Interview

Our approach has been to focus on the readers

Interview with Rajiv C. Lochan, Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer, Kasturi & Sons Ltd. India

WAN-IFRA: A mobile-first future is the trend we see and hear everywhere. While the trend across Asia shows time spent on news media has gone up, the time spent on print is declining. How do you see this trend developing and impacting news media companies' strategy in the short-term and long-term, especially in India?

Rajiv Lochan: Digital disruption is a consumer-driven reality. Therefore, it is most appropriate to respond to it in a consumer-centric manner. Print, website, mobile, etc. are all form factors that the reader chooses to use and if, as media companies, we begin to see our primary responsibility towards the consumer (as opposed to the form factor), we will handle this reality quite pragmatically (and commercially successfully as well). Our focus in The Hindu Group is to prepare ourselves and adapt rapidly to the changes implied by the digital disruption – not merely to our digital offerings, but to the entire reader experience. And we are finding that print is a formidable force of influence amongst readers! I expect this to be the case in the short-term and in the long-term.

Strategy

Growing the SPH portfolio amid waves of disruption

In recent years, Asia has appeared among the bright spots of the world's newspaper industry in terms of traditional, print-based growth, and the view of many in the West might well be that news publishers there aren't yet facing the same challenges that they are. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Conference

WAN-IFRA India 2016, 21-22 September, Kolkata

Discover the full programme of WAN-IFRA's 24th annual conference in India, the meeting point of news publishers in South Asia.

Analysis

What news publishers need to know about Distributed Content

In 2015, several of the world’s largest technology companies introduced ways to host publishers’ articles on their own platforms. Distributed Content, also known as “platform publishing” or “homeless publishing,” was pioneered by Facebook, which launched Instant Articles (IA), a way of formatting editorial content that replaces an outward link to publisher’s websites with text, images and video hosted directly on the social platform. Soon, others such as Apple, Snapchat, Twitter, and Google, came up with their own versions of Distributed Content. The ostensible aim of the movement is simple - to render information more quickly on smartphones. The implications, though, are far-reaching.