Livewire: The Communications, Media and Entertainment Blog

Recently towards the end of Year 2010, a survey of 10 newspapers was conducted by an independent organization, representing North South East and West of the country. What emerged from the survey was quite startling; rural news is below 4 per cent of the total news coverage on Indian press.

The figure 4% when seen in isolation can paint a very dismal picture, however what needs to be analyzed are factors that inhibit newspapers from covering news from the hinterland.  Let's briefly touch upon some of these factors and possible solutions.

Lack of news bureaus at district or sub-district level -  From a cost perspective, it's prohibitive to appoint News Bureaus at each district and sub district for collection and distribution of news. It's a huge capital expenditure to set up multiple news bureaus at each district, appoint them with human/technical resources and associated infrastructure to support the resources.

A probable solution will be to co-locate news bureau with other news agencies/electronic media or if the publication has an established news bureau at district/sub district, it can amortize the news collection cost vide its syndication. Vice versa it can license syndicated news feeds, without incurring capital expenditure, from other publications/news agencies/electronic media having their bureaus at these districts.

Positioning of the Newspaper - Politics as a subject occupies the major space in a newspaper followed closely by Business and Economics. Considering the fact that most newspapers service urban and semi urban population, rural coverage is not a very interesting proposition for them. Instances of political violence, local elections or major protests reported from hinterland are the ones which usually make it to the newspapers.

Also a newspaper may not like to be positioned as one which appeals to a class of people who are interested in news from district/sub-district levels. This may hamper the perception of the newspaper to its large national advertisers thus effecting considerable revenues.

However there is a certain class of people residing in urban areas who would like to consume news pertaining to the hinterland. These are the people who've migrated to urban areas for better prospects and would like to be connected to their place of origin.

For a newspaper to satisfy the content needs of this class of readers, it can enable a wider coverage of rural news on its website. Alternatively the newspaper can launch mobile subscription packs specifically covering news from hinterland. The packs can be in the form of plain vanilla text SMS, Audio/MMS clips or a neat mobile application that can be customized to serve rural news.

Lack of rural coverage by mainstream media players opens up lot of opportunities for VAS content organizations to fill this gap.