Sakaal
Type | Daily newspaper |
---|---|
Format | Broadsheet |
Language | Marathi |
Circulation | 1,400,000 Daily |
Sakal (Marathi: सकाळ, meaning "morning") is a Marathi language newspaper based in Pune, Maharashtra, India. The paper was the foundation publication of the Sakal Media Group. Its present circulation is approximately 1400,000 copies per day, mainly in Maharashtra.[1] It is published in Pune, Mumbai, Kolhapur, Nashik,Aurangabad, Solapur, Nagpur, Satara, Amravati and Jalgaon. Sakal was founded by Nanasaheb Parulekar and began circulation on January 1, 1932. [2].
Pratap G. Pawar is the present chairman of the Sakaal Media Group and also the Vice - President of WAN (World Association of Newspapers). Abhijit Pawar is managing director. The concern's other operations consist of regional newspapers, magazines and internet publishing, together employing over 2000 people, publishing around ten million copies per week and claiming to reach an online audience of more than 3,500,000 daily through its website. Other publications include the English-language Sakaal Times (which replaced The Maharashtra Herald), Gomantak and Agrowon, a daily dedicated to agriculture.
History
In some ways, Sakal was a classic newspaper of the nationalist period. Its idealistic founder, N.B. Parulekar had been influenced by American papers during his years at Columbia University. And though he started Sakal (morning) to advance Gandhi’s movement for independence, he also introduced genuine daily journalism to Marathi. Previously, as a veteran Sakal journalist recalled, Marathi journalism had amounted to opinions published two or three times a week; the staff went home at 7 pm. Parulekar’s Sakal hired reporters, paid stringers in small towns and covered crucial local topics like fluctuations in the price of mangoes. In its first years, Sakal appears to have been ridiculed and deplored in much the same way that old elites scoff at the expanding popular press of the 1990s. People used to joke about its [Sakal’s] district and taluka correspondents’ reports about village fairs, pilgrimages and crops. But Sakal built a place in the hearts of the people of Pune and its neighbourhood-and a circulation. By the early 1960s, Sakal sold 69,000 copies a day. The Mumbai-based Marathi dailies of the two chains (The Indian Express and The Times of India) sold 1,22,000 and 75,000, though Mumbai had a population five times greater than Pune.
Though begun as a part of the nationalist cause, it established itself as a successful business by making day-to-day concerns, not just of Pune but its rural neighbourhood, a preoccupation. By the 1960s, Sakal kept full-time correspondents, each with a telephone, in every town in its neighbourhood. It ran training camps for its journalists, promotions and cultural events for its readers and letters to the editor on its front page.
Parulekar converted Sakal into a private limited company in 1948, with himself, his French wife, their daughter and one or two other shareholders. When he died in 1973, he left the paper with practices and traditions that wore well. It survived the first shocks of India’s revolution in newspaper technology and carried on for more than 10 years. But he also left a complicated ownership structure: a minority of shares went to his wife and daughter but most went to individual trustees and to a trust. Widow and daughter do not appear to have got on well with the trustees and the trust, which put their shares on the market at the end of 1984. The Pawar family, whose best known member was Maharashtra politician, Sharad Pawar, bought them over the opposition of Parulekar’s wife and daughter who went to the courts. At the same time, the rapid changes overtaking the newspaper industry, and the death of the long-serving editor, S.G. Mungekar in 1985, reinforced the sense that Sakal was at a turning point.
The Pawar family turned the paper into a public limited company in 1989, and P.G. Pawar, a brother of the politician, became managing director. Emphasising marketing, he sent representatives around India to promote the paper and overseas to study marketing techniques. Prior to the acquisition by the Pawar family, Sakal had been competently run, but old-fashioned and perhaps over- staffed. The new owners took it in the same direction as renovating newspapers around India: towards marketing surveys, new management practices, aggressive selling of advertising and improvement in labour-saving technology. Sakal’s annual turnover grew by 5 times in eight years-from Rs 60 million to Rs 300 mil
References
- ^ Nanasaheb Parulekar, Biography
- ^ Sakaal Times launched in PuneBS Reporter, Business Standard, Pune May 7, 2008.
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