Hindustan to increase its focus on youth in the coming months

The Hindi daily will launch a slew of youth-centric activities in the next few months. The newspaper also plans to launch an edition from Gaya in July.

Summer is the time when school students are either busy enjoying their long vacations or are busy charting out their plan of action for life, preparing for competitive examinations. To cash in on this, newspapers across the country line up a series of activities aimed at school going children.

Hindi daily Hindustan, from the stable of Hindustan Media Ventures Ltd (HMVL), which recently completed its foray into Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, is gearing up to woo the young readers in the summer months through a series of education fairs, counselling sessions, scholarship programmes and content rich, youth-centric supplements.

Along with its regular youth centric supplements such as Nayi Dishayen, Hindustan Jobs and Jaano English, the group will focus on on-ground activities during the May-July period. For the record, Nayi Dishayen is a weekly career and education supplement for students, while Hindustan Jobs is a jobs supplement and Jaano English is brought out in collaboration with BBC Hindi.

To ensure that youngsters from 9th to 12th standard don't lose their connect with the newspaper during the summer vacations and competitive examinations, Hindustan has lined up a series of activities including scholarships (Pratibha Samman), education fair and counselling sessions across 18 cities, in tune with the daily's punch line, 'Tarakki ko chahiye naya nazariya'.

For the record, Pratibha Samman felicitates meritorious students of Classes 10 and 12 of more than 2,000 schools across Bihar, Jharkhand, UP, Uttarakhand and Delhi, with scholarships and recognition.

Talking to afaqs!, Amit Chopra, CEO, HMVL, says, "In case of UP, while we have completed our geographical expansion and are available in the entire state, we continue to be severely under-valued in terms of readership and monetisation. So, for the next 12 – 15 months, our focus will be on improving readership numbers and extracting better value for our large presence in that state. Also we will continue to remain focussed on the youth audience and will also embark on more youth centric activities over the next few months."

Further explaining on why the main focus will be on on-ground activations and not special youth supplements, he explains, "I believe that stand-alone products or supplements do not make much of a business sense and activations allow opportunities for deeper connect with the youth audience." He believes that standalone print products for kids are not viable as advertisers prefer television in case of kids audience. It would more be a social responsibility of newspapers towards growing ‘reading’ per se and probably an investment into getting future readers for brand and the category.

To strengthen its position among the youth, the group also plans to introduce the content of Hindustan Nandan in Bihar, informs Chopra. Hindustan Nandan is a weekly supplement that picks up content from Nandan magazine, a monthly title of the group.

In a separate development, the daily is in the midst of setting up its printing facility at Gaya. The group is expected to launch an edition from Gaya, Bihar in July. Hindustan will launch four sub-editions of the main Gaya edition. This will be Hindustan's fourth edition in Bihar. The group looks at an initial print run of 65,000 copies for Gaya.

Since retail advertising is not big in the city, the group expects to generate 15 per cent ad revenues from local advertising, including educational institutes, consumer durables and mobile shops.