Notes on a disastrous year for news media
Several media firms are in perilous health, posing questions on the future of traditional media and the depth of the subscriber base digital companies covet.
Why read this story?
Editor's note: Shekhar Gupta’s ThePrint is a good place to start this piece. Launched with much fanfare by one of the few celebrity editors to have emerged from the 1990s, Gupta’s venture was a digital media company with roots in the journalistic rigour usually associated with print publications. Hence it was christened ThePrint. At the time of its launch in late 2017, Gupta was quoted as saying, “Depending on which brand you prefer, you can call it the Bentley of political journalism or the Bloomberg of political journalism in India.” Even if you set aside the superfluous comparison, the real Bloomberg, i.e. Bloomberg LP, brought in a top line of $10 billion in 2018, the last known data available. Bloomberg is a private company and its financial records aren’t available in the public domain. In comparison, Gupta’s The Print recorded a top line of Rs 8.1 crore and a loss of around Rs 14 crore as of March 2020, according to data from the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. These are disappointing numbers for two reasons. A) Because year on year there hasn’t …
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