Here is the report from Anup Gupta, Design Director of the Hindustan Times, one of my ongoing projects, now at a standstill as are all projects globally.
According to Anup, the spread of the SARS Cov2 pandemic has led to a significant impact on print editions across all publications.
Fuelled by rumours that newspapers are carriers of SARS Cov 2 virus (though there is no scientific data to support this) some subscribers, and many gated residential complexes, refused their copies. This clearly was a cause for concern and various publishing houses got together to start an advertising campaign that aimed at educating the readers. The value proposition in the ad campaign was to present the newspaper as the trusted source of information, one that the readers could depend upon, unlike the unsubstantiated fake news that went around on social media that claimed newspapers where spreading the virus.
The solution?
Says Anup:
Since the edition was being compiled daily and published as an epaper, yesterday in a organisation wide email Praveen Someshwar, our CEO, urged all employees to share the epaper link with family and friends. A few of us went a step further to download the pdf of the paper and circulated it on Whatsapp messages.
Clearly newspapers in India still have a loyal readership that feels good to get their hands on one, and that, gives me a lot of hope. .
The reaction of the readers
From the many mails and messages that we at HT received it also became evident to us that our readers still wanted to read the newspaper, because they enjoyed the experience. We had to come up with an innovative solution.
A front page message
According to Anup, to help the cause of print media, recently the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, also threw his weight behind the medium. His message was adapted by HT in a jacket for its readers this morning.
See the entire PDF edition here
https://cloud.kdanmobile.com/en/share/pdf/RWtxR1JpZ1UxMzU5MzlNdElqRlRwSA==
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TheMarioBlog post # 3235