FEEDING THE HUNGRY:

Increasingly literate India fuels newspaper boom (AFP, 9/19/10)

“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 appetiser — 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 (25 sen), allowing many households to subscribe to more than one daily.

The market liberalisation of the early 1990s triggered the rapid expansion of an Indian middle class that was hungry for information and represented a boom in potential consumers as well as newspaper readers.

“A race began to reach this audience,” said Robin Jeffrey, author of “India’s Newspaper Revolution.”

“Advertising avenues were the prizes and these would come largely to newspapers that could convince advertisers that they had more readers than their rivals,” Jeffrey said.