News Broadcasting
IBN Lokmat to launch by March; TG ‘aspirational’ audience
NEW DELHI: IBN Lokmat, the Marathi news channel from the GBN stable, is all set to launch latest by March.
The channel is currently in its trial run and will launch as soon as the new facility in Vikhroli is ready and once the ongoing 360-degree training by US experts concludes, Nikhil Wagle, editorial director tells indiantelevision.com.
Wagle insists that the network created by IBN is unprecedented in regional journalism and includes 13 bureaux spread across the state, with 100 stringers, allowing “us to reach the last man in the village”.
Wagle says he visited hundreds of journalism schools in the state and 2,000 students were interviewed; hence the editorial staff is representative of the entire state, not Mumbai-centric.
Lokmat is the biggest newspaper chain with multiple editions in the state, and the new company, IBN Lokmat News Pvt Ltd, owns the channel, but is a part of the GBN group, and hence, committed to the same standards of journalism as CNN IBN, Wagle explains.
Asked whether infotainment or even crude videos (of the kind seen on Hindi news channels) will also find a place on the channel, Wagle denies it, arguing that historically, the Maharashtrian news consumer has been more tuned to social values than those from the Hindi heartland.
“That sort of news won’t be accepted here,” he says, adding that in any case, the company is committed to hard news that is of relevance to people.
Wagle reveals that the core content for IBN Lokmat would be driven by the aspirational aspects of Maharashtra’s economy today.
Sixty-four per cent of Maharashtra lives in urban areas, the highest in the country after Tamil Nadu, he says.
“Every small town is trying to become a metro and larger towns are aspiring to higher status and this is the real issue today, so this aspirational aspect will be widely covered, along with traditional hard core news.”
With malls and cineplexes coming up, businesses expanding and the youth lifestyle changing rapidly, urbanisation and its challenges would also be a core issue on the channel.
Asked whether they would also include programming content like astrology, which has recently surfaced in IBN 7, GBN’s Hindi news channel, Wagle says, “There is no place for astrology in a news channel and the Marathi viewer is not interested. When they watch a news channel, they want deep-rooted investigative news.”
There will be rural coverage as well, but Wagle says it will not just be sensational news of farmer suicides.
“There are different angles to showing something, and we are not chasing TRPs, so when we cover farmer suicides, we shall show all the angles that exist, not just the sensational aspect,” he said.
Rajdeep Sardesai, editor-in-chief of CNN IBN, says that the top layer of editors are the cream of Marathi journalism and will be totally driven by hard core journalism, saying, “Nikhil Wagle is no less a hard core journalist than any in the country, and so are most of the others, who all have a minimum of 15 years of journalism behind them.”
News Broadcasting
News TV viewership jumps 33 per cent as West Asia war draws audiences
BARC Week 8 data shows news share rising to 8 per cent despite T20 World Cup
NEW DELHI:Â Even as individual television news channel ratings remain under a temporary pause, the genre itself is seeing a clear surge in audience attention.
According to the latest data from Broadcast Audience Research Council India, television news recorded a 33 per cent jump in genre share in Week 8 of 2026, covering February 28 to March 6.
The news genre accounted for 8 per cent of total television viewership during the week, up from 6 per cent the previous week. The spike in attention coincided with escalating geopolitical tensions involving the United States, Israel and Iran, which have kept global headlines firmly fixed on West Asia.
The rise is notable because it came at a time when cricket was dominating television screens. The high-stakes stages of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, including the Super 8 fixtures and semi-finals, were being broadcast during the same period.
Despite the cricket frenzy, viewers appeared to be toggling between sport and global affairs, boosting the overall share of news programming.
The surge in genre share comes even as the government has enforced a one-month pause on publishing ratings for individual news channels. The move followed regulatory scrutiny of the television ratings ecosystem.
While channel-level rankings remain temporarily out of sight, the genre-level data suggests that when global tensions escalate, audiences continue to turn to television news for real-time updates.
