DNA Newspaper Attempts Mission Impossible
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Image: Sameer Pawar
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he scene could have been from the 1961 film Guns of Navarone. In it a team of Allied commandos take on the suicidal mission of destroying a massive German gun emplacement watching over a vital sea channel.
Back home, in 2005, the island was Mumbai, at Rs. 800 crore - Rs. 1,000 crore, the single largest print advertising market in India and guarded like a fiefdom for close to two decades by The Times of India.
Under the mission leaders — Sudhir Agarwal, the sharp yet unassuming brains behind the Dainik Bhaskar group and Subhash Chandra, the self-made media baron who had dared to cross swords with Rupert Murdoch — was assembled a crack team of senior journalists, marketers, salespeople and distribution experts to not just take on The Times of India, but conclusively defeat it. Their secret weapon was a new newspaper called DNA.
Once Mumbai was conquered, DNA’s gameplan was to quickly replicate its success in most big metro and city markets across the country, becoming a pan-India newspaper advertisers and readers couldn’t ignore.
But after a bruising five year battle, DNA’s original ambition lies in tatters.
With the exception of current editor R. Jagannathan almost all the senior professionals it hired to fight The Times of India have deserted it. Its readership in Mumbai is down nearly 15 percent from its 2009 peak while The Times of India’s is still 2.5 times larger. To pare down losses due to lower-than-expected revenue, the paper has been forced to progressively do away with additional supplements, reduce pages and print lesser copies of the newspaper. Its ad rates are one-third The Times of India’s on paper, but close to one-seventh in reality due to severe discounting. There’s no sign of its revenue being enough to cover its operational costs for at least another year or two, says CEO K.U. Rao, leaving unanswered the larger question of how much longer it will take for the paper’s investors to recoup the Rs. 1,100 crore they have put into the project till date.
The result: Instead of gunning for The Times of India, Rao is working hard to make DNA an economically viable business. “Our vision since day one was only to become one of the top five English publications in the country,” he says.
It’s a compromise DNA had no choice but to make.
Bruised and Battered
DNA’s current predicament followed a rather impressive start — getting from zero to 400,000 copies in Mumbai within two years. It did that by using an all-out mix of editorial star power, free-flowing cash lines from both parent investors and a product that was crisp, well-designed and intelligently written.
But though CEO Rao outwardly seems thrilled to have broken into the top six English general newspapers in India on aggregate readership, things are not so rosy when you delve deeper.
In its largest market, Mumbai, which accounts for nearly three-fourths of its readership, DNA is a distant number three after five years of operations. Hindustan Times at number four is snapping at its heels, with just 7 percent lesser readership.
In Bangalore where it launched in December 2008, it is on the verge of being dislodged by Deccan Chronicle for the number three position. In Surat it shuttered operations after launching an edition in 2007.
“It was a dream we had. We wanted to give the Times a fight and to some extent we did. I don’t know about the future though,” says Sidharth Bhatia, a veteran journalist who was the editor of DNA’s edit pages from inception till December 2009.
Financially, DNA’s future is grim. Its revenue last year, at Rs. 148 crore, was up 22 percent over the year before, but that was still Rs. 70 crore short of covering its operating costs. Cutting costs is therefore Rao’s first priority as he attempts to steer DNA to profitability.
Under Subhash Chandra’s active guidance, who started playing a more hands-on role at DNA since the last one year after taking over from the Agarwals of Dainik Bhaskar, Rao is walking the fine rope of trying to print less pages but sell more ads. DNA’s print run in Mumbai was reduced by over 100,000 copies last year to reduce its cash burn rate.
Rao says DNA will also become more hyperlocal. That means it will intensify its news coverage that is local to the reader’s location. In Mumbai it has two supplements targeted at the suburb of Thane and the city of Navi Mumbai. Doing so will hopefully allow it to attract more retail advertising. “If a Hyundai or Maruti showroom takes out ads in a newspaper, it would not take much convincing to get Hyundai or Maruti themselves to advertise too,” says the head of an independent media planning agency.
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