Do You Still Read Newspapers?
Tracking the circulation of newspapers across States and Union Territories of India
A changing world
With the pandemic weighing the world down, affecting every field that is there, college and studies in India could not avoid the hit. I was supposed to be in my third semester by July-ish, information design from the National Institute of Design but the semester commencement was pushed back without any further notice. To make do with this indefinite, uncalled ‘break’ (at the risk of sounding offensive), I decided to hone my skills at information visualization tools (D3.js, Tableau, etc.) so I can be ready when the semester kicks in with full steam.
Cut to September and the pandemic in India is still at large. Our semester was declared to be held online, for better or worse. I was excited nevertheless. This time again, the information and data visualization course was to be delivered by Amit Kapoor and Chakradhar Saswade, both experts in the field. For the course’s project, I chose to explore the circulation of newspapers in India. In this article, I will walk you through the process I followed for selecting the topic, analyzing the idea, and designing the final visualization.
Finalizing the topic
After days of futile attempts at finalizing a topic, I almost gave up, when a friend of mine, who is a journalist in one of the prestigious newspaper in India, asked me to visualize the landscape of print media, specifically, newspapers in India. This nudge was enough for me to start exploring and do some research on this industry. Luckily, I found this website which keeps track of the newspapers produced in the country… a jackpot for me!
I started collecting the data and exploring the stats, papers, and figures.
An interesting insight that came out was the steady stand of the newspaper industry in India. Unlike in many countries, the Indian newspaper industry has managed to survive and continues to thrive. Research shows this is due to four main reasons:
- Publishing newspapers in local languages helps gain masses by tapping into the market of non-English speakers
2. Advertising still holds a large stake and chunk in newspapers
3. The price models: While newspapers in many countries have subscription models, Indian papers have rock-bottom prices. Just 10 cents will get you a Times of India, the country’s largest-selling English newspaper. The Wall Street Journal costs $3 at the newsstand.
4. The ownership of Indian newspapers: According to the Registrar of Newspapers for India, 86% of the country’s publications are controlled by individuals, and less than 10% by joint-stock companies.
By this point, I have decided to do a story on the above-said topic with visualization of numbers supporting the four pillars of its thriving success. So I started sketching and laying out the initial drafts.
I wanted to do a visualization showing the dynamics of the circulation of newspapers in different states. I was curious: which state had the largest circulation or is the largest newspaper consuming state?
The data
Thanks to The office of registrar of newspapers of India, I have the data about the circulation of newspapers for each state, the population of each state, and the language in which the most consumed newspapers are written. I used Tabula to convert all the PDFs to structured excel sheets, which were later imported to my code in D3.js.
I normalized the population down to 10,000 for each state and calculated the newspaper circulations accordingly and the results were quite surprising.
The visuals
Now that I have the data calculated and fields ready, my next goal was to visualize. I started looking out for inspiration for how densities are plotted in general and that’s when I stumbled upon the very insightful work by Federica Fragapane called population density. I was immediately drawn to the idea of having the population drawn as dots inside an encasing circle. Federica’s population density fit my idea of density charts: each newspaper circulation as a dot in an encasing circle of population normalized to 10,000 people in a state. I was yet to figure out how to show the state’s original population.
The code
I have learned D3.js a fair share and couldn’t think of any other program which would give such custom-built density charts/forms. Plotting a circle is easy in D3 but the challenge was to plot a certain number of randomly placed dots and contain them within the area of the circle, for each state. Trigonometry was in order and this article worked wonders for me. I was able to plot it for one state and it was a matter of using a simple while loop (still figuring out D3’s data binding method) to do the rest of the job.
After this was done, I had to show the original population of the state to give an interesting insight that some states, despite low population, had higher circulation numbers. I decided to plot arcs around the main circle and the results were quite satisfactory.
The visualization
I made a print and a web version for my visualization.
I used the BUS (Big, Useful & Surprising) model that we were taught in class to highlight some of the interesting insights as below. The model helps quickly analyze what we have gained and produced from the visualization that should be a takeaway for a reader. An insight drawn from the visualization can be Big, Useful or Surprising, or all three of them at the same time. This can vary from a viewer to another.
In conclusion, the state (Uttar Pradesh), despite it large population, wasn’t the state with largest newspaper circulation at all. Chandigarh with a low population was the largest newspaper-consuming state/Union Territory (I’m lowkey proud as I live here) and East Indian states show the lowest circulations in the country, with Assam and Nagaland being at the lowest end.
Lastly, I made the visualization look like an actual newspaper print. I plan to make the web version interactive along with the above mentioned four pillars of my narration.
I hope you liked the article and the visualization. I would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions for the same.
The full-size version of the visualization can be seen here.
Thank you for going all the way through! I’m Abhilash, a student at the National Institute of Design, Bengaluru. I’ve been learning Data Visualization and Design as a part of the Information Design discipline. Some of my works can be found on my Behance folio.
