 Good evening everyone. I hope all of you are doing well. It's Tuesday evening, 3.30. It's not an ideal time to do a webinar, especially since most of us are at home. Sometimes it comes in the middle of a siesta. But anyways, it's good to have all of you here. My name is Kishan and I'll be hosting this webinar today. And I think we have an amazing panel today before I quickly introduce them. Personally, I feel it is very close to my heart because I was born and brought up in Kerala. And I can say that I was born and brought up on print. This paper was part of my, you know, bringing and growing up. And that's something which I, that's a personal character that I have. And also from a professional point of view, it's very important to know about how this medium will emerge over the crisis that we all been witnessing. So we will have about an hour. Please feel free to send your questions in between and we will probably try and get some time in the end to ask some of the questions to some of the panelists. But if there are some questions that are relevant in between and I'll probably try and get it in so that you know, you can ask them to the panelists on that. So again, once again, welcome all of you. Thank you, Andhraag and the team Axis for Media for this opportunity. I'll quickly introduce the panelists today. This panel is actually very, very clearly representing Dukshin. You couldn't have got a better panel representing Dukshin because we have people from all possible cities in South. From Hyderabad, we have Karthik Haji Saab. He is Director of Advertising and Marketing, Sakshi. So one of the most important print, you know, publications in the South. Write down the South from Kerala. We have Varish Chandy, who is a great partner, client and somebody who I know for a long time, representing Manorama Group. Varish Chandy has his DP Marketing Advertising Sales. And we have Suresh Balakrishnan from Bombay, representing the Hindu Group, his Chief Revenue Officer, Hindu. And he's representing Hindu sitting in Bombay. And we have Ishwar N, who is the CM of Casa Grande. He will bring in the Advertiser for an interview. And he also represents a category which has print as an extreme role to play in that. And last but not the least, we have Abhinav Kharil, who is the CEO of the Ashlet News. Somebody who can also bring in the perspective of the new age medium of consumption of news. So we have an interesting panel. The topic is about how print will re-emerge as a medium. And I don't have to give you the background. All of you know that print is one of the strongest medium in the country. And it is unlike some of the other markets in the world, print is growing in this country. It's a large base. It is one of those legacy mediums with a lot of credibility. We have, because of our culture and the language and the regions, there has been a whole host of legacy brands who have been providing news and entertainment to a lot of consumers. And then COVID happened and it's been almost 100 plus days. So I would first of all want to ask some of our extreme panelists on how the impact has been and how has been the recovery over the last 100-110 odd days. So if I could start from Hyderabad, from, if I could share from Sakya to Reddy, how has been the impact so far and how has been the revival more than impact? Because I mean, you've been talking about the lockdown for a long, long time, I would love to hear about the recovery from a circulation point of view, I mean, advertising point of view, distribution point of view. Also from subscription, all of that, right? I mean, how has it been? Yeah, sure, Christian. Thank you. Basically, first of all, I would like to appreciate you for branding this as Dakshin, Go Dakshin, because Dakshin is entirely different from what we applicable to our topic. Dakshin is entirely different from what is happening in Uttar and Pascha. So we are not much disturbed in terms of the circulation at all, except for the urban areas, like Hyderabad and all that, there is a little effect on that during the lockdown days, but the rural areas, rural areas have not been affected much at all. So even in Hyderabad also, some of the areas like the big, what do you call the communities where people, apartments and all that, there we had some entry problem with the hawkers and the people going in. But immediately after, I think maybe end of April, we started like-minded brands in Hyderabad and Hyderabad started working together, going into all these communities, speaking to the RWAs. There was this apprehension that newspaper is a carrier of corona, the virus. That we made a lot of efforts through mediums like news channels and all that, making the doctors speak to them that newspaper, they are definitely not a medium of carrier of corona and all that. That is how we were able to convince most of the societies and slowly come back. I think we have almost of the, whatever we have lost in between during the lockdown period, we are back again, almost 75 to 80% we have worked with back. Hyderabad is also a place where the distribution is divided into 50-60 spots from where the hawkers will come and collect the newspaper and go. They have their own transportation system and they go. There is no disturbance at all in the distribution part at all. So as you say, I just see like newspaper always has been coming back more strongly after every this thing. After this pandemic also I think we will come out very successfully and we will definitely face the challenges with bold this thing. We have now actually, while we are affected in the major urban towns, we are looking towards the SCC 2, 3 and 4 towns of both the Telvis speaking states. We are now concentrating more on that for our more readership and readers and all that. So those areas are not that much disrupted the SCC 2, SCC 3, 4 towns and all that. That is why we are working harder now to get better circulation, better younger readership is available there. And in both the states we have almost 250 census towns where the urban facilities are there. That is where we are concentrating. I think the economy will now come from those areas we feel and we are concentrating more on that while we are putting efforts on the urban areas also. People are finding the rural areas much safer and now we have an early monsoon. We are expecting a lot of better agricultural to do this thing. We also are finding the reverse migration is also happening to some extent. Like people are going back from urban to rural areas, particularly the daily wage earners and all that. The IT and all those industries will remain quite good in the Hyderabad but these things are going backwards. So we are concentrating more on that. So when we look forward to better growth there, while the Hyderabad might take a little longer time to come back to extremely normal. That's good to hear because I think not just only urban but also in Shenia urban and smaller towns. I think there is a focus to bring back circulation and all of that. I will just come to Suresh. Suresh, I have to ask you how is the situation in Chennai considering you have both the lineages, both English and Tamil. But from an urban point of view, a newspaper that has been part of the daily