Consolidation among corporates seems to be in the air at the moment. The publication division of VRL group, which owns Vijaya Karnataka and Vijay Times, was taken over by Times of India group (Bennett, Coleman and Co. Ltd) recently. The story of Vijaya Karnataka is amazing. They entered the Kannada press industry at a stage when the industry was very mature and the existing players, like Prajavani, Udayavani, etc had long established their hold on the readers' mindshare. Nobody thought it would be possible to come up with a new newspaper at this stage and make it successful. It is like coming up with a new brand of soap today. It is easy to achieve phenomenal success in new areas by becoming pioneer in that area. Examples are AT&T, Vaseline, IBM, etc. However, entering a crowded market and winning customers over is not easy at all. But this is exactly what Vijaya Karnataka did. It is the largest circulated Kannada daily in Karnataka today.
With this aquisition, TOI group has immediately obtained reach to almost all parts of Karnataka through Vijaya Karnataka, unlike TOI which is popular only in Bangalore. Though this may turn out to be beneficial to Vijaya Karnataka, it is surely not good for me because I was subscribing to both TOI and Vijaya Karnataka. There is not meaning in reading two newspapers from the same publisher. I will have to change one. I guess I will move to Deccan Herald.
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