Aroon Purie is not your average garrulous media baron. So catching the chairman of the Rs 1,500-crore India Today Group (ITG) in a ‘reasonably talkative mood’ is a rare opportunity. The occasion is the India launch of the Robb Report, a monthly magazine for ultra-luxury products. A brand of the California-based CurtCo Media, Robb Report has been licensed to ITG, which also brings out Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping among 34 other magazines. The group’s flagship brands remain India Today and Aaj Tak (India’s biggest news channel). Vanita Kohli-Khandekar spoke to him on the magazine business and the state of the Indian media business. Edited excerpts.
What does the Robb Report bring to the ITG portfolio and what is its potential?
It (Robb Report) is in a completely different space from the other luxury (media) brands in the market. It is about ultra-luxury or very high-end lifestyle products and services. We will sell it on an ad-based model. The magazine will be mailed to 35,000 very select affluent people, who advertisers want to reach out to. Also, it is a more male-oriented than most other luxury magazines, which are very female-oriented. So there is no direct competition for the magazine itself. We might compete for the same advertiser. Maybe tomorrow we will discover that the potential is more than 35,000 people and we may sell it on stands.
Are magazines dying?that is the refrain we keep getting from the US.
In the US, the digital threat is looming large. In India, part of the perception comes from readership surveys. They are newspaper-oriented. They don’t capture the growth of speciality and niche magazines. People are not stupid to launch so many magazines. And digital will happen in India, it may skip the PC and move straight to the mobile through apps, alerts and anything else. Magazines are very suited to doing that. Cellphone, in fact, make the whole digital strategy profitable.
Why are readership surveys not able to capture niche audiences? All of you are part of the readership bodies — IRS, MRUC.
Because the dominant players are newspapers, so the survey is more inclined to newspapers. The Association of Indian Magazines (AIM) is trying to change that. (AIM is trying to commission a survey that looks at magazine readership only).
When you look at the print and TV business, the audience numbers are huge, but scale continues to elude it, why?
Indian media is too cheap. It starts from the newspaper benchmark of keeping prices at Rs 1.50 or less than the raddi (waste) price. Therefore, magazines are under-priced. So, on pay there is not much. On ad rates, we are very low compared to international norms. Increasingly that is changing. Magazines are now more expensive, so they get more revenues from distribution.
Also in India the (audience) numbers look very large, but really how many units sell? Those numbers are not very large. The data on purchasing power is flawed.
When you look at the growth of ITG, what do you wish had been done differently?
We should have got into newspapers earlier. (ITG launched Mail Today in association with the Daily Mail in 2007). We might have grown in TV, but the whole distribution cost element makes any business plan unviable. It makes sense only if I am working on spreadsheet capitalism and launching just for valuation. Unless we get a larger share of what consumers pay to cable operators, scaling up in TV doesn’t make sense. We can always do a GEC, but it is a very expensive game and we don’t have core competence in entertainment. We would like to stick to news, and non-fiction, such as opportunities in women’s TV or speciality channels such as golf.
What is to say that if the structural flaws in the market are corrected, consumers will pay for niche channels or even for newspapers?
Newspapers have had a deliberate strategy of under pricing, so, that new players can’t get in. They will give you a gift, send the paper at home. But this is ultimately a short-term strategy. In the medium term there are huge prospects for a serious newspaper. We are looking at a Hindi newspaper, work is going on.
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Your comment on the state of journalism in India
Journalism has been a force for good and has largely been responsible. It has made politics and the polity more accountable by arguing, questioning and raising the noise level. Sure there are question marks on the credibility of some journalists, but that doesn’t spoil the range of journalists in this country. Many of the mistakes that have happened is because young people who are not well-trained get into responsible positions. There is a need to invest in training and mentoring. The whole thing will improve.
Your comment on paid news
There is no question about it. Paid news is abhorrent to the ethics of journalism. Journalists are like doctors or teachers. It (paid news) is like a doctor giving you fake medicine.
ITG has a foot in almost every segment of the media business. However, it still remains largely about magazines and Aaj Tak. Would you diversify more or would you stick to core competence and what is that for you?
We are moving to our new office building in Noida by the end of this year. So, everything, print, broadcasting, radio, will be merging into digital media. What I look forward is to create a news turbine that will then go on to multiple platforms. We would hire specialists who are domain experts. They can then generate content across media – whether it is an article or a TV story or an internet one. That is when the business will change. There will be one floor with only 450 journalists (though we have a total of 1,200). There will be far more synergy in the way we generate content, in advertising, in our approach to events. The physical proximity will make that difference.
Then there is organic growth in each segment. If the problems in TV get sorted out, we would do more channels, magazines will continue to grow and there will be more newspapers, maybe in languages.