culture. How has been for Hindu the revival, what has been some of the things that has been interesting from a learning point of view? What has been your experience? I wouldn't be underplaying it if I said that it was the first time in the life that we experienced something like this. And your absolute right being an English paper and being more metro-centric. That is more Chennai, Coimbatore, Madurai, Pondi, that kind of a paper. So there was a little more pressure on us in terms of distribution etc. Because in smaller towns I agree with what Mr. Reddy said. There was not so much pressure in the smaller towns. Even we felt whatever circulation we had in a small town Tamil Nadu didn't get affected. In the metro there was some impact obviously because lots of high-rise buildings and stuff like that. We came around it pretty fast. April was bad. April was bad I think for most of us because it was almost like a handbrake being pulled in a car running at full speed. So it came to a screeching halt. And then from May onwards I think things started picking up. Both from a distribution and an advertising perspective. April was X, May was 2X, double of April and June was 80% more than May. So the advertising money seems to be still a long way to go. But the trend line is clearly there to be seen. So also circulation. Like Mr. Reddy said today in Tamil Nadu we are at roughly around 80% of our original circulation. In Kerala we are at almost 95-98. Kerala was the least affected. So VC will tell you more about that. But Kerala was the least affected for us. Again in Andhra we are back to about 75% of our circulation. And so also in Karnataka. So that was the journey. But the three things if you ask me that we learned and we did in this were one was staying relevant. Because every day was a new day. This city is getting locked down. That city is opening. This is happening. Every day was you came to office or you woke up in the morning and it was a new day. So staying relevant was a challenge for us. And we had to be therefore staying relevant and being agile. These were the two things we had to be very very fast at. For example what we did quickly we converted both sports star and frontline into full digital magazine. We have not printed a single issue of sports star. Never happened before. And what has happened is in both those subscriptions have gone up. You know even under the digital format. Obviously it has a niche audience who read both sports star and frontline. So we converted them directly into digital. Last three months they've been they've been no physical copies of sports star and frontline which have done very very well. Our digital transformation obviously has got accelerated much. Necessity is the mother of invention. So digital transformation which we knew was happening in our company has got hugely accelerated by this. So we had to be agile in making that happen. And whatever advertising was there whenever an advertising advertiser came on board. He was saying okay I know your circulation is not 100%. So maybe it is you're claiming it is 80 maybe it is 60 maybe it is 70. How are you going to add value therefore make up for that value. So a lot of lessons we learned on how to be agile on pricing how to be agile on value additions that we give on the digital front etc. But the most important thing I think that and I think Hindu had a huge advantage over that was it was a trust deficit period. It is still a trust deficit period. There was a lot of fear. People were scared etc. And I think there Hindu definitely had a March is that it was a trusted paper. So therefore we were able to build on that a lot. I don't know if you're aware but we published almost on the end of March. We published a covid book ebook which we translated into 15 languages which told people about the pandemic and what are the symptoms etc. And about last week we have published another ebook which tells you how to manage the disease about mental health and all that. Same thing and in terms of editorial a lot more space got taken up by mental being activities at home parenting. We had to change almost not the DNA of the paper but definitely the mix of the paper had to change and change quickly to take care of how the consumer was now behaving in the house. So both from an editorial perspective from a circulation perspective and from an advertising perspective. If you were to put into three buckets I think we were challenged and we responded by being agile staying relevant and building on the trust that Hindu had. These are the three things that we did during the during the lockdown. Interesting what you say about relevance and agility and also trust. I think trust is something which I think I'll come back to in the conversation because I think it has a big role to play in the reemergence and also relevance at this point in time. I would come to I would like to ask you because there in Kerala if you see one of the most trusted media groups covid has been relatively better managed as a state is what we know. There is a huge amount of love towards the morning newspaper as such. How has been your experience? Has there been some of the same challenges or it also was a period where the issue happened and there's one of the biggest advertising seasons. For for retail especially in Kerala and how is all all all this being panned out for for Manurama and what are the learnings so if you could just. Okay to start with you know we have been hearing this you know new norm you know we got to live with etc. But Kerala I think this new norm has been in practice for the last few years because we had the NEPA virus and everybody knows how we manage that and then we had multiple flights. So you know disaster and Kerala you know we go hand in hand and therefore managing that we have been pretty good at it and you must have heard about our health minister Shailaja teacher. You know and she's you know now known across the world of how she managed or our health department managed the virus if you know if you remember the first covid case was found out in Kerala. It was on January 30th it was a medical student who returned from Wuhan she was found with she was you know tested positive and you know when the problem started in China itself our state went into action. We started you know tracking everybody who is coming from abroad because you know we have millions of tourists who come in. We have also a million plus diaspora across the world who keep coming back. So there was a tracking of those people started very very early I think that was one of the reasons why we could contain. So you know if you remember in Italy and in Kerala the covid was found in almost the same time. But come May you will find that around 14% of the cases in Italy they died whereas in Kerala actually in May the number of deaths were only two. Now after that we opened our borders to our friends from outside Kerala as well as from outside the country. And we had a very disciplined the quarantine practice where institutional quarantine was done in the beginning and you know all that really helped. Okay if you look now we are registering on an average in the last one week about 200 cases and almost about 95% of the cases you will find