Chitralekha launches Autocar Gujarati

The Gujarati edition of Autocar India will be launched in magazine-within-magazine format in Chitralekha

The January 11, 2010 issue of Chitralekha, the Mumbai-based Gujarati magazine, will see the launch of an eight-page edition of the Gujarati version of Autocar India, in magazine-within-magazine format. Chitralekha has entered into a content sharing tie-up with Autocar India for this purpose.

Autocar magazine, with its separate cover, will be placed in the second half of Chitralekha magazine. The monthly offering will reach over 240,000 Gujarati homes - the circulation of Chitralekha, all editions.

The segment in the magazine will be called Autocar India, but the masthead will be in Gujarati, with a small reference of the English masthead as well. The look and feel of the English Autocar India will be maintained in the Gujarati offering.

Mitrajit Bhattacharya, president-publisher, Chitralekha Group, says, "Autocar is the best name in the trade. Gujaratis are the biggest buyers of automobiles and Chitralekha reaches them week after week. Therefore, it makes sense to do the tie-up. Auto companies, I am sure, will be excited with a proposition as this one."

He explains that the frequency of Autocar has been kept at once a month, because "Automobile purchase is a big decision and does not happen overnight. Monthly is a good frequency to cater to the discerning audience with the best of news, views and opinion about the auto world, without being late."

The content will be picked from the Autocar India English team, but the subjects will be chosen as per the readers' needs and market requirements of Chitralekha. The number of pages will vary from 8 to 16, depending on the relevance of the content. Autocar will be placed in such a way that it flows with the rest of the content of Chitralekha, without breaking the regular sections of the magazine.

Chitralekha readers will thus have access to articles written by Hormazd Sorabjee, Shapur Kotwal and Ajit Dalvi, amongst others; apart from news about launches, car and bike reviews, test drive reports and top selling cars.

Depending on the success of this initiative, the group will decide when to launch the independent version of Autocar Gujarati. "We will monitor the success of the eight-pager closely, which should ideally lead to the launch of an independent magazine," he says.

Both the magazines will have a common pool of advertisements, but the advertisers will have an option to take it within the new segment or elsewhere in the magazine.

Bhattacharya adds that Chitralekha pioneered the concept of magazine-within-magazine, with its women-centric magazine, Priyadarshini.

Chitralekha magazine is the flagship publication of the Chitralekha Group. It hits the news stands every Saturday at a cover price of Rs 15, and has a content mix of news, events, cultural landscape and fiction.

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