ISAS Working Papers

This paper provides readers with the context for the remarkable and sustained expansion of India's daily newspaper industry since the 1980s and the acceleration of that expansion in the twenty-first century at a time when daily print journalism in much of the world has declined. Covering a hundred years of the daily newspaper industry, the paper focuses on three themes: the ideas and motivations of the people who create newspapers, the financing of those newspapers and the technology through which they operate. The time-frame divides itself into four periods, each with identifiable and significant characteristics. In the first (1900 to 1920), from the time of the Viceroy, Lord Curzon to the ascendancy of M. K. Gandhi, English-owned newspapers slowly introduced industrial practices and journalistic conventions as they had evolved in Britain. A few Indian-owned English-language newspapers took up some of these innovations, but no Indianlanguage newspapers adopted such practices. Profit and ideology co-existed, but the largest and most influential (mostly British-owned) papers were more concerned with profit than preaching.