are coming from abroad. Okay so we have been able to manage to a fairly large extent and we also have I would say a fairly decent fairly disciplined population who listen to the you know to the organizers and to the administration and that really helped a lot. And today we stand at around 5600 cases out of his 3000 orders been cured and so the active cases around 2000 and with a death rate of 27 that's the least you know and if you look at the fatality rate it's less than 0.5% which is perhaps one of the best in the world. Okay that is about the pandemic and secondly about the distribution of the newspapers right from the beginning as Mr. Reddy said and as Suri said you know we have been able to distribute the newspaper right from day one of COVID. Because of the government intervention both at the center and the state where we said that very clearly established that you know newspaper is not going to spread the virus so we have been able to convince that and even in the containment area we have been able to get the newspaper distributed. So you know we are distributing around 98% to 98 to 99% of virtually the same number is being distributed so that is one thing. And the second thing about the distribution of newspapers that you know we also learn and I think the entire newspaper industry needs to learn that what actually helped us to survive all these days is a circulation revenue. Okay because unlike many other urban areas where even the English newspapers Hindu is a different difference unlike the urban areas the newspaper was distributed either free of cost or marginal cost. We have been able to sell newspaper at reasonably good price across Kerala by all newspapers and that has really helped us to survive in the last few months. And I think that is also a great lesson which I think the newspapers have to learn that don't put all your eggs in one basket and you need to actually get revenue out of circulation also which I believe the digital also is learning in the hard way I must say. So these are some of the learnings that we had. So yeah I am going to come back to the learning on circulation because I think it is a very important point from a re-emergence point of view to the topic today. Let me go to Abhinav now. Abhinav hi, would it be fair to say that you know this was a good time from a medium point of view that consumers being locked at home having more time to spend on digital devices and things like that. We all know that television viewership went up pretty much pretty high in 30-40% news was one of the biggest gainers in that and consumption patterns changed across pop straight across consumer groups and it was one of the biggest beneficiaries. What has been, is that something which is what from a print point of format point of view, how would you look at this emergence even though it's a very small window, what would those learnings be which you yourself have been associated with print also in your career. So if you wear both the hats together and see what will you tell based on the learnings in the last three to four months. So hi, thanks a lot for the question. So first of all, why don't I start from you know where we started from. Asian F News Network, we do not see this as a traditional media industry but as it's a digital industry where or a B2C internet industry where we have at the back end either our prints or our radio channels or our TV channels or it could be anything but the front end for us, for us it's a digital company so digital and the focus is also clear when they selected the management team. For example, I'm not a journalist, I've not worked in media before, I'm an internet guy, I'm an engineer but I'm largely an internet guy. Yeah, so I have a tech background, so for us the asiannetnews.com is the operating, everything else, our print is called Kannada Prabha, our TV channels are called Subarna, Asiannet News, our radios are called 91.9, Heethiko and others, so everything that just formed the back end. So once the positioning is clear, from our side we were absolutely fine, I mean there were more people under lockdown, fortunately, like Mr. Malik Vagis has just said, we are very, very fortunate that all the markets where we are operating have been extremely well managed. Of course we discussed Kerala, Karnataka has been an exceptional sexist story, the BSY government, whatever they have done, I can't just thank them enough, considering that Bangalore is more comparable with Delhi and Mumbai, you have the figures in Delhi, you have the figures in Mumbai and look at the figures of Bangalore, everything that they have done, it's just world class and because of that, actually for the Q1 in January when the first case was detected in Kerala, from there onwards we started on the conservative business plan that maybe will not grow as aggressive, maybe we need to focus more on cost and all. We've just closed our first quarter results, we are exceeding our targets, so that's a good story at least for us. Traffic wise, yes immense traffic spike, within the last 100 days our traffic all more than doubled actually, so fortunately if you go the industry wide, we are the only South Indian player in top 10 in the country as of now. We managed to beat NDTV, we are ranked 9th on total 3 ways. The entire thing was that just continue, since there were some hesitation and fortunately a lot of my colleagues there have done a great job in educating and creating awareness around the citizens that the virus cannot be spread through the print. Despite that there was a hate, there was some hesitance but then we started focusing more on the digital so that more and more people were actually consuming our print offering that is Kannada Prabha through our digital platform. In terms of revenue, the usual players, the real estate, the local retailers, the jewellery, the hospitality industry, it's almost negligible. So fair in March itself we started focusing on the new area like online education, I've got some good clients there, e-commerce technology, some of the gaming companies. But still as an industry it's not all rosy, we have yet to come out. I would say April was more like a crisis, may have been slightly better. June we are almost coming out of it, so now what happens from here onwards will really determine but it is clear this is not going to be a year of phenomenal growth. Most likely I think the crisis report says overall as an industry there will be 18% degrowth, I hope that it's not an understatement but I think this looks like that. We would be really happy if without any growth if we manage to have, I'm talking just about the print by the way, if we manage to have the same level of performance as previous year. Digital will grow but overall otherwise industry may actually degrow. But yeah we are constantly sharing best practices with each other, a lot of things the colleagues have helped, the things that we could do. So yeah I mean it's a growing learning phase and I think one of the toughest ones that we have seen in the last 15 years. For me that's my career, I'm still in 30s so for me this is the first year where I've seen that things are not growing but sort of stagnating. So still open. Yeah I mean every crisis actually brings