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Deccan Chronicle Holdings Ltd, publisher of English daily Deccan Chronicle, launched its new business daily, Financial Chronicle, in Chennai and Hyderabad on April 16. Financial Chronicle is expected to hit the stands in Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi shortly. Priced at Rs 1.50, the business daily would be available Monday to Friday.

After Agra, Ghaziabad and Meerut Hindi afternoon tabloid DLA launches its fourth edition from Jhansi. Priced at Rs 1.50, the 16-page all-colour tabloid is published in two editions – city and up-country, encompassing nearby towns. At present, the sale of the copies is restricted to the city limits, but it would soon be made available in the catchment areas.

DLA with punchline ‘Aaj Ki Khabar Aaj’ has circulation of about 310,000 copies, including all the four editions, and claims to be the maximum read newspaper in Agra, much ahead of Amar Ujala and Dainik Jagran.

Now a days Rajasthan Patrika which is planning to come out with its edition in MP has ignited the media scenes of Bhopal. One it is offering greener pastures to journalists from Bhaskar (a higher pay packet! ) which has lead to a queue of resignations at Bhaskar. 

Good thing is that at last poor paid journalists of Bhopal are getting towards reasonable pay packages, which they deserved for long time. Meanwhile there are rumours that Bhaskar is also going to increase pay package of its staff by 20 - 25 % to retain them in the organisation.

It is also been interesting as today early morning when Patrika wanted to distribute pamphlets in newspapers challenging Bhaskar citizen journalism effort but was resented by some (who is still not clear ?).  Anyway one can expect heated times ahead in the media circles of Bhopal.

In a bid to increase it national presence, Deshbandhu, one of the oldest newspapers in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, has launched its a national edition in Delhi. The national edition would have an initial print run of 100,000 copies and would cover the Hindi speaking belt of Delhi and the NCR. Copies would also go to Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan.

The newspaper celebrates it Golden Jubilee in 2008. Deshbandhu Group holds the Limca Record for winning the ‘Statesman Excellence in Rural Reporting Award’ for a record 12 times.

As temperature of Bhopal rises so is the case in its media world. With Rajasthan Patrika coming in with its MP edition which may be named as MP Patrika and simultaenously Rajya Ki Nai Dunia is being relaunched as Navdunia, large exodus of journalist is happening from established names. Major exodus is happening from Bhaskar. Already many have resigned from Bhaskar some are in pipeline. Expectedly about twelve are in line to join Patrika and two are joining Navdunia !

Sandeep Bamzai a veteran business journalist returns to print. He is joining Sakaal Times, the soon-to-be-launched English daily from the Sakaal Group, as Consulting Editor from April 14, 2008. Bamzai moves from Reliance Entertainment, where he was a Consultant. Sakaal Times is expected to be launched in late May or early June this year.

NaiDunia Group has appointed Arpan Chatterjee as its Chief Sales and Marketing Officer. He moves from CyberMedia’s online tech job portal, where he was Associate Vice President, Marketing, Sales and Customer Support.

The 60-year old Indore-headquartered newspaper NaiDunia is executing an aggressive expansion plan, having grown from a single edition in Indore two years ago to six editions (Gwalior, Bhopal and Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh, and Bilaspur and Raipur in Chhattisgarh). The Group claims that its circulation figures have more than tripled in the last two years to over half a million copies.

Multi-lingual portal Webdunia is present in nine languages and offers email service in 11 languages. The traffic and users at the portal have been growing at 6-8 per cent month with over 80 million page views per month.