NEW DELHI (AFP) — The top-selling Daily Mail and a leading Indian magazine group are to launch a newspaper targeting women readers in India's booming media market.
The India Today Group said on Tuesday the paper, backed by Daily Mail publishers Associated Newspapers, would hit New Delhi streets by the end of the week with a print run of 120,000 copies.
The 48-page tabloid will be gradually rolled out across India, jostling for readers in competition with a host of new publications launched in the past few years.
The new paper plans to adopt the highly successful formula used by the Daily Mail in targeting middle class women readers who it says are largely ignored by other dailies.
"Mail Today will be a completely different newspaper from the other existing newspapers and it will be a newspaper that the whole of India would be proud of," said India Today chairman Aroon Purie.
Women's content is not an area featured by existing Indian newspapers and Mail Today will have it as a "differentiating factor," Purie said.
The nearly century old Daily Mail, Britain's second largest selling daily after the Sun, was the nation's first paper to have a women's page and has positioned itself as a middle class publication, championing such themes as family values.
"There has been a huge growth in (Indian) women's participation in the professions and women are going to be a particular focus though we will be a general newspaper," Mail Today's editor Bharat Bhushan told AFP.
The paper, which is aiming to have a 50 percent female staff, would have special sections dealing with women's health and other issues.
The Daily Mail's designers had worked on the Indian paper which is borrowing the British daily's typeface and font, Bhushan said.
"We've learnt a lot from them," he said, adding the paper expected to start up with a paid-up circulation of "over 100,000."
Associated Newspapers would hold a 26 percent stake in the venture in line with government ownership rules capping foreign ownership at 26 percent to protect "the national interest," he said.
There have been a slew of newspaper and magazine launches in India including two new general dailies -- the Mumbai-based Daily News and Analysis, or DNA, the Mumbai Mirror -- and a new business paper Mint started in February.
But media analysts said there was still room for more.
"There is scope for another Indian newspaper with different characteristics," said Bhaskhar Rao, head of the Centre for Media Studies.
"I think women need a paper, less than 10 percent of women in some (Indian) states read newspapers."
Driving the media boom in the country of more than one billion people is a fast-growing economy which has created a surge in advertising and newspaper circulation figures that would be the envy of any editor in the West.
Some 204 million Indians read daily newspapers, according to the National Readership Studies Council, which says there is "still significant scope for growth" as 359 million people who are literate do not read any publication.
The burst of new publications has created a fierce battle for staff and sent salaries of traditionally low-paid Indian journalists soaring.
India's vibrant media market is a far cry from the West where television stations, newspapers and magazines are laying off staff in the face of falling audiences, dwindling circulations and shrinking advertising revenues.