opportunities, I will come to that and also the interesting point that I'm taking over which I'll bring it back is about where is the position clear as to what industry are you in and hence kind of use all your assets around it to kind of go back and define what is the consumer satisfaction that you want to do. But I'd like to come to Eswar Eswar and thank you for being patient because you are a most integral part in this at least at this point in time the advertiser is the most critical element in it. And you also represent the category at this point in time which also has gone through a lot of challenges because of the current situation. And also as a category real estate is something which depends a lot on print because of the way the nature in which print actually delivers to some of the category objectives. How has it been for you at the revival? Have you been advertising not advertising? Have you been waiting for or the faith on the medium has been continuing but you're waiting or how has been the last 100 or days as an advertiser from a print point of view? See obviously we had a big lockdown out here in Chennai so the lockdown was there and then it was opened up and then we again had a lockdown and especially in a category like us which is a real estate. People have to really come out of their homes, see the property and then only buy at least 80-90% of the purchase happens like that. So you are actually unable to achieve anything of that because of this lockdown. So we actually didn't advertise anything at all during the lockdown period be it the period of April and May. Even though we had some visibility in the TV medium for sure in the month of April and May but we didn't have any exposure to print in the month of April and May. Because it didn't make any business sense for us to do any ads at that point of time. Once the lockdown opened here on June 1, so we opened the lockdown, we were the first ones to actually advertise. And we have been, Kassarand has always been the biggest printers on print in Chennai and Tamil Nadu for the last 5 years consistently. So we have been very heavy on the print because the category demands it one and it works for us from a tactical perspective. Tactical perspective in the sense you expect people to walk into the site during the weekends because that's the time that they have. And you also kind of heavily advertise during the weekends. So we were the first ones to advertise once the lockdown was open here. And we take bigger spaces, we actually take spaces like J-1, J-2 in the front page and we also advertise across newspapers at one go. So it is not that we advertise only English or only Tamil, we advertise in all the newspapers and that's what we did when we actually opened up from the lockdown. We advertise in all the 4-5 newspapers that's available here, English and Tamil. And we advertise in June 1st, we can and then we backed up again advertising the June 2nd, we can as well. So it's not that we tried once and we stopped it. So we did again in the June 2nd, we can as well. So what it actually did was that we were able to clock close to 150 units of sales in those 15 days of time. It came as a big shocker for us also because people are still in the lockdown mindset. You don't know whether home buying is there in their mind even to buy with job losses happening here and there with salary cuts. We were not sure at all whether this kind of heavy advertising will work, heavy advertising in print will work. But it actually worked for us. I mean 150 units we sold in a matter of 2 weeks is like our regular month, I mean regular non-lockdown month, non-lockdown month sale. So we didn't expect it to work honestly speaking but we were ready to take the plunge and see what happens. It's all units in Chennai, it's all for units in Chennai. Yes, I mean 85-90% in Chennai and then the spirit is across Coimbatore and Bangalore. So I mean it actually worked for us and we being a category leader here in Chennai, we thought that we had to do it to move the industry. Otherwise the industry doesn't move at all. We being the biggest have to advertise, I mean have to advertise to bring confidence to everybody else as well and the industry as well. So actually that's what we did and it worked for us, I mean it actually worked for us on ground. Lovely, that's really reassuring because I think that's something which we've been telling that there are certain categories where this works really well. And even in situations like this. So now I think there is a very interesting starting point because like Mr. Reddy said about going deeper down younger audiences and things like that. I'm going to make sure his rates go up. I have already bugged in the rates. Suraj, you spoke about relevance and agility and trust and all of that. Actually you spoke a very important point about not just depending on your advertising revenue but also sort of spreading your risks and things like that. And Abhidha also spoke about being very clear on what business are you in, right? That's where I'm coming to the most important question of how can print re-emerge? At some point I also even think that probably this has been a very good experience because most of the articles or webinars that you have seen, everybody consistently says that this crisis is an opportunity. And I think if you see most of the articles, most of these things, while everybody is being honest that it has been tough times, it's also an opportunity that everybody says. And a lot of companies, a lot of industries that are using this crisis as an opportunity to provide their business and sort of transform their business, right? Suraj spoke about the digital acceleration that happened in your company, right? So I am asking a question and I'm going to try to break it down into two parts. If print has to now emerge, looks like July onwards, there will be better consumer sentiment, there will be more demand. Lockdown will get released, there will be more and more people and jobs and money in the market and things like that. I have my question and I'm going to come to each one of you in this, but my question is that how can print re-emerge now? There is one angle of content format distribution and there is another angle of revenue model, right? Which is about subscription versus advertising and all of that. So let me take the first part, which is the content format part of soft print, right? If print has to re-emerge itself, do you think, and I'm going to come to each one of you, but my question, the larger question is, if print has to re-emerge as a medium, because few years back, print was the largest medium in the country. Now it is number two, number three, depending on the digital, number two, it is a very strong number three in that sense. However, it is growing unlike some of the other markets, it is credible, it is working for a lot of categories. On the other hand, there is also a lot of P20 happening on digital, right? There is a lot of snacking of news that is happening, formats are changing, all of that content consumption itself is changing, even for some of those hardcore print loyalists are doing this in the last three, four months, right? So if print has to re-emerge, should the