)
Time Out, the global arts, culture and entertainment guide which is published by Paprika Media, a company founded by Ruia scion Smiti Kanodia in 2004, announced last month that it would shut down its three print editions (Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore) and go digital from October. The final print edition of the magazine hit the stands on September 15. "With a generation that is always on the move and demands all information on its fingertips on a real-time basis, digital is the way forward," says Paprika Media CEO Rajnish Rawat. "The online platform for Time Out will be different and will be free for all."
This might well be the death knell for city magazines - at least in the print medium. Time Out is the latest amongst a long list of magazines that have either shut shop or gone online. Apart from Bombay in Mumbai, there used to be Calcutta Skyline in Kolkata and Talk in Bangalore. New Delhi had as many as three: Capitalist, City Limits (from the Outlook group) and First City. While city magazines did well from the late 1970s, the last few years have been tough on them for reasons such as rising operational costs and decreasing advertising revenues, the consumption of city-centric 'niche' content either moving online or being eaten up by the newspaper supplements, all leading to plunging subscription and readership.
Vir Sanghvi, advisor at HT Media and founder-editor of Bombay, doesn't mince words. "Time Out," he says, "was almost an aberration on the print landscape, because by the time it launched here, print magazines were already struggling. The first killer blow had come from the newspapers, and the final one from the internet." Anupriya Acharya, CEO of ZenithOptimedia, a UK-based media agency that is part of Publicis Group, adds: "Advertising revenues will always follow the eyeballs, and the eyeballs are increasingly moving online."
A long time coming?
The numbers show that the writing has been on the wall for city magazines. Avtar Singh, Time Out's first editor and currently the managing editor of Indian Quarterly, fancies himself as a bit of a doomsayer, "I don't think magazine publishing is going to survive." According to the FICCI-KPMG Indian Media & Entertainment Industry Report 2014, the print industry grew 8.5 per cent from Rs 22,400 crore in 2012 to Rs 24,300 crore in 2013. However, it noted that the industry continued to derive most (94.4 per cent) of its revenues from the newspaper category, which is largely driven by Hindi and the vernacular print markets. The Rs 1,400-crore magazine segment, on the other hand, had a turbulent year, with some prominent publishing houses having to discontinue their magazines. The city magazine subsection, already a small part, seems to have been hit the hardest. The English-language, city-centric section of the magazine industry was between Rs 50 crore and Rs 70 crore, but has now shrunk to about Rs 50 crore, according to industry estimates.
The important thing to note, according to Singh, is that "print has reached the end of its cycle and one shouldn't let sentiment slow the adoption of new trends and survival tactics." Hence, all roads are leading to the digital highway - the overall digital ad-spend in India grew by approximately 38.7 per cent to touch Rs 3,010 crore in 2013. The media & entertainment industry is expected to register CAGR of 14.2 per cent by 2018 wherein digital advertising is expected to have the highest CAGR of 27.7 per cent.
Bharat Kapur, the publisher of First City, which started in 1990 and shut in October last year, believes the market for city magazines took off when India was "at the cusp of liberalisation, with a much greater participation in what we term 'cultural activities' and a deeper interest in literature and critical thinking, thus ripe for a well-designed, well-structured magazine that was both informative and enriching." Its prime advertisers were five-star hotels and premium restaurants, surrogate liquor and lifestyle products. The economic downturn of 2010-2011 saw hotels pull out, restaurants close down and retailers move online.
A lot of lifestyle businesses have feedback forms which ask the customers where they heard about a particular outlet. Vaibhav Bajaj, the owner of Havemore restaurant at Pandara Road, New Delhi, advertised in First City in 2010 for Rs 50,000 for a half page ad. But while interacting with his customers, he realised they were hearing of the restaurant more from their advertisements on the radio and on Facebook, leading him to cancel his advertising deal with the magazine. "Business had been slow, while advertising rates were climbing, I decided to pull out since I wasn't getting a good return on my investment," says Bajaj.
The lure of web
City-centric magazines have an interesting set of competitors now who are riding the wave of new media, from popular bloggers to mobile apps such as Zomato, BuzzInTown and BookMyShow and city supplements of newspapers. A few of these blogs have become full-fledged websites now, and are holding the fort for city-centric content in the meanwhile. Delhi-based blog Little Black Book Delhi, which was started in 2012 by Suchita Salwan, is now a revenue generating company with a team of eight employees that receives over 100,000 visits per month. The start-up was able to garner advertisements by high-end brands such as Jaguar, Marriot, The Lalit and Air Bnb (a home-sharing website) within a year of operations.
Mumbai Boss, another online publication, gets about half a million visits a month, and plans to "expand to other cities but not in the traditional city-by-city microsite model," says its editor, Nayantara Kilachand. Brown Paper Bag, started as a blog in Mumbai by Mansi Poddar and Kanika Parab in 2011, opened an edition in Delhi in 2012 and is in the midst of starting one in Bangalore by year-end. With Zee Group-owned India.com and JC Penney as bankrollers and celebrity blogger Miss Malini as an endorser, it has amassed over 100,000 subscribers in Mumbai and Delhi. These digital magazines are hence a result of the possibilities offered by the new technology that is purportedly decimating print culture - they make sure to come with the "cool" tag attached, and they're inventing their own business models on the fly.
However, many readers feel that online vehicles are tightly curated and don't engage in the way city magazines used to. What Time Out's exit has exposed is a lacuna among the already fragmented city sphere, as there now won't be a single publication that can be considered a real and holistic authority on a city. Acharya believes that this schism will leave the reader questioning authenticity - so rich content can still make its mark. Sanghvi, too, is upbeat, "I think this is the editorial space that needs to be filled now, the new technology has to be embraced and existing online publications need to be bettered." The magazine is dead, long live the magazine.
