Will All My Friends Be Moving to India Now?

The business woes of the U.S. newspaper industry, and of most other traditional media, have been exhaustively chronicled, most vigorously in newspapers themselves. (I sometimes think that the entire journalism/ music/film/TV industry just needs a 5-year bridge loan to help it safely migrate to the digital future, when online distribution and advertising are robust enough to support them.) So it is nice to see that newspapers are growing somewhere — and in this case, it’s India.

As this Forbes report makes clear, media revenues are way up in India and consumers at a variety of levels seem eager for more content: “Last year, Vogue announced it would start an Indian edition in 2007, and The Wall Street Journal entered into a partnership with The Hindustan Times to launch a business newspaper, Mint, which debuted in February. India’s print media is estimated to reach over 220 million people, and has immense growth potential since close to 370 million literate Indians are believed to not be served by any publication.” The celebrity magazine Hello! has also just launched in India. (The Economist also has a good recent article on the Indian newspaper boom, but only the summary is online; it makes the point that many of the new publications are English-language, since English is not only the international business language, but the language of aspiration for the up-and-coming Indian.)

In the last few years, several of my friends who work in finance have moved to London. I wonder how many of my writer friends will soon be moving to India?