Hindi Paper Finds Success Going Hyperlocal

Courtesy of Rajasthan Patrika Group The Rajasthan Patrika headquarters in Kesargarh, Rajasthan.

JAIPUR, Rajasthan - On the June 25, I walked into Kesargarh Fort in Jaipur, the capital of the northern Indian state of Rajasthan. Where cannon were once mounted, now lies a silver printing press. The monotype-casting machine is the only giveaway that the stone and terracotta façade is home to a newspaper group, Patrika.

As I entered through the carved wooden doors, a garlanded portrait of a stern-faced man glowered at me. This was Karpoor Chandra Kulish, who founded the Patrika in 1956. Mr. Kulish was a reporter disgusted with the political and corporate affiliations of the Rajasthan papers of the time, according to the newspaper’s chronicle of its history. With a 500 rupee (8.3 U.S. dollar) loan from a friend, he set up the Patrika newspaper.

By the time he retired in 1986, the paper had built a formidable reputation for independence and moved into its Kesargarh headquarters. Mr. Kulish’s son Gulab Kothari now edits the newspaper. Mr. Kothari is a large man with the low voice of someone who knows he has a captive audience. His public lectures and tours make him the newspaper’s most famous name. He writes lengthy editorials on everything from electoral reform to Hindu mythology. Mr. Kothari’s sons, Nihar Kothari and his brother Siddharth Kothari, manage the business end from suites that flank the ornate entrance to the fort.

Patrika is printed in 33 main and about 250 local editions. The group has a total readership of 19 million people, largely in the northern Indian states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh, according to the latest Indian Readership Survey. Rajasthan Patrika is read by 14.6 million readers in Rajasthan, which has a population of 68 million. In comparison, the world’s largest broadsheet English daily, Times of India, has a total readership of 14.8 million people, spread across the country.

Patrika has arrived at a winning combination through a mixture of old-fashioned credibility, large circulation, and civic-minded hyperlocal coverage and editions. India’s print media is poised to grow by 17 percent in the next few years, according to research by the financial services firm Motilal Oswal. Online reading, the bane of newspapers in the West, is unlikely to replace newspaper consumption in India, but instances of unethical journalism are growing.

Yet Patrika has earned a reputation for being a credible source of information.

Courtesy of Rajasthan Patrika Group. Gulab Kothari, editor-in-chief of Rajasthan Patrika.

“My constituents don’t believe me unless it also appears on the pages of the Patrika,” said Om Joshi, a Rajasthan state legislator.

“We check, recheck, and then publish,” explained Nihar Kothari.

Politicians in Rajasthan speak about the growing trend in Indian newspapers to offer politicians favorable coverage for money. “A local paper offered me a package,” said a Rajasthan lawmaker. If he paid the amount of money that particular newspaper was demanding, he would get favorable coverage. If he declined to pay, the newspaper would slander him in its pages. “Patrika would never try something like that,” the lawmaker added.

A state government once offered the owners of Patrika a coal mine in return for favorable coverage, a researcher told me, but the Patrika owners turned the offer down. How do they resist the temptation of payoffs in politics? I met Gulab Kothari, the editor-in-chief in his office deep inside Kesargarh fort. Trinkets and paintings of Hindu gods were scattered around his enormous desk. “Many of the older Rajasthan newspapers failed because they took political sides,” said Mr. Kothari, “The moment the readers see that, they’ll stop reading you.”

Politics in Rajasthan is a two-horse race between the Congress party and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In the 1990s, Patrika slipped from its fastidious standards of neutrality. Even the most ardent supporters of the paper whisper that in the 1990s, the newspaper sided with the BJP.

“An impression was created because Kulishji [the founding editor] was close friends with [former BJP chief minister] Bhairon Singh Shekhawat,” said a deputy editor. He conceded that some reporters slanted their stories to favor the BJP, hoping to please the editor. “But in the last decade, we’ve been extra careful to be neutral,” the deputy editor added.

Patrika seems to have tided over its brief phase of partisanship. “There was a perception of its BJP bias, but there is no politics now. I’ve won the Stars of the House award from Patrika,” said Mr. Joshi, the Rajasthan state legislator. “I am from the Congress.”

The “Stars of the House” award that Mr. Joshi referred to is one of many public interest campaigns that Patrika runs. Since 2003, Patrika has tracked the performance of state legislators. Candidates sign pledges before the elections, listing the action plan for their constituency (about 174 of 200 current state legislators signed on before the 2008 elections). Once in power, reporters persist with followup articles, typically in the candidate’s constituency. The “Stars of the House” scheme ranks the performance of legislators in the House on a given day.

Courtesy of Rajasthan Patrika Group. The Rajasthan Patrika e-paper.

In 2009, Patrika published a legislative report card. “Not a single MLA [legislator] has accused us of playing favorites,” claimed K.B. Kothari, a former United Nations official, who is related by marriage to the paper’s ruling family, and the paper’s adviser on social initiatives.

