Radhakrishnan Nair is the Mumbai-based editor of Rolling Stone in India. A middle East edition of the magazine is soon to be launched. Nair says his magazine has been well received since it hit Indian shelves two years ago.
What's your opinion about this Middle East version of Rolling Stone?
I think it is great news. The Middle East, especially Dubai, is now an important destination for bands in Asia, which shows that there is a large audience for rock music in the region. In fact, more international bands play in Dubai than in India. So there will be quite a lot to write about. And from what I know, the audience is a pretty discerning one.
Rolling Stone India has already marked its second year. Can you describe this experience?
We have had a better-than-expected experience over the past two years. The magazine has been received very well both by the regular readers and the musicians. There is a large, burgeoning, local rock scene in India, which we cover extensively. In fact, we see Rolling Stone India as a platform for local rock music and musicians. As a result, we have been able to provide our readers with a good blend of international and local music coverage through the magazine. And contrary to expectations, we have quite successfully steered clear of Bollywood and Bollywood music, which otherwise subsumes all pop culture in India.
Readers and musicians who are interested in or involved with rock music are definitely engaged with Rolling Stone in India. India has dozens of musical traditions — hundreds of folk music forms, Hindustani classical, Carnatic Classical, Bollywood film music, regional language film music, etc. Our area of interest is rock. Those interested in rock, whether sung in English or in Indian languages, are definitely engaged with the magazine. The launch itself was significant and got a huge amount of publicity.
Pigeons are faster than the Internet in the English countryside
To protest against the slow speed of broadband, residents of rural England brought pigeons to compete with an upload to YouTube. And the pigeons won. Two of them, carrying a memory card with a video of five minutes, flew more than 120km in 75 minutes. In the meantime, only 24 per cent of a 300MB video had been uploaded on the website.
The American newspapers are still in bad shape. Last week The Miami Herald cut 49 jobs. Publisher David Landsberg wrote in a letter to employees: "These actions come in response to the volatility of the economic recovery, a situation that is affecting many industries." He added that the job elimination cut across all divisions through voluntary buyouts and involuntary layoffs.
A Salt Lake City newspaper said last month it was cutting 85 jobs, just days after USA Today eliminated 130 positions. Last year two major US newspapers folded — the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Colorado, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in Seattle, Washington, which stopped publishing in print and moved to online only. The Christian Science Monitor after 100 years also gave up on print and moved to online only. In Brazil, the Jornal do Brasil, founded in 1891 — the third oldest Brazilian paper — stopped its print edition last August, moving to online only.
According to a survey by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, paid newspapers in India have gone up 44 per cent since 2005 to total 2,700 papers. This puts India ahead of the United States, which has 1,397 paid-for daily newspapers and China, which has about 1,000 papers which must be bought.
"India also has the world's highest paid-for daily circulation, having surpassed China for the first time in 2008," the AFP article said. Bhaskar Rao, director of New Delhi's Centre for Media Studies, told AFP that Indians had a "hunger to know" and that after they watched a story on television, they wanted to find more about it in the paper the next day.
"Circulation of Hindi newspapers, for example, has risen from less than eight million in the early 1990s to more than 25 million in 2009. And circulation figures only tell half the story, as many more people read newspapers than actually buy them," Rao was quoted as saying.
In addition, Indian newspapers do not have to worry so much about competing with the internet, since connection costs and a "lack of infrastructure" meant that the number of people using the internet was low, with only 55 million web users.
