Idlers in the streets of Hazratganj in Lucknow in June this year, when I was in the city, could have sidled up to a barrow vendor, handed over Rs 25, received a few coins in change and been given 11 Hindi daily newspapers with which to while away the hot hours. Five of those dailies were well-known national brands, ranging from Aaj, the Ancient Mariner of Hindi dailies, now looking frail and faltering, to the muscular Dainik Jagran and Hindustan and the still-in-the-race Amar Ujala and Jansatta, the latter having that look of threadbare frugality that only an association with Ramnath Goenka (founder of the Indian Express Group) could impart.
The other six dailies, however, were puzzles, capable of explanation only by the cognoscenti of Lucknow. What fairy godmother, for example, paid for the ink, the paper and the printer’s labour to produce Avadhnaamaa—eight pages for Re 1 and not a paid advertisement in sight?
This is surprising, considering that newspapers have been the cutting edge of capitalism for 300 years, the first commodity mass-produced for profit, as Marshall McLuhan and Benedict Anderson pointed out long ago. Owning a newspaper can also be a spine-tingling ego-trip that ownership of steel mills and supermarkets can never equal. But publishing a newspaper can empty a proprietor’s pockets as effectively as the roulette wheel or race course.
India in the 21st century is lucky: newspapers have a future, they reach into the countryside in remarkable ways, and they are still family-owned. All this is probably good for journalism and the public interest, and it is certainly good for entertainment. Newspaper families are more fun to watch than a three-ring circus. But in the English-speaking world, newspapers today tend to be owned by faceless corporations, listed on stock exchanges and dedicated not so much to truth and justice, or even to the glorification of their owners, but to the highest annual returns for their shareholders.
Grip on Gujarat: Shreyansbhai Shah of the Gujarat Samachar group. (Photograph by Suresh Mistry)
India, on the other hand, has more than two dozen major newspaper-owning families who pursue their businesses with a combination of self-interest, self-importance, public interest and flair. From a long list, some of the most enthralling include: the Sarkars at Ananda Bazaar Patrika in Calcutta, avowed custodians of Bengali culture; the Man in White in Hyderabad, Ramoji Rao, and the empire built around Eenadu, which arose from a pickle factory and a rickety press in Visakhapatnam; the Agarwals, whose meticulous managerialism built up the Dainik Bhaskar network from a small base in Bhopal from the mid-1990s; the Kasturis in Chennai at the Hindu, whose masthead belies the politics of its publisher and must be making the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh gnash its saffron teeth that it did not get the name first; those two Ahmedabad dailies, Sandesh of Falgunbhai Patel (with a limited public holding) and Gujarat Samachar of the Shah family.
Bahubali Shah of the Gujarat Samachar group. (Photograph by Suresh Mistry)
Owners in India determine whether newspapers survive and whether a free press means more than the freedom of a few to doctor news and make money. But today, in the West, even Rupert Murdoch, who comes closest to the outrageous owners of the past, depends on his shareholders’ love for the returns his companies pay them. In India, by contrast, fewer than half a dozen Indian newspapers have been floated on the Bombay Stock Exchange, and none of them yet runs the risk of passing out of family control.
On the whole, this is a good thing. Rival families compete. And vanity sometimes overcomes avarice. A family-owned newspaper might be content to earn a five or six per cent profit on its investment after the bills are paid. But the great, greedy US newspaper chains from the 1960s looked for nothing less than double-digit dividends. Managers were installed in chain-owned newspapers to get financial results. When MBAs Rule the Newsroom was the plaintive title of a book by a despairing US journalist in 1993.
Media Houses On The Stock Market
- NDTV, Network 18, TV Today, Deccan Chronicle, HT Media, DB Corp Ltd, Jagran Prakashan, MiD DaY Multimedia, Sun TV, Zee News NBC, The Sandesh Ltd
The closest India comes to this culture is the path down which Samir Jain and others have taken the Timess of India over the past 20 years. The managers knocked off the editors nearly 15 years ago, the newspaper has gone from economic strength to strength, and the other big English dailies have followed its managerial lead. But the Times of India empire is still controlled by the family—no nosy corporate shareholders to worry about. If the family were willing to suffer financial loss to support a cause, they’d have only themselves to answer to. It would be possible to take the risks that Katharine Graham took with the Washington Post at Watergate.
Risk-taking was the way Ramnath Goenka played the game. The builder of the Indian Express and its sister publications was relentless in pursuing his likes and dislikes. He was willing to take on Indira Gandhi and the Emergency and to turn journalists loose to pursue stories—always with an eye on the balance-sheet. But Goenka was a cost-cutter to keep his ramshackle empire afloat, not to satisfy shareholders.
There are patterns, driven by economics, in the way owners get into newspapers. Orissa today may not look like New York City in the 1890s, but it has a newspaper culture that rivals the Big Apple’s in the old days. Twelve Oriya dailies, printing more than 2.5 million copies, wrestle for the eyes of 40 million people. That means 12 proud proprietorial families strutting their stuff and enjoying the influence of having a mouthpiece; but eventually, a number of these papers will close as the bills mount and the revenues don’t.
Regional Empires: Navakalowner Nilkanth Khadilkar with daughter Jayashree. (Photograph by Apoorva Salkade)
For the time being, though, India can relish the richness and idiosyncrasies of its newspaper owners—families like the Khadilkars of Mumbai’s Navakal, which traces its links to Bal Gangadhar Tilak and the national movement. The daughters run the newspaper, they win chess tournaments and even serve jail terms for insulting judges. And the father’s front-page editorials rouse sufficient passions among the Marathi working class to get the newspaper’s front office wrecked in 2009.
R.S. Agarwal of Dainik Bhaskar. (Photograph by Vivek Pateria)
But consolidation of ownership and public listing on the stock exchanges probably lie in the not-too-distant future. The way in which Malayalam has become effectively a two-newspaper language is a straw in that wind. For now, though, lovers of newspapers—and of a vigorous free press—can both enjoy the show and attempt to shame preening owners who turn their mass dailies into the equivalent of shopping-mall throwaways by secretly selling favourable coverage during election time. Newspaper lovers can also try shaming those owners into better training, pay and care for their journalists and demanding higher standards in return. One of the pluses of family ownership of a newspaper is that public shame or praise can sometimes mean more to a large ego than double-digit dividends.
