18 top media houses strongly condemn IRS 2013 results; seek withdrawal of survey

The newspaper groups have urged advertisers and media agencies not to rely upon the recently published IRS results in any way as they are “riddled with shocking anomalies, which defy logic and common sense” 

BestMediaInfo Bureau | Delhi | February 1, 2014

The fight is now in the open. Eighteen leading newspaper groups of the country have come together to strongly condemn the just published Indian Readership Survey (IRS 2013) announced by the Media Research Users Council (MRUC).

Rubbishing the IRS 2013 data, a joint statement issued by the 18 newspapers in public interest stated: “The survey is riddled with shocking anomalies, which defy logic and common sense. They also grossly contradict audited circulation figures (ABC) of long standing.”

According to the statement, while there are hundreds of such anomalies in the report, it highlighted a few of them as below:

• There are wild swings in overall newspaper readership across states. While Punjab has lost a whopping one-third of all its readers in just a year since the last IRS, neighbouring Haryana has grown by 17%.
• Every major newspaper in Andhra Pradesh, irrespective of language, has de-grown by 30-65%.
• There are similarly wild swings at the city level. Mumbai shows a 20.3% growth in overall English readership, while Delhi (a faster-growing city overall on all macro indices) shows a drop of 19.5%.
• Hitavada, the leading English newspaper of Nagpur with a certified circulation of over 60,000, doesn't appear to have a single reader now!
• Hindu Business Line has thrice as many readers in Manipur as in Chennai!!

Given these glaring anomalies, the newspaper groups, through the joint statement, urged advertisers and media agencies not to rely on the recently published IRS results in any way.

The statement strongly called for RSCI and MRUC, the conductors of the Indian Readership Survey, to “withdraw the results of IRS 2013 immediately as well as put a stop to all future editions of this survey, as their continued publication will cause irreparable injury to the reputation of established publications like ours.”

Also read: IRS 2013: Publications up in arms. Where have the readers vanished, they ask

Info@BestMediaInfo.com

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