Ear to the ground

In these days of big media houses, Umesh and Rita Anand have shown the advantage of being small.

Eight years ago, a couple from Gurgaon near Delhi — one of them a journalist, the other a former teacher and researcher on development issues — got into their car with a copy of their first magazine looking for stalls that would agree to display it. They hadn’t quite expected what they were up against. “Finding an outlet that would sell our magazine proved more difficult than we could have imagined,” says Rita Anand, editor of Civil Society that has just completed eight years in circulation.

Stalls would stock only those magazines that came through distributors and distributors wanted numbers. “We, as a small startup media enterprise, were certainly not in the number game. We were bringing out only a couple of thousand copies and no one was interested in selling those,” adds Umesh Anand, publisher of Civil Society, who is from Kolkata, began his career with The Statesman, was part of the team that launched The Telegraph and who, after a stint as resident editor of The Times of India, decided to step out of mainstream journalism and start his own “small, independent and sustainable media enterprise” with his wife, Rita. On the cover of the first issue of the magazine was the man who would make headlines in every newspaper and every television news channel eight years later — Arvind Kejriwal. The story then was not about Kejriwal’s fight against corruption, it was about his activism in the Right to Information movement in India

From their small basement office in Delhi’s South Extension — until two years ago they were bringing out the magazine from their house — Umesh and Rita Anand are happy with the decision they took in 2003. In the last eight years, the magazine has covered a range of issues that would ordinarily be thought of as serious and boring, and perhaps too jhola-wala. The changing face of activism, which India witnessed recently, new policy changes, new-age businesses like those offering micro housing loans to a very small business, mobile services replacing the age-old money order economy, future cities — the magazine, brought out on 100 gsm art paper, was the first to highlight many such issues.

“That’s another thing,” says Umesh. “We wanted to redefine the way a magazine such as this would be perceived. It was a conscious decision to use good paper and an attractive look because we do not want to come across as a magazine catering only to NGOs. We’re not doing that.” So alongside issues such as dementia (the trigger was Kalmadi’s memory-loss plea), adoption of HIV-positive children, there is a fair amount of business, opinion, travel, lifestyle and even angst.

Numbers, however, have stayed small. At the moment, the Anands say, the magazine prints only 5,000 copies, but they hope to increase that number by four times. Only about 500 to 600 copies are sold through retail points, including book stores in places such as the airport and Hazratganj in Lucknow. “But 95 per cent is subscription driven,” says Umesh. “That is the business challenge. To crack the myth of numbers. Would growing bigger be more sustainable? The advertisements would stay the same, but the cost of production would go up.” For a small publication, it’s crucial to find a sustainable number and then work with that, he adds.

Civil Society, which got its first subscriber at a residence welfare association meeting in Gurgaon, now has subscribers across the country, even in remote corners such as Dondaicha in Maharashtra, Baghmara in Meghalaya on the Bangladesh border, Ganjam in Orissa, Tezu in Arunachal Pradesh and Nowrozabad in Madhya Pradesh. “Here, the Indian postal service has come as a life-saver,” says Rita. Readers include government officers, top industry executives, technocrat Nandan Nilekani and even housewives. “It’s an important magazine,” says Nilekani, “covering important areas of civil society and development in various sectors.”

With time, despite its small numbers, the magazine has found a set of dedicated advertisers, including the Tata companies, TVS, Microsoft and Crompton Greaves. Umesh also handles the marketing. Ask him about the ad to editorial ratio and he laughs, “We haven’t reached that stage yet; we have few ads and lots of editorial content.”

All in all, the magazine has a small staff of nine people, “and that includes the woman who comes to sweep the floor,” he says. It also has a small team of freelance writers and photographers across India. Until recently, their son Lakshman, a professional photographer, was helping out, “but now he has his own job,” says Rita.

The Anands are now in the process of upgrading the magazine’s website to include video along with print stories. Here technology has played a great role in helping keep costs low. The web team sits in Mumbai and though the Anands have never met them, work they say is as smooth as can be. “We communicate on Skype and everything gets done.” Technology, they add, is a big help to an enterprise as small as theirs.

There are similar magazines like Seminar, but the couple isn’t too worried about the competition. “The space that we are covering is underutilised. Also, we have positioned ourselves differently,” says Umesh. But for a business to be sustainable, it has to make some money. “We have never gone into a debt,” says Umesh. “For a small media to survive, it is critical to create a product in the money you have. Sometimes, it can be a bit unrealistic, where you are not paying yourself for six months.” To tide over such situations, the Anands are now turning to book publishing.