Patrika has found great success with public interest advocacy journalism. Its status as a widely-read newspaper with 2,500 journalists on its rolls adds punch to its campaigns. Its footprint of 5 to 15 correspondents in each district maximizes the impact.

Since the 1980s, the Indian higher judiciary has expanded access to constitutional rights. Judges can take ‘suo moto’ cognizance of letters or reports in newspapers, and initiate public interest litigation. “The judges are influenced by what they see in the papers,” said Justice Shiv Kumar Sharma, a retired judge of the Rajasthan High Court. “Patrika has a reputation of being accurate and honest.”

“Many, many public interest reports of the Patrika are converted into PILs [public interest litigation] by the court itself, after the judges read [the story in the newspaper],” added G.S. Bapna, the advocate general of Rajasthan. In 2003, the editor-in-chief Gulab Kothari wrote a letter to the Chief Justice of the Rajasthan High Court, based on a running campaign on the Patrika’s pages. In it, he argued that Jaipur’s urban planning was being constantly changed under political pressure. Judges from the Rajasthan High Court converted the letter to a legal case. Shailendra Agarwal, the legal reporter for the newspaper, told me that judges have recently ordered that changes to Jaipur’s masterplan require a gap of five years, and each change has to be justified in court.

Patrika’s reporters in the districts have taken to using India’s Right to Information Act to petition for access to government documents and build news stories from the resulting information. In the district of Tonk, two hours from Jaipur, a Patrika reporter filed 210 petitions under the Right to Information Act in five months in 2012. The Rajasthan government answered 206 of his questions. Patrika ran these answers in 233 news stories. Arun Sharma, who collates these figures for the newspaper, told me that when promotions and pay increases for the journalists are decided, these details form 20 percent of the reporter’s annual assessment.

This newspaper group’s success hinges on credibility as well as going local with multiple editions. Its 33d edition is in Bastar, a remote tribal region in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, about 15,000 square miles â€" larger than Belgium. The population consists largely of impoverished tribals. Maoist guerrillas are particularly active here, waging a protracted war against Indian security forces.

On May 25, a column of about 30 vehicles carrying politicians from India’s ruling Congress party was ambushed by 200 to 300 Maoists in Darbha valley in Bastar. At least 27 people were killed, including Mahendra Karma, the founder of a notorious anti-Maoist militia, Salwa Judum, who later joined the Congress Party.

A month after the massacre, Patrika began an edition exclusively for the war-torn region. It is the newspaper’s 3rd edition in Chhattisgarh state. The edition is printed out of Jagdalpur, the capital of Bastar district, a 15-hour train ride from the state capital. Few newspapers have reporters here, no national newspaper has an edition. But Mr. Kothari is not daunted.

“Maoists are basically dissatisfied tribals,” he said. “Why will they object to a local paper that reports on their grievances?”

Patrika has 12 printing centers in Rajasthan state alone, and 33 in all. Each center prints a main edition and multiple local editions, giving the Patrika about 250 tentacles. Its pages carry local voices; its social agenda is local. Gulab Kothari told me that his local journalists in Bastar will chart out campaigns for local change, which will be championed through the local edition.

The decision to go hyperlocal in rooted in the lessons of an American story. In the early 2000s, Nihar Kothari, the owner’s son and the executive editor of the paper, was an intern at the financially troubled Chicago Tribune.

“The Tribune called itself ‘newspaper of record’. Readers couldn’t care less,” said the younger Mr. Kothari. “They wanted to know what’s happening on their street.”

Courtesy of Rajasthan Patrika Group. A Rajasthan Patrika printing press.

But maintaining multiple editions in rural India is an expensive venture. Most Indian newspapers make money through advertisements not subscriptions. It is hard to convince advertisers that poor readers are worthy targets. Patrika is attempting a solution with lower-end paper and printing for its rural editions. I visited one such low-cost printing press on the outskirts of Jaipur, where screaming machines devoured rough newsprint and spewed slightly faded printouts. The costs are still considerable, but this rural penetration has earned them a fiercely loyal readership. “We do take a hit on our profit margins with editions in rural areas and small towns. At times, we lose money for several years on an edition, but often things turn around after a few years,” explained the younger Mr. Kothari. “It is important to have a newspaper edition in a place like Bastar even if it is not the most profitable venture.”

In early June, I visited a village in the Barwani district of Madhya Pradesh state. The village lies off the banks of the Narmada river, and its residents are mostly wheat, cotton, and chili farmers. I asked one farmer, Deorambhai, what newspaper he read.

“Barwani Patrika.”

Is it popular in other areas?

“No, no,” he waved, and then pointed towards the next district, “they read Dhar Patrika.”

Vinay Sitapati (sitapati@princeton.edu) is doctoral candidate at Princeton University. He has worked as an editor at The Indian Express, Delhi. Mr. Sitapati’s research on the Patrika group was supported by Omidyar Network.