DANFES

The Third Eye was witness to a landmark event in the life of the Indian Newspaper Society, the premier apex organization of the newspaper publishers of the country with more than 700 big, small and medium newspapers as its members. It was a national seminar on the problem of the small and medium newspapers of the country. More than 500 of the INS members happen to be small and medium newspapers which had for years stayed in the background while the big newspapers, and even among them an elite minority of big English language newspapers, always dominated the affairs of the INS charged with the mandate to ensure the healthy growth of the print media industry and take up its problems with the government, besides efforts at internal regulation of the affairs of the industry and its relations with the advertisers.

The daylong seminar held at the India International Centre in New Delhi, received encouraging response and interaction from both the leaders of the newspaper industry as well as the leaders of the concerned government departments. While the Chairman of the PC, Justice K. Jaychand Reddy, in his inaugural address, to the problems of the small and medium newspapers in India, it was reassuring to hear from one eminent speaker after another that the future of the print media was not at all endangered by the advent of the fast sprawling electronic media.

The fact that the INS President, Pradeep Guha, the top executive of the Times of India Group, flew all the way from Mumbai to be at the seminar and two of the top experts in the field of newspaper production and economics were there to make a perceptive presentation on how to cut newspaper production costs and improve quality of production, showed that this seminar was different from the traditional run-of-the mill meets.

The fact that the Union Minister for Heavy Industry, Sontosh Mohan Dev was there to inaugurate the afternoon business of the seminar and promised all support on his part to help solve the major problems of the small and medium newspapers.

Eminent editors like the Jagran Editor, Shri Mohinder Mohan Gupta, the Malyala Manorama Hindi Magazine Vanita Editor, Jacob Mathews, the Pioneer Editor, Chandan Mitra and the Day After Editor-in-Chief, Sunil Dang, who as the Chairman of the Small and Medium Newspapers Committee of the INS and the main motivator behind the holding of the landmark seminar made valuable contribution.

Sunil Dang made the proposal that there should be a system of ‘ONE WINDOW’ tackling of the problems of the small and medium newspapers who were sent shunting from one authority to another for establishing their existence, their circulation and their various credentials and entitlements for the grant of concessions like newsprint allocation and support like Government advertisement. He was summing up and responding to a barrage of questions and posers from the floor by the publishers of small and medium newspapers, mostly representing the Indian languages media in the country.

While Shri Chandan Mitra asserted that the future of the print media had not be affected and would not be affected by the electronic media, Shri Shahid Siddiqi, a well known Urdu editor and a Rajya Sabha member, like Shri Chandan Mitra, also called for the small and medium newspapers to get better organized to tackle their professional challenges and to present a united and coherent viewpoint to government and corporate agencies. There were interesting suggestions of creating a second INS complex to better operate the organisation of the Newspapers at Raffi Marg in New Delhi.