Aroon Purie:The man who saw Tomorrow

He started the empire with a massive failure, a miscalculation that would have had most entrepreneurs scurrying for cover. India Today was first conceptualised as a window on India targeting the Non-Resident Indian - and while his editorial team succeeded in putting together a credible and competent product, the organisation could never come to grips with the marketing and distribution challenges. The International edition was consigned to the dust-bin - but not the product that had been created. It was re-engineered, and the NRI's loss became the Indian citizen's gain.

He's built his empire around the five letter word "Today". The bedrock was the runaway success of what was then a fortnightly English newsmagazine, India Today. He saw a need for quality newsmagazines in Indian languages, and proceeded to launch a slew of India Today versions in the vernacular - each a resounding success. He launched a music publishing business, and named it - you guessed right - Music Today. He launched a superlatively organised Internet newspaper christened The Newspaper Today, which, like many a dotcom, sank without a trace. When he forayed into television, the holding company was called TV Today and its first offering was the Hindi News Channel, Aaj Tak - which, surely, one can translate to "Until Today". The English news channel that he proceeded to launch is named, quite simply, Headlines Today. And when he felt that there was an opportunity to enter the newspaper business with a tabloid in Delhi, he dispensed with prefixes and suffixes - it's called Today.

The word Today seems to have ruled a large part of Aroon Purie's life and empire, but what emerges in a conversation with Impact editor Anant Rangaswami is that he is the man who sees Tomorrow. Read on; Aroon Purie talks about media yesterday, media today and, most importantly, media tomorrow.

There have been, for you, many defining moments at India Today, almost milestones. The Emergency, perhaps, was one such milestone. Can you talk us through three or four such milestones?

Firstly, I'm a very bad historian. Excuse me if I don't remember all the benchmarks. But a couple of them do come to mind; definitely 1977. That's when the elections took place after the Emergency was lifted. That's the time Indira Gandhi was thrown out - I think that's the time that India Today really took off. That's the time that there were so many stories that were coming out, that were suppressed during the Emergency. Then you had the change in Government, Mrs. Gandhi losing her deposit against a joker like Raj Narain, the first time that there was a non-Congress government in power, that too a coalition of parties headed by a character like Morarji Desai- very interesting times. That was the time that India Today captured the whole scene in a very imaginative and colourful way that got people's attention. From there on there was no looking back. We had a team of young reporters, who just went out and told it the way it was. It was good writing, good pictures and newspapers were just not up to it. That is where India Today established itself as a newsmagazine.

From then on, India has been through such a dramatic time, with the fall of the Janata Government in 1980 and the return of Indira Gandhi, the rise of Sanjay Gandhi, his death then the induction of Rajiv Gandhi, the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi and so on. It was such a turbulent period in India; an exciting time; it was ideal for a news magazine like India Today to report these events and it did it with clarity and credibility. That's why India Today has got its leadership position in the media.

It was originally conceived of as a magazine for the International Indian community...

It didn't work out. It's a funny thing, but actually India Today was born out of a failure. The fact is that we didn't realise how difficult it was to market such a product to Indians living abroad. Indians are scattered all over the place. North America was a major market, UK was another one. It's very difficult and expensive to reach them. We soon realised that this was going to be a very long haul. As an experiment, we put some copies into the domestic market and discovered that there was a greater degree of acceptability. Soon, from that point on, we started building on the domestic market. The big lesson we have learnt is to build a strong domestic market before you go international. You could apply this to any other product.

It's 30 years now, and you've been an unusual case in that we've had one player ruling for so long. Even when you went from fortnightly to weekly, you became the leader instantly. How do you see this whole genre - the general interest news magazine - panning out in the next ten years?

Firstly, I think the position of India Today in the whole media space is not fully appreciated. India Today has nearly 50% readership share of all English magazines and over two-and-half times its nearest rival. Its SEC A readership is more than its rival's total national readership. India Today is perhaps the only truly national media brand and, with its 5 editions, it has a readership of over 20 million. The combined readership of India Today English and Hindi is more than 50% of the readership share of the mighty Times of India and Nav Bharat Times with all its editions. The point of all this is that we are very uniquely placed but we are not finished. We have a clear growth path in language editions, there are 12 major languages still left, and in lateral extensions as we have done with Simply Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and now even community-wise with Simply Gujarati and Punjabi. And, then, Spice and Aspire. Plus there are many more in the pipeline.

It is a tougher and tougher market. You're competing with television, with the Internet.

I think that the whole media is in a crisis. It's a paradoxical situation. You have an exploding media, which is expanding in every segment - television, internet and print. But I think also everybody is questioning their basic assumptions. Who is our target audience? How do people get information? When do they want this information? What are they willing to pay for information? Has news become a commodity? By information I mean news, opinions, analyses. These are the questions everybody is asking themselves because the consumer is getting information from many different sources in real time. There is no waiting any more. In my opinion, this question is more critical for newspapers. Today, newspapers no longer break stories. I don't get my F.I.R. (First Information Report) from newspapers any longer. I get this from the evening broadcast or morning broadcast, or even my mobile phone. Newspapers have to go beyond just delivering what has happened the night before which I already know about. I think that's the crisis they are facing - and they haven't, to my mind, been able to successfully meet that challenge.