Kasturi & Sons has launched Ergo, a free daily, in Chennai, says a Mint report.
Some backgrounders:
Ergo, a 16-page, all-colour tabloid, is India’s first free daily from a large media house. Free newspapers try to recover all their costs—of publishing and distribution—from advertising. Globally, such free newspapers are now published in at least 52 countries.
While Ergo is the newest offering, the model itself is not entirely new to India. A host of small local publishers have been bringing out weekly community newspapers, such as Neighbourhood Flash in New Delhi, Ontrack Suburbs in Mumbai and a host of them in Chennai, including Suburban Voice and Mylapore Times, for some time. But unlike Ergo, they have mostly tended to be from boutique publishers and very tightly focused in terms of their geographic reach.
In recent years though, major publishing houses, such as Jagran Prakashan Ltd, the publisher of India’s largest circulated daily, the Hindi Dainik Jagran, and Kasturi, have also begun such “community” papers. Jagran launched its weekly tabloid, City Plus, in September 2006 with an initial print run of 40,000. Today, the company claims a circulation of 370,000 through 18 editions in and around New Delhi. Kasturi’s Downtown and Neighbourhood Flash also claim a healthy circulation.