content and the format of print has to change is my first question. And if yes, how? Let me come to Suresh first, because you spoke about digital acceleration. Do you think this is a great opportunity to pivot on the changes? You also briefly spoke about sports star in front, the front line changing some of those formats and things like that. But can you tell us, is this the beginning of a new sort of a re-emergence of content and format of print that you used to see earlier? I wouldn't say it's the beginning of a new emergence that's the only disconnect. The thing is that if you know, all of us have been in this industry, we all know that this happened quite what, close to 10 years ago that we realized that digital is something that print will have to develop, et cetera, et cetera. And it will have to grow along with digital. A lot of print companies invested in digital more than 10, 15, 20 years ago. The first e-paper to be launched I think was the Hindu in 2005 in this country. So various things have happened. What this pandemic has done though, and that's what you're interested in, is the fact that we all had these plans, but everybody thought that we had a longer runway to get into digital and make digital part of the print offering. Because let's face it, at the end of the day, at least as far as Hindus concerned, we are clear that let's say a few years down the line, I don't think we want to be a media company, we want to be a content company. And we want to be a content company that is serving not only India but global audiences. India diaspora across the world as well. And if that's the vision, and that's the long-term vision for most of us, it has to be platform agnostic. And this again was a wisdom that we had. What this pandemic has done is fast-tracked this whole thing. Let me give you a few examples. In my organization, we have collapsed the digital sales force and the advertising sales force. Now, it is one large sales force selling both digital and print. And this happened, it took a lot of training, and all of us were at home in the month of April and May. So we did hours and hours of training with our sales team today. My whole sales team of 200, 256 people to be precise are actually selling digital and print. One of the changes that we were contemplating that we want to do, we did it first April. So that change happened. Sportstar and I already spoke about have already gone digital. Editorially, all my editorial staff is pivoting much faster than they would have done normally. The process had begun in my organization, editorial staff, because that is the backbone. The content driven, whatever you put up, digital is only a medium, you need the content. So what happened was the pivoting of the editorial staff also got accelerated. Today I have a much larger bunch of people thinking digital first, even in a newspaper company. We had a few people thinking digital first in a much larger newspaper first contingent editorial, like a traditional print company. Now it's almost 50-50, there are so many more people thinking digital first. So this whole thing has got accelerated, point number one. Point number two, which VC touched upon was this whole pricing game has changed. In February 2019, Hindu went pay, Hindu digital went pay, few months later Hindu e-paper went pay, business line, digital went pay, business line, e-paper went pay, everything was pay. By the time we hit the pandemic, we were all behind the pay wall. And now we find a lot of publications now trying to get behind the pay wall because of the pandemic obviously. Also, we are the most expensive English newspaper in the country as far as cover price is concerned. Again, a journey that we had started more than five, these are the things and I agree with VC complete. These are the things that are paying off for us. In Delhi if you go, we have 10 rupees on a weekday, 15 rupees on a weekend. Everywhere else we have 7 rupees, 8 rupees on a weekday, 10 rupees on a weekend. These are expensive cover prices for an English newspaper like we followed the regionals in that. So the economics of the business have changed, the acceleration towards digital has changed and this whole thing about delivering value proposition to the advertiser. Obviously, the questions that are being asked are getting harder and harder now. Money is getting lesser and lesser. Therefore, this whole transition is something that has happened at a much faster phase for us. Both the economics of the business and the construct of the organization itself is going through a change. A change that we had already envisaged, what this has done is it has fast-tracked. And therefore, yes, what will emerge will be, I think, different than what it was. Okay, so I think that's a very important point of how it all got fast-tracked and realisation has to be far more than what it probably would not have been. It was normal. Mr. Reddy, I would like to ask you, is this the same from your point of view also because you are in a very different market. Any way in which you see, you also have a very strong digital offering. There is also a sort of integration between the two. But is this the only thing that is required or are there more changes that is required from a format point of view? For example, across the globe there are evening newspapers, digital shows certain role of snackable content maybe. But in that understanding probably is still the physical copy and it's all about habit formation. So is there any way of re-looking at the business now that it's sort of an inflection point from both content and format point of view? Is that something? Before coming to that, first of all I was to say that this was a good news from Mr. Ishwar saying that print definitely works. In spite of so many revolutions and issues and all that, print will come back and print will work. And print is what we say is still the more credible medium. It is considered as a credible medium. So print will continue to survive and it is a habit formation. Now people will not be as comfortable to read news and other means of devices or anything like that by holding the newspaper in their hand. And I think it will continue to grow even in the next decade also. I don't see anything that print will disappear or will go back to that. However, we have to put our efforts in developing the digital equivalent of the newspaper. We have to work on the editorial content. We have content on the formats also. The newspaper formats also will have to work. I think we have to give more what we call a newspaper for everybody in the family and all that. We have already come to those formats. Like we have to be giving the news in a smaller formats. In a shorter this thing we have to convey the meaning of it. We should catch the and we should also evolve strategies and all that where we should start catching the reader. The young readers, what we say, we should address to them and try to get more readership from that format. And coming to the marketing part of it, yes. We should be needing the package that both print and the digital and work together so that as the advertisement pie is sinking we should give the best mileage to the advertiser by working out combos, by working packages