beyondbrics

When Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal in 2008, he famously wrote a letter to New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr that ended: “Let the battle begin”. In Britain, battles between tabloids and broadsheets are well known.

But in India, perhaps because it is one of the few countries in the world where newspapers are thriving, dailies tend to keep their opinions of the competition to themselves. Not any more.

Newspaper readership in India increased by around 40 per cent between 2005 and 2009, reaching 110m readers, compared to a 15.9 per cent decline in readership in the UK to 14m, according to The Economist. With 1.2bn people, many of whom still treat reading a newspaper every morning as a matter of pride and status, there’s plenty to go around, the idea seems to be.

But this has changed, as a print-and-TV advertising battle has taken shape between two of the country’s biggest English-language papers.

In this corner: The Times of India, the Mumbai-based grand dame of Indian journalism that in recent years has transformed itself into something of a floozy. Think heavy on the Bollywood, text message syntax and the liberal use of vaguely-demarcated advertorials (like this one in sister publication The Economic Times), not to mention the occasional front-page typo.

And in this corner: The Hindu, bulwark of the south, standard bearer for the left and fighter, generally, of the good fight that has clung to its doddering, long-winded – some might say boring – roots. Think no-frills, dead-serious journalism delivered in a professorial monotone.

Nationwide, TOI is the largest English daily, with roughly 7.5m daily readers, while The Hindu – strongest in south India – claims around 2.2m readers, according to the latest Indian Readership Survey.

One way to look at the difference between the two is their treatment of an incident in late January in which Shah Rukh Khan, a famous actor, slapped a director’s husband: TOI put the story on the front page, above the fold; the Hindu placed it on page 16.

As Indian writer Chandrahas Choudhury recently put it in Bloomberg, “to read them in succession can be akin to feeling as if one has just been addressed by a teenager and then a dotard”.

In November, the Times of India aired a commercial in Chennai – the Hindu’s hometown, in which TOI had launched an edition in 2008 – depicting a man asleep at a political rally, a bodybuilding competition, a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and many other places. “Stuck with news that puts you to sleep?” the ad ends. “Wake up to the Times of India.” The implication was fairly clear.

The Hindu, as might be expected, took a while to come back, but when it did, it was similarly backhanded and lacking in subtlety. In the last few weeks, it has begun airing TV commercials that show Indians incorrectly answering questions like “who will succeed Ratan Tata as the head of the Tata Group?” or “Where is Tahrir Square?”  or “What does ATM stand for?”.

The man behind the camera then asks each a question about a celebrity, which they promptly answer. “What paper do you read?” Their answers are bleeped out, but it doesn’t take a lip-reader to make out “Times of India”.  The ads end: “Stay ahead of the times.”

The print campaign runs along similar lines: “Also has pages 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7…” reads one ad, referring to the Page 3 section of TOI’s Bombay Times, a celebrity and society supplement that blurs the lines between news, advertising and product placement.

Chalk one up for The Hindu.

On Saturday, TOI returned the volley with an ad of its own, this one quoting Albert Einstein: “Information is not knowledge” it begins. “We know who the Comptroller Auditor General of India is. We also like to watch [Bollywood star] Deepika Padukone walk. And Shahrukh Khan talk. Is this impossible?”

In its drive to sound superior, the paper could perhaps have avoided getting the Comptroller and Auditer General’s title slightly wrong.

“We don’t think reading the news should be like getting ready for an exam,” the ad continues. “Because we don’t wake up every morning in order to compete about how much we know.”

After all, who would want to read a newspaper concerned with how much it knows?

Related reading:
India: chipping away at free speech, beyondbrics
Operators braced for India licence fallout, FT
India’s media sector: getting hot, beyondbrics