Broadsheet Explosion in Kathmandu

KATHMANDU – Six o´clock in the morning, the famous Kathmandu fog still covers the citystreets as Amar Thapa heaves the shutters of his popular kiosk at Putalisadak..Outside, there are five newspaper delivery boys waiting to hand him their bundles. Just a month ago, there would have been only two: from the government-owned Gorkhapatra and the three-year-old Kantipur. Now there are three new Nepali dailies in the market: Himalaya Times, Aajaho Samachar Patra and Sri Sagarmatha. Another one, Lokpatra, is in the offing..For years, under the Panchayat system, Nepal had a muzzled press where the only daily of note was the Gorkhapatra. With the arrival of press freedom in 1990, the expansion of the consumer market, and an increasingly literate populace, newspapers suddenly seemed like a viable commercial proposition. Kantipur was started by two Nepali Marwari brothers, belonging to the Indian Express clan of Ramlal Goenka. The newspaper ran at a loss for the first two years, but emerged in the black in early 1995..As soon as Kantipur began making money, and also because there were those who disliked its purported Nepali Congress-leanings, the other publishers came up with their own dailies has the public confused, but no one seems to mind. This is quite different fare from the opinionated and politically blinkered news presented by the Nepali weeklies, almost all of which act as the mouthpiece of one political faction or the other..Bharat Dutt Koirala, Director of the Nepal Press Institute, believes that the quality of journalism in Nepal is bound to improve with the competition. "The market for newspapers is now Nepal-wide, and the public has also become much more discerning. It is demanding better news coverage," he says..But Mr Koirala and other media experts say there will be heavy mortality among the new entrants, as themarketis not large enough for all of them. Says one lecturer of journalism at Tribhuvan University: "Gorkhapatra will survive because of its monopoly on government ads, and Kantipur because it was first off the wire. There is a market here for one more daily, and may the one that is best edited win."