and all that. That is how I think both print and the digital can survive together for a longer period. Okay. So yeah, I think that's very interesting point for different audiences. How do you create different kinds of news offerings? That's something that's very interesting. When I come to you, Manorba is a group which has been also pioneers in getting a digital offering to Malayali. Not only in Kerala but outside Kaila as well. There is also different print formats which has got very, very strong sort of following whether it is Vanita or some of the other whether it is Vida or the financial magazine or health magazine, something like that. My question again, the same is that however we have not seen any drastic change in the way the format is looked at. For example, a lot of the younger audiences are embracing print even in Kerala. For Kerala there is a growth happening. Even younger audiences are interested to get into in-depth analysis given by news paper. We have never seen something which is a special offering only to them, for example. Or another format which is a digital only format or a combination of that. Anything which is from a publication house having such a great success across formats. What is the new thing that this pandemic has caused? Or is there anything like that? Ploma content and format point of view for re-emerging as an industry. To start with, let me just say that I don't believe in a digital first or print first. I would say that digital, those who want to be first, let them get into the digital. Those who want print, first thing in the morning, if you want to read the newspaper, let them read the newspaper. That's exactly what Malala Manor is doing. As Krishna rightly said, we have been early investors on digital space and we have done fairly well. Not only that, we have done well, we have done very well in the sense that we have reached about 35 million unique visitors for Manorama Online. And it is growing and it has said that we have also grown tremendously during the pandemic time. To my belief, it's not about the format. I would say it is more about the re-emergence of the legacy medium. The legacy medium actually stands for the credibility and the verifiable news, all of that. That is what the legacy medium offer and the format could be very different. It could be the digital, it could be the print, it could be anything. We are trying to be in all those spaces, filling out a cross. Again, talking about the print, which is my first love, I just wanted to say that what really happened immediately after the lockdown. Two examples I'll give is when the automobile showrooms opened up. On the first day, one of the guys, we had actually a jacket of a certain automobile. The dealer called up and said he had 200 bookings on the same day. Just like our friend has talked about the real estate, 200 bookings on the day the jacket appeared. The second case was on July 3rd, the first Malayalam film to come on OTT, Sufiyum Sujadeem. You probably would have heard about or seen, some of you may have seen the film. With much difficulty, we got on to Malayalam and Auruma print. After it came on print, until then it was actually coming on digital, it was coming on television everywhere. The day it appeared on print, the producer called me up and said, I must say that the response that we got today is perhaps better than all other medium put together. That was actually a great testimonial for print and I think print definitely works. And I would say that for many more years to come, it will work in Kerala. At the same time, we will continue to invest in the digital space to cater to those who want to see it on digital first. But the pandemic what is exposed is about the shallowness of the digital medium, where the trust deficit was huge during these times and people were giving all kinds of wrong news. Then people will click on a Hindu or a nationate or a Manorama news to actually get on to the correct news. So I would say it is a re-emergence of the legacy media. Okay, that's very interesting because I think I don't think there was any time where the trust was sort of bringing back the confidence back into the medium. Let me ask you, it has also come up in some of the questions which people have asked. All this is fine, however, how are you going to make the physical format of the print exciting for today's millennials who are all the time glued onto their mobile screens when any time they can get news from any sources because of the mobile screen. You are somebody who has addressed all the formats, how will that happen? What is it that print can do to re-emerge considering that a lot of habits are going to continue? So let me just start by saying that I absolutely agree with everything that Mr Varghese has said. The Hindu, Malayalam Manorama, Asian news, Sakshi is always going to be more reliable, especially when it comes to news, it's about credibility. If you even take the global market, just look at the leaders, Lafigaro, New York Times, Washington Post. So what you will see, there will be the legacy gold standard brands like a lot of brands who are available on this con. That's part one. Part two is the new age start-ups who are starting the digital first brands. There will always be issues related to credibility. In my opinion, success will come to the legacy brand who could manage to open the cutting edge sort of tech start-up-ish kind of talent. And the New York Times dot com, the Washington Post dot com of India are still emerging. I mean, next 10 years we will see and I'm pretty sure that at least the top four or five players are going to be coming from the legacy brand. People who can successfully pivot. So I absolutely agree with Mr Varghese. And also the second point, I mean, even internally, a lot of my colleagues, the Asian news are much older than I am. So they also say the same thing that in the morning I need to touch my newspaper with my cup of tea or cup of coffee. So these are the habits that these guys have been in for the last 20, 30 years. So that cannot be changed. However, let's just go to the slightly younger audience. The teenagers, the 20s, or even someone like me in 30s. 2004 was the last cable connection. I mean, once I moved abroad, it was always, you know, the online streaming. And fortunately, afterwards, the Netflix guys came, Amazon Prime came later and Hotstar came and so on. In my house, I got, I mean, a cable connection just to monitor what is happening on nation and news or Subana. But otherwise, from overall yearly consumption would be in minutes. It's not even an hour. We don't watch it. Newspaper, I've not bought a newspaper for, I don't know, 15 years maybe now. So, and there are a lot of people from my generation and much younger than me who have not actually started reading newspaper. They directly moved to digital first. So coming back to your question, we are doing experimentation, you know, in terms of on the website, what we call the user experience, the UI and UX. So, you know, redesigning, of course, you can't touch master too much because, you know, that represents the gold standard, the legacy brand. But in terms of, you know, what do we present and all the color combination, how could you