‘Jagran’ and ‘Bhaskar’ target Amritsar

The Amritsar market has suddenly become a hot destination for Hindi dailies. The top two dailies are ready to launch their edition in this city of the Golden Temple. While ‘Dainik Jagran’ is launching its edition from today, ‘Dainik Bhaskar’ plans to follow it next month.

Till date, ‘Dainik Jagran’ was feeding its readers in Amritsar with the Jalandhar and Ludhiana editions. This will be its 31st edition. The objective behind this new edition is not only providing local content to the readers but also fulfilling advertisers’ needs.

Shailesh Gupta, director, Dainik Jagran, claims that JAL (acronym for Jalandhar, Amritsar and Ludhiana) is a strong ground for the daily. The newspaper has been present in Punjab for six years now and doing extremely well there. The Amritsar edition, now with a local touch and flavour, is a step towards capitalising on this advantage.

Meanwhile, the ‘Bhaskar’ editon in Amritsar and also in Jalandhar, which will be launched shortly, will start off with a print run of 1,70,000 copies. The Bhaskar Group claims to have already recevied paid subscriptions of 85,000 copies in advance.

About the Punjab market, Gupta of ‘Jagran’ says, “Punjab has a huge potential to absorb Hindi dailies and since ‘Jagran’ is already going strong, it made sense to come out with the Amritsar edition, further giving us an impetus there.”

Apparently, Punjab throws up huge potential for new players as per Bhaskar Group’s findings from the survey of 4.7 lakh households. As such, currently only 25 per cent of the population that can read Hindi is being catered to by the existing newspapers. There are another 6.7 lakh potential readers over 12 years of age and 3.03 lakh potential ones in SEC A and B who are waiting to be tapped.

Meanwhile, the two established newspapers in the market have revised their prices – ‘Punjab Kesari’ sells at Rs 2 compared to the earlier price of Rs 3 and ‘Dainik Jagran’ has also dropped its price to Re 1 from Rs 2 in July. This, it says, is the celebration price, owing to the daily being declared the number one newspaper in JAL markets (source: IRS2006 Round 1).

Gupta of ‘Jagran’ is confident about his product and claims to be the clear number one in the state. Commenting on competition and how the daily will handle it, Gupta was categorical that the best product would survive. He stressed on the daily’s six-year-long innings in the state that had given it a better understanding of the market.

© 2006 agencyfaqs!