Is you daily newspaper informing you about what's happening in the Patent world? - Coverage of patent related issues in Indian News media

Analysis of frequency, coverage trend, coverage topic of patent related stories in past 1.5 years in Indian News Media.

Building the Base:

It was same lazy morning with sleepy eyes on 31st August with newspaper in my one hand and toothbrush in the other. The reaction after seeing the newspaper was the same “same old political crap, what the hell!” but then as I unfolded the paper, I saw a rather unusual head line on the lower part of front page, a headline “Pollution board chief cashed in on own patent”. Well it was surprising to see patent angle in wide spread corruption in the country. After reading the article, I asked myself, Is Indian media catching up with western media and giving importance to patents and Intellectual property?


Setting the Stage

I thought let me check this out by analyzing news publication of the premier of Indian media sources. So, I decided to utilize Google News and its advanced feature to copy all the articles which mentioned “patent” in the text of the article from January 1, 2010 till date 6 Sept, 2011.

I copied the results from Google for each news source and dumped into an Excel spreadsheet. After cleaning the data it was easy to find useful insights. If anyone wants to take a look at the collated data, please follow this link to DOWNLOAD the spreadsheet. 

Lifting the Weight
I have considered following source for collating the news articles.

· Reuters India
· Deccan Herald
· Economic Times
· Hindustan Times
· Times of India
· InformationWeek
· The Hindu
· Livemint (The Mint)
· IBNLive.com
· NDTV.com
· Business Standard
· Financial Express
· Indian Express
I am sure you will find your favorite newspaper! If not, then maybe you can decide to switch to any of these after seeing the results.

Here are some fascinating statistics & analysis based on the collected data: 

Reuters, may be due to its Global nature covered more stories on patents or stories involving any patent angle. Leading Indian daily newspaper such as Deccan, Times of India, Economic Times, and Hindustan Times were almost at a same level.

In my view, it is still less! Our Media should cover this area more proactively.

Now the next intriguing question was, if this trend varied during the past 1.5 years. For that, the publication dates were normalized by Quarter. Here is the outcome of that:

It was comforting to see that Indian Media has started taking the issue seriously. The moving average trend lines of various sources are in the upward direction. 

Yes! our media is waking up to the IP issues.


Now you will ask what they are actually covering, to do that I used a widely known Text tool Wordle to create a word map. This analysis is based on the titles of the news item retrieved above. Please note that the larger the text the more they appeared in the title of the news.

Looks like we are being informed on important developments by our responsible media!

And Finally.....:

Let’s see, what we can conclude here:

1. Indian Print and Online media has started taking Patent issues seriously.
2. International issues and news form headline and covered by most of the Indian Press. 
3. The inclination towards patent related news has increased in past quarter and it may rise further. 
4. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung and Motorola were top international companies covered by Indian media 
5. Ranbaxy and Dr. Reddy’s, Glennmark were top Indian companies who were quoted in different sources. 
6. Important international patent disputes such as Android, HTC-Microsoft, and Apple-Samsung got their due place in News.

I hope you have found the article interesting. That’s why you are here!
Please feel free to write back to me via email or post your comments on the blog.
Please do not think of suing me if you think I made any error. I disclaim any liability which may occur due to any error in presented data. Also, this article is entirely represents my personal opinion. This is not a official or associate with my employer.