As Ken Auletta noted in a 2012 New Yorker piece, with the increase of literacy and readership in the 1990s and 2000s, these long-standing media institutions developed ways to turn shifting social trends into profit.
Instead of going for subscription money, however, many big newspapers lowered their prices, making their products extremely affordable and offering free delivery. The papers focused on ad revenue instead, selling mass volumes of ad space to companies eager to get their products in front of people’s eyes.
Here is where India’s newspaper industry diverges from press practices in many other countries. Ad sales have always been a part of the media business, everywhere that media exists. But while U.S. media generally observes a “church and state” distinction between editorial content and advertising, that’s not always the case in India.
“Advertorials” — that is, ads that are styled to look like normal news articles, with a tiny caveat explaining who sponsored them — are extremely prevalent in Indian media. They’re widespread in the U.S., too, though there’s a lot of disagreement about how to implement them (and whether they should even be used at all). But some Indian news organizations go one step further. Scandals have erupted over so-called “paid news,” in which politicians or brands reportedly paid publications for positive coverage. The Indian government has condemned the practice.