Growth Lurks In Where Regional Media Grown

News media around the world are at the most challenging time now as they encounter crucial phases of transitions. Either in the offshore or in the domestic market, every news media house has its own story these days of how they cope with the current market scenario where many people call it ‘digital onslaught’ on the traditional print newspapers and rapid arrivals of modern print production and workflow tools and technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and others. A striking point in the story is the undying significance of print copies, particularly in India and a little implication abroad.

Print being the bequest of news media for ages, its significance will never lose even though there have been changes and revolutions taking place in the industry. Digital platforms of news media, let’s say smartphone apps and social media, are not snatching the age-old tradition of print media. In a way, we can put it like this—digital news content is an offshoot of print editions, both the mediums are rather complementing each other than competing while reaching out to the larger and more heterogeneous audiences of all age groups.

Digital platforms like social media and micro video sites are where audiences get connected to regional news and features which eventually gain a new traction of readerships for vernacular newspaper houses working for a particular region or geography. In India, it’s a kind of growth generated because of our country’s linguistic diversity and cultural diversion. For instance, Hindi dailies like Dainik Jagran, which have no presence in south or east, are ranked among the list of the country’s or world’s largest-circulated vernacular print newspapers. The same holds true for Telugu daily Eenadu, Tamil daily Dina Thanthi, etc.

Growth in the current Indian newspaper landscape is taking place in the regional domains where national dailies play little or no role out there. Malayala Manorama in Kerala is the largest circulated regional daily in India. Readers of the Malayalam daily enjoy the absolute and strong preference for contents in local language on topics relevant to hyper local events, occasions, issues, and stories, which may have been vastly overlooked by the national dailies. This eventually fuels the region-wise growth of vernacular dailies like Malayala Manorama and many others in south, east, west, and north.

It’s not happened only in India! After engaging in nearly three decades of publishing its own brands of magazines only in digital formats, New York-based The Arena Group has finally decided to physically print The Street, one of its flagship titles, from January 1, 2026 onward. The group was launched in the mid-1990s when the dot-com was gathering stream. However, irrespective of today’s digital dominance witnessing around in every aspect and corner, The Arena Group agrees to the fact that print still has its own room of significance for readers.

Well, when it comes to comparing and contrasting between the ‘print’ and ‘digital’ media platforms, don’t make them rivals. AI replacing editorial staff in newsrooms is just a myth. No editorial person has so far been replaced by an AI tool. AI makes typical editorial tasks faster and accurate than ever. Sweden’s leading newspaper group Bonnier News uses AI-assisted robots in pre-press process to produce 45 of its newspapers. The robots gather texts and photographs to help designers generate final pages and layouts. This is how the ‘print’ and ‘digital’ work out as a team, not as rivals! We see it’s going to happen, because they are capable.

Sonal Khurana
sonal@smediagroup.in