How often is it that you go out of your way to buy a newspaper?
Rarely, right?
In fact, we’re so used to bite-sized pieces of information, that we barely care anymore about waiting for a paper to deliver the news to us every day.
Newspapers right now are practically meeting their inevitable fate whether they are becoming an afterthought. But, newspapers and publishing companies are also adapting to a new reading style of their regular readers, which is why they are making changes.
But this newsletter is not going to be about the changing interests of readers. It’s going to be about the changing raw material by the media houses, starting with the use of newsprint.
Newsprint is a low-quality paper that media houses use to publish newspapers. Over the last two years, newsprint costs have risen by more than 300%. And for the better [or worse?], they are getting shorter and thinner than ever!
But why?
You see, creating material for newspapers requires a country to be rich in fibre, which India is not. And since it takes a fortune to create such raw material in our country, India depends on waste paper imports, specifically from countries like Canada and Russia.
However, as the war broke out between Russia and Ukraine, the imports witnessed a major halt, reducing the imports by up to 45% for India. With that, there were extra duties imposed on the imported material, which anyway a reader has to bear.
And with the world opening up after the pandemic, newspapers again started to see a little bit of traction and building readership which it had lost before. Overall, the costs went nowhere but up!
So, what’s the solution?
Out of the many proposed solutions like rising advertiser costs or lowering the selling prices, one of the best solutions is to always focus on waste segregation.
We as the readers of newspapers right now can easily recycle our paper waste. This will not only make it easier for the publishers to gather newsprint for their papers but can also contribute to lowering the costs of the industry overall.
