INDIAN LANGUAGES NEWSPAPERS 7-Marathi Big Newspapers Are Elephants

Mumbai and Pune represent two facets of Marathi journalism, Pune's Sakal, in spite of its recent shift towards new marketing and management strategies, still remains imbued with idealism of the nationalist period and its emphasis on wide-ranging local-level reporting. On the other hand, in Mumbai's highly segmented market, smaller newspapers claim popularity due to their unpredictable mix of business sense, technical mastery and cultural intimacy. [Spreading across India after the end of the 'emergency' in 1977, technological change in the form of the personal computer and offset press revolutionised the newspaper industry. The circulation of daily newspapers in all languages trebled between 1976 and 1992 from 93 million to 28.1 million and the dailies-per-thousand people ratio doubted from 15 daily newspapers per 1,000 people to 32 per 1,000. Regular reading of something called "news" both indicates and causes change. Expansion of competing newspapers clearly signals the vitality and growth of capitalism: newspapers have owners and owners must have advertisers. The changes of the past 20 years are obvious yet largely unstudied. The essays in this series on the press in the major Indian languages are part of a larger project to map, analyse and try to understand the transformation of the Indian- language newspaper industry.] TO understand the Marathi press, one needs to appreciate two cities Mumbai (Bombay) and Pune (Poona). Mumbai is the Manhattan of India a buzzing, multi-lingual magnet on an island. As well as the industrial and commercial focus of India, it is the base for the advertising industry and for India's two biggest newspaper chains. The Times of India and the The Indian Express. Pune, on the other hand, is Maharashtra's Boston(indeed, both have brahmins) where history, culture and more cultivated ways of life are supposed to prevail.