make it more exciting for younger generation? At the end of the day, once again, I believe it's not going to be about the medium. It is just going to be about the right producing right content being credible in it. And then formatting, no one can, you know, today, like this is going to be the format. It's still an experimentation phase. Next couple of years will really determine some early patterns are emerging already. But it is too early for me to, you know, make a conclusive statement that this is going to work and this is not going to work. But, yeah, I mean, eventually the proportion of digital versus the traditional media. I think I believe digital will, you know, increase, it will keep on increasing. And the legacy brand will be the ultimate winner. I mean, so yeah. Okay, so that brings to the other point. Second point, which is of how the medium can re-emerge is around the offering to advertisers. Advertising revenues, the other big part of it, right? It's controlling whatever 60, 70, 70%, 70% of the revenues, right? On one hand, digital has credibility, trust, all of that, which is now paying off, right? For it is, I mean, the automobile example or the real estate example shows that. On the other hand, there is this huge goldmine of regional knowledge nuances, understanding of the market, which is something which every marketer would want to pay probably a premium for, right? Because today it probably is easier to do a national campaign than to win in smaller regional pockets because that's becoming far more difficult to understand regional nuances, crack the insights regionally and then create compelling storytelling within regions. Whereas print has a huge benefit over some of the other medium, right? Because there are no regions inside out. So my first question is to issue a thing that if such a print re-emerges itself and comes to you in a very different way of paying a premium on the trust aspect, on the credibility aspect and also the regional connect aspect of it. As advertisers, we will be open to paying that because like we said, you cannot be consistently relying on a certain pricing model. It has to change at some point in time based on the inherent strength of the medium. The strength of the medium is trust, credibility and regional focus and regional expertise. Are advertisers ready to pay that premium today? I'll come to all of you later saying how do you get that, but let me just give you a question to share the issues point of view on this. I think in this situation, right? The last thing or the first thing that anybody would do from a business perspective is to cut the marketing cost, okay? So when I'm talking about cutting the marketing cost, it means all the stakeholders in that are going to bear the burden. If the stakeholders like the print or the online or any medium of communication for that matter has to play a role in my success, then I think that probably I will, me as an advertiser and as a biggest vendor in the print media, I would say that it has to only come down for a very simple fact that the business has to evolve and move and things has to happen first. We are still in a very nascent stage of after lockdown and I don't think we are ready. Let's say six months down the line or if print has to re-emerge its pricing model based on trust and credibility, then will you be willing to pay a premium? I'm not sure right now, I mean if you ask me the question honestly, I'm not sure right now because we don't know in this kind of scenario what will happen next week and the next month, right? If you're asking me to estimate for six months, I'm not sure what will happen once but what I could say is if you want to get a lot more of advertising revenue from an advertiser like me, me being the biggest vendor, I can talk for it. For me, I will say that I will need a lot of editorial support as well. Here they are all talking about content, editorial and stuff like that. So I would only say how much, I mean when all this media, right? On a small negative news, you latch upon to it and then you make it a big news, right? So a small success being from anybody, why can't you actually also make that a big story? Only when you do that, right? My business evolves, the whole industry evolves and then co-existence happens. So it can't be like the editorial writes saying that real estate is slow and then negative thing is there, construction delay. You can't write then and again you can't come and ask me for a premium even after one month or one week or six months, that will not work like that at all. I am saying, when we are saying, sorry, I am only saying, I don't mind paying a premium at any point of time, but I need to start a value addition happening out of the mediums as such, unless I see value addition, I am not saying I will take a spot, I am not saying you actually give me a space, I am not talking about those things. I can anyway get out from the monies I have, but I am saying the general sentiment now that you are saying print is the most trusted medium of communication, you are saying that people read the print first and they actually start believing on whatever you are writing and talking, right? So write something nice about everything. I know, I actually understand, negativity makes a lot more of a bigger news and a small amount of positivity, but there is nothing wrong in writing good, positive, optimistic things that helps you and helps us also in return. So that's the only way that you could get a premium out of anybody. Otherwise you increasing the rates or me wanting to pay you for the increasing rates, I am not sure it would work even now or after 6 months actually. Okay, so you think that the energy bring more value than it is a question of value versus, right? I just want to ask, and this is open to VC, Mr. Reddy or Suresh, saying that there is this whole balance between subscription versus advertising, right? Advertising is about how much of a premium that you can probably command based on the strength, inherent strength that you have and subscription is a functional number of pages and all of that. There is a cost link to that also from a production point of view. How do you see the balance changing if the industry has to re-emerge? How do you increase the share of subscription in a situation where, for example, even a digital monetization for a lot of people, there is a question saying that do we even have the legacy players have the digital monetization model looked at very closely? So how do you bring that balance and what is the right balance? Hello. First I will address the advertising point of it. Apparently the print media appears to be very costly, but it is very adaptable. Hello. Yeah, we can hear you. It is very adaptable. We can match the requirement of the advertiser to the target audience. At the end we can also work out a good cost efficiency and we will like for a hello. Hello. Yeah, we can hear you. Yeah, yeah. We can have an advertisement work out and a package work out for a Casa Grande client and also a small client in the local area where he would like to give some retakes or he would like to give birthday celebrations and all that. No, we can match that. No, like Sakshi we have tabloids which