Navodaya Times gains manifold readership in short span

Gallop of a newly launched Hindi daily from the Punjab Kesari Group (Jalandhar) Every single edition of regional dailies from the Punjab Kesari Group (Jalandhar) is turned out to be a perfect neighbourhood newspaper to readers. This gracious tradition is inherited even in Navodaya Times, the latest from the group, but in a different swing. Amit Chopra, vice chairman & joint managing director, Punjab Kesari Group (Jalandhar) talks to SK Khurana, editor, Print & Publishing about the rapid readership this Hindi daily based in Delhi has gained over a short span of its launch. Barely one and a half years old in the market, but the acceleration of Navodaya Times over this short period has been getting on a rapid pace. Inaugural edition of this Hindi daily circulated just 3,000 copies in Delhi, which has now phenomenally garnered a landmark figure of 90,000 copies. One of the USPs of Navodaya Times is its reader-friendly approach. “Navodaya Times is featured with distinguished attributes that one can hardly find in other Hindi dailies circulating in Delhi-NCR area,” shares Amit Chopra while explaining the way contents of this promising Hindi daily have developed. Navodaya Times costs just Rs 2.50 on weekdays.

What’s in content?

Like other usual dailies, Navodaya Times consists of 16 pages with a daily four-page supplement on different subject matters viz. religion (Monday), expats (Tuesday), city (Wednesday), films (Thursday), women (Friday), city (Saturday) and magazine (Sunday). But unlike other Hindi dailies, its strategic approach is different when it comes to constructing contents and overall outlook. Pointing out as one of the vital factors, Amit says, “Since manual insertion of supplement is quite often found to be erroneous, time consuming and sometimes missing the pull-out totally, we are equipped with ‘balloon former’ system for automatic inserts to get rid of such postpress glitches.”

In order to make Navodaya Times every reader’s very own neighbourhood newspaper, contents are developed in such a manner to make it very regional-centric, in addition to general coverage of national and international news on sports, business, politics and satires. In this respect, Amit remarks, “In fact, Delhi/NCR is a sort of region where many of the residents in the areas have their origin or root in the neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, J&K and others. These people always love to read news and activities happening around their native or original places. This is how Navodaya Times pulls readers to its unique and regional reader-friendly contents.”

No doubt the way Navodaya Times covers Delhi-NCR is quite exclusive in nature. This newspaper carries out pullouts on Gurgaon, Noida, Ghaziabad and Faridabad supplemented with the main paper circulated in these NCR cities. Though the newspaper has now tapped a good readership in the region, Amit expresses the group’s goodwill, understanding of living in harmony and co-existence with other newspapers in the region. He further mentions that Navodaya Times is a secular newspaper; it neither involves with any political party nor serves as mouthpiece of any.

Infrastructure and workforce

What lies behind the success venture of Navodaya Times in terms of infrastructure and workforce is always worth reckonable – a robust two-acre facility in Noida and a team of 60 experienced editorial professionals. The production set-up is equipped with a 7 Tower Manugraph Hiline, 6 Tower Manugraph M-360 along with a couple of smart and easy Krause CtPs as well as a string of post-press equipments, such as Technicon stackers and conveyors, ITW signode strappers, among others. Such robust machine portfolio of the company makes Navodaya Times one of the captivating Hindi dailies in Delhi-NCR.

Further, there are more to be mentioned when it comes to counting the quality of Navodaya Times. The daily is printed on A-grade newsprint using finest range of inks from Micro Inks (50 percent), Sakata (30 percent) and Flint (20 percent) while the plates are from TechNova, producing 1,000 pages per day by CtP. The next update in the infrastructure will be yet another adoption of a Manugraph M-360 press, which according to Amit will be a ‘stand-by’ to the existing portfolio. In addition, he mentions that other innovations they look forward to facelift Navodaya Times in future will be adoptions of added features like gate-fold, gluing technologies and more.

On the e-platform

Punjab Kesari Group (Jalandhar) never lags behind in the current race on e-platform. Navodaya Times is available as e-paper and it has been actively switched to other online platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook. Another big thing about the group in this context is its online TV which receives wide viewership. In this concern, Amit predicts that online TV will play vital role in delivering ‘breaking news’ in future and the group is in alert mode to tap this opportunity in a bigger scale in the years to come.

Regionally stipulated

Apart from Navodaya Times, Amit Chopra proudly shares a bit of historic journey which Punjab Kesari Group (Jalandhar) has voyaged so far in the world of news media. Founded by Lala Jagat Narain with pivotal support from his sons Romesh Chander and Vijay Kumar Chopra, the group flagged off its maiden journey in the year 1948 with the launch of Urdu daily Hind Samachar, followed by Punjab Kesari in 1965 and Punjabi daily Jag Bani in 1978. Following certain squabbles upon the newspaper’s contents, regional terrorists assassinated both the father and son in 1981 and 1984 respectively.

Even after the ill-fated incidents, the group has been maintaining to a core level by Vijay Kumar Chopra, chairman; Avinash Chopra and Amit Chopra, joint managing directors carving a prominent platform in the Indian newspaper publishing industry.

The group today boasts of 55 regional offices and 11 printing centres in which 3,000 people are employed and 22 presses are running so efficiently to churn daily average copies of 11,07,359 newspapers. Each regional printing unit is equipped with presses with six towers in minimum and seven towers in maximum. Such wide footprints of the group help them penetrate the regional markets by producing special regioncentric Punjab Kesari editions from multiple centres.