MUMBAI, January 15: The print media has been able to retain its loyal readership despite the growing influence of television, say the latest National Readership Survey findings. In spite of the initial euphoria generated over the visual media encroaching upon print, the reading habit among Indians, especially youth, has gone up slightly in the country during the last two years.The findings of the National Readership Survey 1997 (NRS-1997) affirm that the visual media has not really affected the print media. The survey report was released to a packed audience of over 400 media, advertising and marketing professionals. The survey concentrated on 397 publications 166 dailies and 231 magazines. ``The governing members of the council spent about 554 man-hours for the study,'' informed Gautam Rakshit, chairperson of the governing council of NRSC.
The magazine reading habit is gradually coming down, with film and business magazines leading the downfall. While specialised magazines continue to decline, sports
magazines have slightly improved readership. While newspapers have a greater readership among men than women, most graduates prefer English dailies over vernacular newspapers. The survey also revealed that readers devoted more time to newspaper reading than magazines.
Conducted by three leading market research bodies in 520 towns and metros on a random sample of 1,31,568 from 72 socio-cultural backgrounds, the survey also revealed that the print media has retained its position while the number of radio listeners, especially FM radio, has dwindled substantially. TV viewership, especially of regional and cable TV, has picked up since the 1995 NRS.
TV accounts for 68.8 per cent of the total media exposure in the country from the sample survey, while the share of print media is 16.2 per cent and that of radio at 15 per cent. The sample population which was randomly selected were in the age group of 15 to 82 years. The survey said the influence of TV has reached 3.36 crore homes including 1.5 crore homes with
cable TV connection.
Another interesting finding of the survey is that the average time devoted by a reader to a daily newspaper has gone up to 23.7 minutes. The average weekly time spent on watching TV has gone up to 13.17 hours compared to 11.48 hours a week in 1995. Forty-one per cent of the sample did not read anything though 21 per cent of them were literate. The remaining 20 per cent non-readership is due to illiteracy providing enough scope for the future growth of the print media.
On a regional basis, southern states lead in readership habit while readers of Hindi publications are the largest in number due to the dominant position of Hindi speaking population in the country. Marathi is second in the race followed by Gujarati, Bengali, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada publications. In terms of reading habit of the total population in various states, Kerala tops with 73.7 per cent readership followed by Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Maharashtra, respectively.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
