Mid Day to spice up Delhi tabloid mart

Buys brand from Bharat Hotels.

Mumbai's popular afternoon tabloid Mid Day will hit Delhi next month. Its publisher Midday Multimedia Ltd has bought the "Mid Day" title back from the Delhi-based hospitality company Bharat Hotels promoted by the late Lalit Suri. The hotelier and Rajya Sabha MP owned the brand name and had been printing Delhi Mid Day in the city for 15 years.

Earlier this week, The Times of India and The Hindustan Times joint venture, Metropolitan Media Company Pvt Ltd, introduced Metro Now, a morning tabloid priced at Rs 1, in Delhi. By April, the India Today group will re-launch its afternoon daily Today as a morning newspaper. Expected to be in the Berliner format (taller than the compact size), it will be a 48 page newspaper. Ashish Bagga, India Today group's CEO refused to comment on the product.

Clearly, Delhi is bracing up for tabloid wars. But Metropolitan Media's president Sameer Kapoor is not worried. "I never take competition for granted, but Metro Now has the first-mover advantage," he says. The newspaper's day-one print run was 85,000, he claims. "By the end of the week, we will touch one lakh copies," he says.

Not that Delhi has not had its share of tabloids "� the India Today group launched Today some five years ago, while Delhi Mid Day is much older -- but they failed to impress the readers and their circulations are languishing between 20,000 and 22,000 copies each.

However, publishers gearing up to launch or revamp their compact papers insist that the complexion of the city and the media consumption habits of its readers are now changing. For starters, the commute time in the city "� as it extends to Gurgaon, Noida, Greater Noida and Faridabad "� has increased. The growing metro rail network will add to the number of commuters as well, with spare time at hand to read.

The reader profile is changing too. Mid Day Multimedia's executive vice president and chief financial officer Manajit Ghoshal points out that the paper is eyeing the young urban professional on the move. "Today an executive may be in Delhi during the day but he's back home in Mumbai in the evening or vice -versa. So a Mumbai reader is no longer very different from a similar target reader in Delhi. They are equally interested in news and entertainment."

Metro Now addresses the young, between the age group of 18 and 30 years. "We are also looking at young housewives who do not read newspapers. This will be an entry-level paper for them," says Kapoor.

Media experts say that the print media market is also ripe for newer kinds of products. Up until now, the English print was dominated by broadsheets.

Besides, Delhi's broadsheet market is more or less saturated having grown from 5 lakh copies to 15 lakh copies in the last 10 years.

In contrast, the compact newspaper segment is under-exploited and tabloids are cheaper to produce. On the advertising side, Delhi is buoyant with an annual ad spend of over Rs 1,000 crore on English print media alone, which is higher than Mumbai's approximately Rs 900 crore.