Swastik Group to launch English and Hindi tabloids

Swastik Group of Companies' media division, Swastik Media, is all set to launch two tabloids in Jharkhand - an English as well as a Hindi tabloid - in April. Four editions of the English tabloid will be launched from Ranchi, Jamshedpur, Bokaro and Dhanbad, and a single edition of the Hindi tabloid for the state.

The group is yet to disclose the names of the tabloids. They will have a cover price of Rs 2 each and a combo offer is being floated for Rs 3. Swastik Media, till sometime back, had the franchisee of The Pioneer newspaper (English) for Jharkhand. It started publishing The Pioneer from Ranchi in early 2008.

While on weekdays, the tabloids will have all-colour 24 pages, every Sunday, there will be 32 pages in each tabloid. Swastik Media plans to launch the Ranchi edition of the English tabloid first, to be followed by editions in the other three locations simultaneously later on. In November this year, the group plans to expand the reach of its English offering to West Bengal and Bihar.

For the Hindi tabloid, the group will launch an edition first from Ranchi, to be followed by editions in Odisha, West Bengal, Bihar and the north-eastern states.

The group claims to have taken more than 80 hoardings across Jharkhand to promote the dailies, out of which 24 hoardings have been taken up in Ranchi itself.

Swastik Media also plans to launch a regional channel and four national channels by the end of this year. While the regional offering will be a news channel, the four national channels will deal in news, general entertainment and spiritual genres.

For the record, Swastik Media is the media division of the Swastik Group of Companies, which was established in 1961. It is one of the leading trading houses in eastern India, engaged in providing engineering, management and financial consultancy services in the field of infrastructure development.