Battleground Mumbai: Bombay Mirror may be launched by May 30

The day of reckoning for Bennett, Coleman & Co (BCCL), publishers of The Times of India and The Economic Times, is drawing near. The company’s new paper Bombay Mirror may be launched by May 30, say sources.

This, however, will be contingent on the break out of the advertising campaign for Bombay Mirror. The campaign, say sources, should be launched soon. BCCL, incidentally, has been conducting dry runs (distributing dummy copies in newspaper parlance) of Bombay Mirror in the city.

The paper, as reported earlier, is a ‘broadloid’ – a tabloid with broadsheet content – which will comprise 48 pages. On Sundays, an A4-sized glossy magazine of 40 colour pages will be distributed along with the paper. Topics will include everything suitable for Sunday reading – arts, culture, lifestyle, food, review of movies, travel etc.

The pricing of Bombay Mirror is unclear at the moment, but the pre-launch order booking that BCCL is conducting amongst readers in the city pegs the paper at an ‘introductory price’ of Re 1. This will be offered to readers for a month, following which the paper will be available at a cover price of “not exceeding Rs 2” till December ’05, says the price guarantee certificate attached with the order form.

The mother brand, The Times of India, meanwhile, is continuing with its beef-up exercise, the latest being its all-colour initiative. All 40 pages of The Times of India are now in colour, and the company is going the whole hog in announcing the initiative too.

The creative of the outdoor campaign depicts crayon sticks with a roll of the TOI in between. The body copy at the bottom of the visual simply goes ‘40 Pages in Colour’.

The print campaign has the same idea, but a different set of visuals supporting it. In this case, the reader can see a box of crayons with a roll of the paper in the centre. Another one has a stack of thread reels piled one on top of the other with the familiar TOI roll in the centre of the first row. The line with the both the visuals read: Now with 40 pages in colour.

Apart from this, the Times International section in the TOI, which consisted of four colour pages earlier, is now available as a pullout of eight colour pages. An additional page is contained in the paper taking the total tally of international pages to nine. © 2005 agencyfaqs!