we have a constancy level affordability of advertisements. So we give the local news and we change two pages for that constancy and we make it more relevant to that reader as well as the advertiser. So that is the beauty of the print media as of now because of the technology available at all. So now hello. Hello. Yeah, we can hear you. Yeah, yeah. Coming to the subscription part. Yeah, basically the as it is the ROI for the print medium is very less because of the cover prices. Cover prices are not really very great. So of course if you have to add numbers and if you have to increase circulation in the certain settlement and all that we can go for subscriptions also. And the subscription will definitely work because it will be giving the reach and also what do you say the reader would be interested to pay value for the money? No. Okay. Okay. So yeah. The way I see this spanning out over a period of time is like this Kishan that cover prices will increase. If anything this pandemic has thought this apart from people like regional papers and papers like Hindu, the other English papers have already started talking to each other saying you know we should up cover prices. There's already some conversation that's going on about increasing cover prices. They've learned the lesson the hard way as they say. So and also it's a right time because the reader is learning to pay for content. Right. Today a lot of things thanks to people like Amazon, Netflix, etc. The viewer, the reader has learned to pay for content. The Indian reader finally realizes the holiday is over and he has to start paying for content. Look at even your telecom cost. I can tell you telecom charges are also going to go up slowly and steadily as Gio has already shown us. So slowly we are learning to pay for content. Right time therefore to harden your cover prices. The way I see the economics of this business changing. I think the balance between which you mentioned of advertising and cover prices will become more balanced. I think it will come to 60, 40 or even a 50, 50 would be the idea. What it will then do is actually advertising rates will harden because the less the dependency on advertising rates the more you can afford to harden. Today why are advertising rates so soft? Why do everybody come to the table and negotiate as far as you know because you are supremely dependent on advertising. No advertising you don't have enough revenue. The movement is balanced. I think there will be more. Why does everybody look at a Singapore straight time and say wow one quarter page ad per page. What a lovely layout. It looks like a fabulous paper. Because they can afford to put one quarter page ad in a paper and publish a 24 page paper. Because the cover prices are high, advertising rates are high and therefore they can deliver great content to the reader. Please understand the ultimate objective is to reach the reader with great content. The advertiser is piggyback riding on that vehicle. It's not the other way around. It's not been created for the advertiser and the reader being a by-product of that. So because of this, this will balance out. On the digital front, I think the brands that are like he said whether it's Hindu, Malayalam, Pram, Sat Sri, Eshan and these are all very strong brands. And at the end of the day, the strength of the brand will come through in digital as well. So you will start to be able to charge a premium on the digital space as well. We have already proven it. In Hindu, we are all behind the paywall on everything. And we are going to keep... We are behind the paywall. We are launching iOS. There was a question on that. There was a question on that thing. Correct. So I mean the reader will pay for good content. The reader will pay for credible content. The reader will pay for content that is well researched, that is well put out, because as VC said, today you have a lot of trash out there on the digital space. So the movement, you are able to distinguish that with great content, unfortunately. We have... Just to give you a small example, this Sushant Singh Rajput's Suicide. More than have seen a single speculative article from the Hindu about what happened, et cetera, et cetera. We reported the facts and whatever article we reported, below that there was a suicide helcline number in every Sushant Singh article that you read. So there is a certain discipline, a certain way we look at editorial, the way we want to put out for the reader. If you keep the fundamentals of the business in mind, that your reader is your primary target audience and you need to deliver great value to the reader and great content to the reader, the rest of it will fall in place. And charge him for it, make him pay for it. Don't give it to him free. Charge him for it, the rest of it will all fall into place. That's how I see the dynamics evening out in this book. Okay. Before I wind up, any closing thoughts on this, VC? Yeah. Kishan, my point is, I think Suresh has concluded in a fantastic manner is exactly what I also had in mind. But taking a cue from a question which you asked earlier about should this paper be paid premium, I am just requesting Kishan and his fraternity to give us our current rate, yeah? Okay. And we are not asking for premium, but give us our current rate. Secondly, I just came out of a negotiation before this meeting and the guys were saying from Delhi that, you know, we are doing so bad so the print should support us. Now, are we doing so well to support a company that is perhaps 100 times, you know, more revenue than us? And I mean, on the contrary, I will probably ask them, you know, you are asking about one-to-one, will you give one car free for another car or one bike free for another bike? Okay. I think there has to be a limit to all this. And I think we need to work as partners, the media, the client and the advertising agencies and the advertising agency being the link between the two should take the initiative for that. That's what I got to say, yeah. Kishan, he, Kishan, we see on the panel and with an advertising guy moderating it, he had to have a shot. Let me tell you, I've been on a lot of panels with him, he always takes a shot. So the book's not easy. Thank you so much everyone. I think it was very interesting because there are two things which is very, very clearly emerging and I think you have overshot on time. Some of the questions which were asked, I try to include in some of the questions as well for other questions which we couldn't, I'm sorry, due to lack of time. But I think some of the things are very, very clear that I think there is definitely a re-emergence and the legacy players definitely have an advantage. The reader is calling the shots, but however there is a lot of merit in leveraging the existing strengths whether it is trust, whether it is the content that we are providing, all of that. It's also hard to see that clearly because things are working for a lot of categories what you guys discussed about. So thank you so much for all your thoughts. I don't think this is a topic which is, which can be discussed in an hour. Thank you so much for all your feedback, all your thoughts and stay focused. Thank you so much again. Thank you very much. Thank you.