Eenadu is the largest circulated Telugu daily in India
With the lockdown in India in place for more than two months, the media industry is still adjusting to the new norms, such as work-from-home. Sushil Kumar Tyagi, general manager of marketing at Eenadu, spoke to the delegates at the INMA Virtual World Congress on 22 May, about how to build teams in the WFH environment.
As media houses are adjusting their short- and long-term strategies to meet the growing demand for content from credible news sources, remote leadership, and strategic flexibility hold the key to the future. According to a recent blogpost by Brie Logsdon, project manager at INMA, Tyagi broke down the key components of remote leadership comprising communication, coordination, collaboration, and effective use of technology.
“Leaders must train and prepare teams so they can go above benchmarks. Knowing which tools to use is important to efficiency, and leaders should know when it is time for a video call or when to communicate via e-mail. As we all know, only a happy team can produce happy results,” Tyagi said, adding that clear agendas and connections into employee’s personal lives can make a big difference.
He called this strategic flexibility to drive remote leadership through four components – adaptiveness, responsiveness, elasticity, and agility.
Tyagi then shared the four building blocks of strategic flexibility. They are, anticipate, to build scenarios of the future; formulate, to create effective strategies for each of these futures; accumulate to determine the strategic options required; and, operate and manage the portfolio of options or components. Through these, Tyagi said, a remote leader can develop a team, identity, relationship, trust, and mutual understanding.
Eenadu is the largest circulated Telugu daily newspaper in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in South India. Various editions of Eenadu exist throughout the Telugu-speaking region of India, as well as in cities such as Chennai, Bengaluru, Mumbai, and New Delhi.
2023 promises an interesting ride for print in India
Indian Printer and Publisher founded in 1979 is the oldest B2B trade publication in the multi-platform and
multi-channel IPPGroup. While the print and packaging industries have been resilient in the past 33 months since the pandemic lockdown of 25 March 2020, the commercial printing and newspaper industries have yet to recover their pre-Covid trajectory.
The fragmented commercial printing industry faces substantial challenges as does the newspaper industry.
While digital short-run printing and the signage industry seem to be recovering a bit faster, ultimately
their growth will also be moderated by the progress of the overall economy. On the other hand book
printing exports are doing well but they too face several supply-chain and logistics challenges.
The price of publication papers including newsprint has been high in the past year while availability is diminished by several mills shutting down their publication paper and newsprint machines in the past four years. Indian paper mills are also exporting many types of paper and have raised prices for Indian printers. To some extent, this has helped in the recovery of the digital printing industry with its on-demand short-run and low-wastage paradigm.
Ultimately digital print and other digital channels will help print grow in a country where we are still far behind in our paper and print consumption and where digital is a leapfrog technology that will only increase the demand for print in the foreseeable future. For instance, there is no alternative to a rise in textbook consumption but this segment will only reach normality in the next financial year beginning on 1 April 2023.
Thus while the new normal is a moving target and many commercial printers look to diversification, we believe that our target audiences may shift and change. Like them, we will also have to adapt with agility to keep up with their business and technical information needs.
Our 2023 media kit is ready, and it is the right time to take stock and reconnect with your potential markets and customers. Print is the glue for the growth of liberal education, new industry, and an emerging economy. We seek your participation in what promises to be an interesting ride.
