Dad's daily has an image problem like dad's car

Though Delhi now has as many as seven mainline English dailies, The Hindustan Times, which turned 75 last Thursday, still remains the newspaper of the Capital. Over the years, it has grown with the city and the city with it. Even in the midst of so many challengers, HT is still the most widely read city newspaper. But it is as a utility paper that HT scores over all its rivals, even over The Times of India which is fast catching up with it in classified utility advertisements and, in numbers too.

The Hindustan Times took hold of Delhi as a nationalist campaign paper during the freedom movement. Its strong nationalist stance and the eminence of its early editors, journalists and contributors made it a must daily reading for every Delhi family.

As lakhs of refugees from Pakistan trudged into the city after partition, HT became their mouthpiece. It highlighted their daily woes, their trials and tribulations, and their immediate earthly concerns for food, shelter and work. Soon, refugees searching for separated family members began advertising in its columns to establish contact with each other.

Still later, those uprooted from their native communities began sending in ads for brides and bridegrooms. Thus began a new genre of matrimonial ads. Then came 'who's where', 'to-let' and “for hire', 'lost and found', 'sale' and `wanted' utility ads. All these made HT an essential service and utility daily for all.

Such classified ads became a major source of HT's revenue besides boosting its circulation. Within a decade, HT became big business. For decades thereafter, it remained the city's only utility service provider, unchallenged and unassailable. Several attempts were made during these decades to displace it from its dominant position but none succeeded until The Times of India launched a vigorous drive in the 1970s to capture its classified advertising business. It took the TOI about a decade to make a real dent into its classified market but the HT management did not feel cause for concern, believing itself to be unassailable.

Then came on Delhi's newspaper business scene the young, almost insurrectionary marketing wizard of TOI, Samir Jain. Challenging all established ideas about newspaper business, he pushed The Times of India like any other consumer product, as he put it. His vastly superior promotion techniques and gusty marketing drive threw owners and managers of HT overboard.

Ever since then, Samir Jain has been harrassing HT like a guerrilla fighter in a bid to crush its morale and cripple its finances. HT has not lost readers to TOI in these years and has, actually, gained numbers, but only at a much slower rate than its rival.

What is happening is that TOI is attracting a larger number of new readers and a larger share of new classified ads than HT, the same as Ayaz Memon's Mid Day is doing to TOI in Bombay. Also, over the years HT has become a dad's newspaper and TOI one of the young, fresh out of college and newly into jobs. The Birla HT is, thus, becoming like the Birla Ambassador. A daily for the old as is the car. The great CP (Ramachandran) of HT used to say, "If The Hindustan Times were a car, it would be the Ambassador and if the Ambassador were a newspaper, it would be The Hindustan Times." That is becoming increasingly true today.

The Hindustan Times always had a rather intellectually stunted image, seen, as it was and largely still is, as a newspaper of shopkeepers, traders, brokers and babus. If the intellectually curious or pretentious still subscribed to it, it was mainly for its utility advertisements which no other paper used to have those days.

But, now that The Times of India provides all that HT does by way of such utility ads besides a stimulating, vibrant and youthful image, the young have a choice. They see TOI as more in tune with the contemporary trends in fashion, lifestyle and ideas, more reflective of the social and individual concerns of the times. That is why The Hindustan Times has been falling behind TOI all these years.

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