to earth.

You have written something about Dainik Jagran. Nop, don't get taken in by that. The circulation/readership of Hindi newspapers, in fact, will grow for some more time before they reach a plateau.

[PS: I could go on with this.. but at 1:00am almost, its slightly late in the day. Maybe w.r.t to a relevant post again some other time]

[Arthur Dudney]

Dear Subir,

Thanks for taking the time to raise this important point (at 1 am no less). Now that I am thinking about the methodology of gathering readership--rather than circulation--figures, it seems to me that 250,000 is a pretty small sample size to generate results for the whole of India (I get this number from the Media Research Users Council which runs the NRS: http://mruc.net/irs/irs_methodology.html ). Obviously newspapers want to use NRS or IRS figures because they are higher than circulation figures but is there a compelling reason for trusting a readership survey over audited circulation figures? Which helps us to better understand the state of the media? It seems like census weighting a readership sample and so forth introduces a lot of complicating factors that would be avoided with circulation figures. But then again it seems to me that circulation figures might be misleading in India because I know from living in Calcutta that a single newspaper might be bought and passed around to a dozen people, which is not something that tends to happen in the West. Clearly this is a complicated matter. Thanks for writing and giving us a more nuanced picture.

Regards,
Arthur

[Subir Ghosh]

Ok, let's start from the beginning.

Why do newspapers and magazine need readership/circulation figures for? Who do they target? Obviously, they need these figures primarily to target advertisers. And then, of course use "healthy" figures to promote/market the publication to both existing and potential readers.

Earlier, the newspapers/magazines used to quote ABC figures. But advertisers stopped buying those numbers. The authenticity was questioned. The ABC numbers, after all, came from the individual publication concerned. And it is so easy to fudge figures and come up with "ABC-audited" figures. These "audited" figures, in fact, were looked at as mere claims.

So, came the need for third-party sources for figures. Newspapers/magazines anted to concentrate on readership numbers since these were what advertisers actually wanted to know. Secondly, readership figures would also look bigger. And lastly, as you rightly point out in a country like India where newspapers are circulated within groups, it is only justified that we look at the effective readership of a newspaper or magazine.

Now, coming to the two surveys IRS and NRS. The National Readership Survey (NRS) is conducted by the National Readership Studies Council (NRSC), which is run by representatives from the Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI), the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), and the Indian Newspaper Society (INS). The Indian Readership Survey (IRS) is conducted by the Media Research Users Council (MRUC) since advertisers felt it did not make sense to only go by a survey that was virtually controlled by print media companies. Every time a seurvey results are announced, there are controversies. And controversies almost always are to do with falling numbers. No publication wants to admit that their readers are deserting them. Bot surveys obviously come up with different sets of numbers. Now, both cannot obviously be right. But one gets the general trend.

Yes, there's a problem with the surveys themselves. First, the methodology, as you point out. Two aspects here -- sample size and sample selection. A sample size of 250,000 can be fine if it is perfect. Personally, I would be happy with a size of 1,000,000. But more important is sample selection. The sample has to be a perfect microcosm of the entire population. For a correct sample selection, you need to have exact breakups of the entire population itself.

Then there is the question of credibility. Field executives of many market research companies are known to fill up the data form themselves. And if you want to target a sample size of 1 million, it will become quite difficult to keep track of field execs. It is a practical problem, Quite real at that.

This is important since the surveys are not just about how many people read a publication, but also about reading habits, etc. We will be carrying a story on this (reading habits) soon before this week ends.

[ashishdimri]

Dear Arthur,
May I remind you that many other vernaculars-Punjab Kesari and Malyalam Manorama, Sakaal also make such claims.

One doesnot know whether TOI OR HT is being read or not, but there are dozens of Indian news papers which often publish their own unofficial figures.

We all know-print media is losing its readership, but it will take ages for them to accept this hard truth!
warm regards,
yours,
ashish

[Ashok Row Kavi]

Dudley,
Sometimes one has to be a bit cunning to investigate WHAT readers read. For example, there is a TOI survey which says hardly 4 per cent of their readers actually read the edit page(I'll have to really comb my memory to get that piece of info out).
The point is how "influential" the paper is. Who reads the paper and how much money he has to spend; that's what the readership and circulation war is finally all about -- to grab the ads!
I think there are layered nuances here.If it's an elitist policy decision (licence policy for liquor manufacture, for example), I'm sure the news in an English paper works. But if its lack of milk delivery or garbage not collected from the particular neighbourhood, then nothing like the vernacular paper.
So it's all about WHO is reading WHAT.
The so-called "langotis" (city supplements) are targetted mainly at a young consumer audience and therefore full of clothing and special niche marketing (perfumed candles, for example) and are out-and-out ad supplements selling news thinly covered by ads. I hear even the news is sold in the Times city supplements at a whopping Rs. 5,000 a paragraph.
The market and readership is getting fractured and we better understand it before we get anywhere. It's not as if readership is falling. It's that spot news reportage is now old hat because the news channels are alreayd doing that well. Newspapers will have to do some clever juggling with news or change its very basic concept -- or example interpret news so it still reads and 'feels' like news but is not really news.
I don't think it's going to be easy making that transition butit's worth trying as a survival strategy.
How about newspapers as text-books? (Manorama is doing that and the Times is catching on). How about interactive papers where citizens also file reports with their photographs (I'm sure each reader will buy many to distribute them to friends and relatives).
God, this is going to be a different ballgame but we Indians can be innovative here.

[Murli]

Vernacular???

I would really appreciate if SAJA would stop using the implicitly derogatory term 'vernacular' -- a term (much like 'native') imposed by India's British imperial masters on its diverse, rich, and ancient languages. It's about time SAJA became decolonized.

Thanks.

[Arthur Dudney]

Dear Murli,

As it happens, you've hit close to home for me because my academic work primarily looks at how Hindi and Urdu (some of the languages that I'm apparently not allowed to call "vernaculars") defined themselves against Persian and Sanskrit. Now that was an intellectual task Indians were engaged in long before the British linguistic projects in the colonial period. This bit of history should make it clear that I am not being derogatory towards Indian languages. I have to write "vernaculars" because besides using that term I know of no way of referring to "spoken Indian languages that are not English," which is of course what I mean. I think there is a difference between being colonialist and being precise; the term "native" has been superseded by less charged and more accurate words, but to my knowledge "vernaculars" has not. I've heard many Indian academics refer to the "vernaculars" exactly as I have. Anyway, I hope that clarifies the situation.

Regards,
Arthur

[Jaya Kamlani]

Arthur,

I think Murli is right. The word 'vernacular' sounds a bit crude. How about if we used 'regional language' instead?

e.g. "vernacular newspapers" could read as "regional language newspapers"
OR
"yet there are newspapers in five vernacular languages" ... could read as "yet there are newspapers in five regional languages."

Jaya Kamlani

[Subir Ghosh]

hi arthur

i agree with murli... i myself haven't used the word since jan 1995.. the word didn't exist in india before the vernacular press act of 1878 was enacted

i go by the examples that jaya suggests.

and when it is a single newspaper it is easy to describe it as .. say.. "telugu language newspaper eenadu" etc etc