Focus on citizens in Mirror Now's new disruptive news strategy

About a quarter year after officially launching Mirror Now, the channel has announced its plans to bring in disruption in news programming on the back of its differentiated ‘citizen-focused’ positioning. The channel, which has not been aggressively marketed as yet, claims to have scored good numbers on select metro cities and on social media too.

Faye D’Souza, Executive Editor, Mirror Now, said, “We are looking at bringing in disruption across all the time bands. We are looking at doing a more serious early morning band, more interactive early evening band and such others. We want to bring the citizen focus back into the news.”

The channel had not done much marketing till now, but it has recently started putting out its communication on the outdoor medium. The channel has claimed its leadership (only second to its sibling channel Times Now) in the Mumbai market.

“Mumbai is an indicative market and we believe that we will soon be able to replicate this is other cities. Our strongest focus is the six megacities. We get very good viewership from Bangalore and Chennai, other than Mumbai – not just in BARC India numbers but also the social media traction. It will soon be the case in the one million plus towns too. People write to us from all over the country,” said D’Souza.

The channel has content from across the country as it is a combination of resources at Times Now, ET Now and Mirror Now. The channel has been getting quite a good response on social media in the sense that a lot of their videos, stories and hashtags are getting viral.

As D’Souza explained, “The Pahlaj Nihalani case, GST on sanitary napkins and glucose biscuits issue, fuel prices taxes and the Maulana video where he spoke about what women should wear – all of this has gone viral in the last two months and this is completely organic. It shows that we are able to strike a chord. We have never gone out for marketing yet. People have come to know about the channel through word of mouth largely. This is probably the most low budget product.”

The channel got some traction from the first week of its launch itself. Stories such as the revelation on the child locks enabled in cab services garnered as many as five lakh views on Facebook and 69,000 plus impressions on Twitter.

The discussion on fuel price hike reached to about 54 lakh people on Facebook whereas topical issues like women’s safety garnered over 6,000 impressions on Twitter.

The most controversial debate that gave Mirror Now over eight lakh Impressions on Twitter in Week 26 was the Pahlaj Nihlani controversy on deleting the word ‘intercourse’ from the Shah Rukh Khan starrer movie ‘Jab Harry Met Sejal’.

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