Rohit Jha, a small businessman from Rewa was a man full of ideas, enthusiasm and vision. He started his career with a small stationery business. With zeal to capitalize his business further, and with the desire to echo the voice of the people, he started with newsprint business in 1955. He launched the first six page Hindi newspaper daily, News Update, from Bhopal, capital of Madhya Pradesh. This was the beginning of the success journey. After having a good local response he decided to move further and the next edition was launched at Jabalpur, M.P. in the year 1958. In the expansion process after a decade News Update editions began from Sagar and Faridabad. Surprisingly, Jabalpur was the breadwinner, not Bhopal, though it was the capital city. Till 1983, it was like one of those family businesses. In the same year, Rohit Jha came into the print business as a result of an internal division of the family business, and decided to move on and relaunched the Bhopal edition. All newspapers then were working on sheet-fed machinery; and it became the first paper to get into web offset printing in Bhopal. Soon, the paper became number one in Bhopal, beating Kranti, the then local leader.

 

FIRST MILESTONE

With an objective to grow further a market survey was carried out in the city of Indore, which was developed as a commercial capital and as an educational hub of the Central Indian region. Recognizing it as a strong potential market, the Indore edition was started in 1988, while closing Sagar. At that time in Indore, Lok Satta, a daily Hindi newspaper was enjoying market monopoly. The paper was mainly focusing on national and international news coverage. However, focus on local and regional happenings was ignored. Identifying this as an opportunity. News Update started concentrating on local news and issues of social interest. With continuous market surveys, the paper increased its number of pages and improved upon the quality of printing, designing and contents. By 1995, the paper was Number 2 in Madhya Pradesh. It took three years to break the readership monopoly of Lok Satta and News Update had established a strong foothold in the market by the year 1998. Meanwhile, the Raipur and Bilaspur editions in 1995 and 1997 were launched respectively, but only to register their presence, though there wasn’t enough potential in the Chhatisgarh region. The focus was always Bhopal, Jabalpur and Indore. Between two readership surveys conducted in 1995 and 1998, News Update grew at a rate of 104%, the highest among the top ten newspapers of the country. In Indore, the largest newspaper market of the state, News Update enjoyed a massive 85% share among all Hindi daily readers, of which 56% were sole readers.