I'm No.1... no wait...

I will not comment on how both large dailies in Delhi today went a bit over the top with Obama coverage, HT even replaced its City pages with Obama coverage. While American papers did fill up their front pages, their inside pages tended to talk of other electoral issues. Anyway, I still think we went overboard with coverage considering that most coverage was agency copy, save a couple of pieces here and there. Again Chidanand's writing was by far and away the best, but anyway, I won't carry on about Obama because the fun part was below the fold in the anchor pieces - both HT and ToI claimed their 'Number 1' in Delhi, HT celebrated the fact and starting tooting its horn yesterday which puzzled people in BSZ Marg who were poring over the numbers, and were not even looking at Delhi while in HT House cakes were being cut to celebrate the re-taking of Delhi.
But it became like Al Gore's win in 2000, someone at HT didn't exactly look at the numbers properly because it seemed that the IRS had changed its methodology, and since ToI's piece wasn't self-congratulatory (or an attempt to get onto the honours list) and after talking to the smarter stats folks, there was all-round sniggering. People at BSZ Marg, are still trying to figure out where the numbers came from. But, don't expect the last of this today, there will a bit of back and forth.
PS: Have you noticed how the papers have begun to get thinner and ad-edit ratios have begun to change. The collapse of the realty market in the NCR is showing - the days of 32 page editions might be over pretty soon and maybe by early 2009 the major papers will revert to 24 page editions.

Covert

To be fair to MJ, at least he made sure that his new magazine has a functional website where you can go read the stories to get suitably bored. Then again, going through the stories these guys seem to veering further left of Outlook, the cover is a suitably vicious hachet job on Sharad Pawar. At least, and I repeat, they have a fully functional website (simple, but functional) unlike Sakaal Times or Financial Chronicle.
But here is the problem, Covert (and their Covert funders) does not have the distribution muscle of either the India Today Group or the Outlook Group (of course, those who claim to know Covert's funding sources claim otherwise, though magazines are quite a different commondity for what is usually distributed). And despite that, both IT English and Outlook have seen drops in readership in the IRS R1. India Today English, for example has seen 'Claimed Readership' (CR) decline 4 per cent to about 6.9 million readers. Keep in mind, Claimed Readership and Average Issue Readership (AIR) are two quite different things, calculated in different ways (we'll get to that some other time). The same survey shows Outlook CR declined 10 per cent, to around 1.9 million readers.
The truth of the matter is that while hundreds of new magazines are being launched, magazine readership is declining, even the publication I work for saw a decline, not as scary as the 21 per cent decline for Cosmopolitan, but decline none the less, in fact, lifestyle magazines registered some really scary numbers. And the IRS does not even include many of the new-fangled publications which would barely register a blip, such as those published by the Ponytail (who seems to be skipping salaries). I've gone through the numbers and declining readership copupled with rising newsprint costs and the rise of the internet, is not going to make for a pretty time very soon.