The India Today Group has announced a joint venture with Associated Newspapers (ANL), publishers of the Daily Mail of UK, to launch mainline newspapers in India.
Aroon Purie, Editor-in-Chief, India Today Group, said in a statement, “We are delighted that our first foray into mainline newspapers is in partnership with one of the leading newspaper publishers of the world -- the prestigious Daily Mail Group. We share the same values of investment in editorial excellence.”
ANL Managing Director Kevin Beatty said, “This has been a momentous occasion in the long history of our company. Mr Purie, and your Executive team, we thank you for helping us learn a lot in terms of the dynamism of the media landscape in India.”
The new mainline newspaper is likely to be a tabloid which will hit the stands before Mid-Day relaunches in New Delhi. The India Today Group’s afternoon tabloid Today has suffered massive erosion in its editorial staff with the launch of Metro Now by Metropolitan Media; a 50:50 joint venture between HT Media and the Times of India Group. The tabloid market in the National Capital Region is bound to intensify now, especially with the much-talked about impending arrival of Metro International, the Swedish pioneer of the free tabloid newspaper, which has been scouting for partners in the country.
The Daily Mail General Trust (DMGT) is one of the largest and most successful media companies in the UK and has interests in national and regional newspapers and related digital operations, information and business publishing, exhibitions and radio. An FTSE 100 company listed on the London Stock Exchange, its turnover exceeds £ 2 billion and a market cap of over £ 3 billion.
Besides the Daily Mail, ANL also publishes the Mail on Sunday, the Evening Standard, Metro, London Lite, and Loot. The circulation of its national newspapers is around two million copies on weekdays and three million copies on Saturdays with a readership of around six million and nine million respectively.
Its digital division’s network reaches an estimated 25 per cent of all UK Internet users, having expanded into the key areas of the online advertising market in automotive, jobs, property, dating, and personal finance. DMGT is also one of the largest regional newspaper publishers in the UK under its division, Northcliffe Media.
The India Today Group brings out a clutch of leading news and feature magazines, such as India Today and Business Today, and has a nationwide presence with its language editions of the India Today magazine. Among the international titles it publishes in India are Cosmopolitan, Reader’s Digest, Men’s Health, Good Housekeeping, Scientific American, Prevention, and Harvard Business Review.
The other companies in the group are TV Today Network Ltd which runs four successful 24-hour news channels; Thomson Press, the largest commercial press in India; HarperCollins India Ltd, a joint venture book publishing firm; and Integrated Databases, a JV with Yellow Pages Singapore.
