First up was Siddharth Kothari, director, Rajasthan Patrika, who presented the various ways and means through which the regional newspaper house has strengthened its presence across media channels. “New media does not replace old media, but only adds to the existing choice that a consumer has at disposal,” began Kothari.

He stressed that a sound strategy is more important than technology. India comprises 17.2 per cent of the world’s population and has endless choices available to obtain information or entertainment.

When Patrika (Rajasthan Patrika’s edition in Madhya Pradesh) was launched, a big scale multimedia campaign was carried out to announce its entry into Madhya Pradesh. Apart from its daily broadsheets (Rajasthan Patrika and Patrika), Rajasthan Patrika also has a Hindi afternoon daily, News Today and a morning daily in Hindi, Daily News, which cater to specific target groups.

Radio is another offering the company provides to its consumer base. The brand created its presence in the dot com space with patrika.com and rajasthanpatrika.com, both of which provide varied information. The sites receive about 16.38 million hits per month.

Find It, is the yellow pages that the group created for about seven Indian states. The yellow pages are supported by SMS and also have a link on patrika.com. Value added service (VAS) is the recent media platform that Rajasthan Patrika has included with its own SMS shortcode. Here Kothari added a word of caution, “When we introduced the SMS shortcode, we depended on the newspaper in the initial years.”

The newspaper brand also has presence in education (Patrika in Education), television (Patrika TV, which produces corporate films), Sky Media Network that has a set of television channels of various genres and events in the form of trade exhibitions. Food festivals and wedding expos are regularly conducted by Rajasthan Patrika. Patrika Publication also publishes children’s magazines and religious books.

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Rajasthan Patrika Group is publishing 4 newspapers including 2 evening newspaper encompassing 6 states Rajasthan, Gujarat, Tamilnadu, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal and successfully retained its No.1 position in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka (IRS 08) among Hindi newspaper. After establishing itself as a complete media conglomerate that encompasses 3 FM stations, OOH, Yellow Pages, Mobile VAS, Events, Publication, Cable and recently revamped Web Portal, Patrika is spreading out in new direction.