Open Magazine

About Open Magazine

Open is an English-language weekly current-affairs and features magazine published from New Delhi, India. Launched on 2 April 2009 by Open Media Network, the media venture of the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group, it was conceived as a general-interest weekly positioned between the daily news cycle and the slower rhythms of monthly magazines. From its first issue, Open set out to combine reporting on politics, business and society with long-form features, essays and opinion writing, addressing an urban, English-reading audience. The magazine is published by Open Media Network Pvt Ltd and appears every week from its base in New Delhi, with a digital edition at openthemagazine.com extending its reach beyond print.

History and launch

Open was launched into publishing by the diversified RPG group, which had not previously been in the magazine business. The first issue hit newsstands on 3 April 2009, priced at Rs 30, and was initially available in twelve cities: Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Chandigarh, Jaipur and Kochi. Trade coverage at the time described a 360-degree launch campaign spanning outdoor advertising in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru, multiplexes and the internet, with the creative work handled by the agency Shop and media duties by Zenith Optimedia. The magazine was deliberately made slightly wider than the standard A4 size used by most Indian magazines, and copies were placed in five-star hotel lobbies, airport lounges, premium bookstores, hypermarkets and cafés in addition to regular newsstands. At launch, the magazine defined its target reader as men and women around the age of thirty-two from the SEC A1 socioeconomic bracket — senior managers with high household incomes, branded apparel, high-end phones and regular foreign travel.

Ownership

Open is published by Open Media Network Pvt Ltd, described at launch as a wholly owned subsidiary of the R. P. Goenka-controlled RPG Enterprises. The group, whose businesses span power and energy, carbon black, retail, IT-enabled services, FMCG, infrastructure, education and media and entertainment, entered publishing with the launch of Open in 2009. Following the 2010 division of the RPG businesses between the sons of Rama Prasad Goenka, the magazine came under the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group, chaired by Sanjiv Goenka. The group's other media interests include the music company Saregama, the retail chains Spencer's and Nature's Basket, and — from July 2020 — an exclusive licence to publish the Indian editions of Fortune magazine in print and digital formats. Open remains the group's flagship magazine brand and the founding title of its media venture.

Editorial leadership

The founding editor of Open was Sandipan Deb, formerly the managing editor of Outlook and Outlook Money and before that the editor of The Financial Express. Deb shaped the magazine's early identity before moving on, and was succeeded by Manu Joseph, the writer and former editor who led the magazine through the early 2010s. The current editor is S. Prasannarajan, with P. R. Ramesh serving as managing editor and Raas Taneja listed as publisher. Mohit Hira served as publisher and chief executive officer of Open Media Network in the mid-2010s. The magazine's leadership has thus drawn on some of the most prominent names in Indian English journalism, and each editorial transition has been closely watched by the media trade press as a signal of the title's direction.

Editorial philosophy

In interviews around the launch, Sandipan Deb articulated a philosophy that has continued to define the magazine. He said that every story in Open would have to pass at least two of five filters — that it inform, entertain, lead to a thought, have an emotional impact, or be useful — and that the magazine would maintain journalistic neutrality while respecting the reader's intelligence. Crucially, Open positioned itself against the traditional weekly newsmagazine model: it would not be a magazine of record re-running the week's headlines, a job Deb argued was already done by search engines and news aggregators. Instead, cover stories would be deliberately distinct from the regular news cycle, approaching significant events from fresh and unexpected angles. He described the concept as "a magazine of world class standards from India, and not an Indian magazine," signalling an ambition to meet international editorial benchmarks rather than to localise a foreign format.

Content and coverage

Open's pages mix political reporting and analysis with features on business, culture, science, sport, cinema and ideas. The magazine has built a reputation for long-form cover stories, photo essays, interviews with public figures, and columns by well-known writers and commentators. Its feature writing frequently looks beyond Delhi's political establishment to cover regional India, social change, technology and the arts. Over the years the magazine has carried investigative and narrative reporting alongside lighter lifestyle and culture coverage, reflecting its general-interest brief. The balance between hard current affairs and reflective features has been the title's signature: where daily newspapers and television chase the news cycle, Open has aimed to slow the reader down with context, argument and storytelling.

Design and format

From the outset, Open invested heavily in visual presentation. The launch-era decision to print the magazine slightly wider than the standard A4 format gave it a distinctive physical presence on newsstands, and the title has maintained a strong emphasis on photography, illustration and layout. Covers have often been conceptual rather than literal, designed to provoke curiosity rather than simply illustrate the week's news. This design-led approach extended to special experiments: for the Independence Day issue in August 2015, the magazine carried a cover asking readers "Are we free to be free?" — also the title of the issue's cover story by Pratap Bhanu Mehta — with an embedded augmented-reality feature developed in partnership with the UK-based company Blippar. Readers who scanned the cover with the Blippar smartphone app could see their own faces appear on it, an early example of a print magazine using mobile technology to make the reader part of the cover.

Distribution and availability

Open began with distribution across twelve Indian cities and subsequently expanded its reach across the country, with trade reports noting its availability in more than twenty towns within its first year and a half. The magazine has been sold through a mix of newsstands, premium bookstores, hypermarkets, cafés, airport lounges and hotel lobbies, reflecting its upmarket positioning. Alongside print, an e-magazine edition has made the title available globally, allowing readers outside India to subscribe digitally. The combination of a national print footprint and a digital edition has kept the weekly accessible to its core audience of urban professionals even as print distribution in India has become more challenging for English-language magazines.

Digital presence

The magazine's website, openthemagazine.com, carries the week's stories along with web-exclusive content, archives and subscription options for both print and digital editions. In its early years the title also experimented with mobile platforms, launching with a website and a BlackBerry application at a time when few Indian magazines had a serious digital strategy. The digital operation has grown in importance as the Indian magazine industry has shifted online, and the site now functions as the magazine's daily face between weekly print issues. Open's presence on social media platforms extends the reach of its cover stories and features, and the digital edition has allowed the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group's media venture to serve readers in the Indian diaspora.

Position in the Indian magazine market

Open entered a market dominated by established weeklies such as India Today and Outlook, and it differentiated itself by leaning into features, ideas and visual storytelling rather than competing directly on news coverage. Its launch was one of the most closely watched media debuts of 2009, not least because it marked the entry of a major industrial conglomerate into publishing. Over more than a decade and a half in print, the magazine has outlasted several rival launches and maintained a distinctive voice in Indian English journalism. Trade and academic commentary has often cited Open as an example of a general-interest weekly that bet on long-form writing and design at a time when much of the industry was moving toward shorter, news-driven content. Its survival and continued weekly publication make it one of the notable magazine success stories of post-liberalisation Indian media.