Dog Eats Dog:TOI And HT Slug it Out on Circulation Stats

NEW DELHI: There was a time when the media took pride in being united, and never allowed competitiveness to become undignified and ugly. This was from the realisation that as the fourth pillar of the Indian Constitution it could not sink to levels that defied good journalism.

The times have changed drastically over the last two decades in particular,with both the Hindustan Times and The Times of India rendering another body blow to what used to pass roughly as journalistic ethics and propriety. The differences making the two major newspapers cross swords in public centre around “I sell more than you” claim. This time around HT’s circulation figures aroused TOI ire sufficiently for the newspaper to run a front page story headlined “TOI Challenge: Making Sense of HTs amazing circulation numbers.”

The story begins with “Read the new whodunit in town. Let’s call it the mystery of the amazing circulation numbers.” And then of course the argument goes on to supposedly debunk the HT claim that according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation report it has a circulation that takes on TOI’s numbers. As always the interpretation of statistics became the basis of claims, this being a regular fixture in the longstanding HT versus TOI media war that entertains journalists and makes no sense to the readers.

This particular episode began with the Economic Times that ran a story in June contesting the HT circulation figures with the headline, “ All Down& Out, HT Up and About, Media Industry Foxed.” HT countered this immediately with a story headlined, “TOI cannot digest readers message, shoots messenger.”

TOI continued the unresolved war of figures with the story above. And now the HT Vice President (Marketing) Shantanu Bhanja has told the media that surely no one could take the TOI story seriously. In his view “HT is conclusively ahead of TOI in Delhi in both circulation and readership.”

“Around the world, what advertisers and media planners really care for is not just how many copies are printed and sent to the centres at 6 in the morning, but how many are really picked up by readers to read. TOI is of course aware of that, since that alone is the real proof of the pudding!What we are unfortunately experiencing, therefore, is an expression of utter frustration at the last round of IRS so conclusively establishing HT's lead in Delhi NCR,” he said.

The war is not about who is publishing the truth, who is publishing the facts and who is highlighting what the marginalised poor of India are going through. The war is all about circulation figures as this invites the advertisements, and news has been turned by both these newspapers into an industry. Interestingly the managements determine the editorial content of both TOI and HT, with advertisements playing a major role.