History of Press

There were basically three kinds of newspapers during freedom struggle:

1) Critique of British

2) Social reforms

3) Combating communalism.

For Gandhi journalism was not an end in itself but a means to an end. (Social service)

Post independence scenario - There was a break from pre-independence.

 Ø  Robin Jeffrey said he studied Indian Capitalism through Indian Press and he described how Indian Press becomes capitalist enterprise.

 Ø  Nehruvian states claimed certain trend of socialist state and though there was mixed economy, all the big industries were in public sectors.

 Ø  Audit Bureau Circulation (ABC) was formed in 1948 in Bombay. Newspapers, advertising body, News Agencies came together and they find out exact number of the copies sold of each newspaper. There is a Chartered Accountant within each newspaper who does auditing.

 Ø  ABC also tells us which product is sold in which region .For example number of Malayalam newspapers sold in Mumbai will tell the number of malayalis staying there.

 Ø  RNI (Registrar for Newspapers in India.) was formed in 1953 and newsprints are allocated via RNI. The number of circulation decides the number of newsprints.

 Ø  DAVP allocates advertisements of central government via RNI.

 Ø  Jeffrey says in early years of independence, there was some kind of state control over freedom of Press.

 Ø  First National Readership Survey took place in 1970 and the second survey took place in 1978.

 Ø  There was a jump of 47% in readership in period between 1970-78.The most important reason of rise in readership was the emergency of1975-77.There were three important reasons for rise in readership:

1) The people wanted to know what happened during and after emergency and thus readership rose.

2) Green Revolution

3) Increasing Indian diaspora abroad which brought money to India and moreover people wanted to follow and know the trend going on abroad.

 Ø  Huge jump in newspapers and a large quantum of this are in smaller towns. This signified that regional newspapers were rising and people in smaller towns had more purchasing power .Moreover there is a language pride. For example Bengal Government wants to have Bengali Newspaper.

 Ø  From 1982 onwards, middle class started purchasing  TV in large numbers ,so TV started competing with newspapers for advertisements. There were anticipations that newspapers survival would be very difficult now. Pre 1980s there was national media only but after 1980s it became localised also. For example Eenadu in Tamil Nadu started its publication in vishakhapatnam instead of Hyderabad to beat Anandprabha.They circulated their copies for free for the first seven days and within four years it became the best selling newspaper.