The News Now: Jammu's English Broadsheet Telling the Untold Stories
The News Now is a daily English broadsheet newspaper published from Jammu city in Jammu and Kashmir, with its online edition at thenewsnow.co.in serving as its digital news portal. Its tagline promises to tell the untold stories, and its own description of its mission stresses venturing onto less-travelled roads to find stories of struggle and change in Jammu and Kashmir. At a time when news is migrating from print to faster digital platforms, the paper presents itself as working in an integrated way across both.
Based at Gangyal in Jammu, the publication combines a print edition noted for longer, magazine-length feature journalism with an online operation that aims to bring readers near-live news. For a region where Srinagar-based and national media often dominate the narrative, a Jammu-published English daily with a combined print and digital identity occupies a distinctive place in the Union Territory's media landscape.
Overview
The News Now describes itself as a regional newspaper with national ambitions: rooted in the news domain of Jammu and Kashmir, but intending to be read at the national level. Its online portal carries Jammu news, Kashmir news and Jammu and Kashmir news alongside national and world coverage, breaking news and features on history, culture, industry, the economy, politics and people.
The website domain was created in February 2016, giving a verifiable marker for the portal's digital presence. The paper's contact address is in Phase III of the Industrial Estate at Gangyal, Jammu, and it publishes phone, email and WhatsApp contacts for its office and editor, together with a Facebook presence — the apparatus of a working daily newsroom rather than a purely online start-up.
History and Founding
The News Now does not foreground a founding year in the material available for this profile, and no launch date for the print daily could be independently verified from the sources consulted; the domain record shows the website was registered in February 2016. What is documented is the paper's self-understanding. It says it was set up on industry-tested, professional lines, with an editorial policy defined by independence and courage.
Its print identity, by its own account, rests on magazine-length journalism, particularly on the feature pages, where it promises consistent flair with fresh flavour each morning. That positioning — a broadsheet that treats features as a signature rather than filler — reflects the competitive reality of Jammu's English newspaper market, where established national titles circulate alongside regional dailies and a Jammu paper must offer local depth those titles cannot match.
Ownership and Business Model
The News Now is owned by The News Now LLP. The LLP is promoted by a business house popularly known as the Bansal Group, described by the paper itself as one of the leading business houses in Jammu and Kashmir. The promoters' diversified interests, declared openly by the publication, range across steel and cement to hospitality and education.
That transparency matters to how the paper asks to be judged. It presents its ownership plainly, states its editorial policy of independence and courage alongside it, and invites correspondence about the paper through its office email. Its business model is the conventional one for a regional daily: a paid print broadsheet and a free online portal, supported by advertising across both, with an Android app extending the digital edition to mobile readers. The app listings reproduce the paper's about-us text, indicating a deliberate strategy of meeting readers on the platforms where news consumption in Jammu and Kashmir increasingly happens.
Language and Regional Focus
The News Now publishes in English. In Jammu and Kashmir that choice defines its readership: English dailies serve officials, professionals, students, business readers and the policy community, and they carry regional stories into national conversations in a way the Union Territory's larger Urdu and Hindi press often does not.
Regionally, its centre of gravity is Jammu city and the Jammu division, while its coverage remit explicitly spans the whole of Jammu and Kashmir and aims at national readership. Its keyword identity — Jammu news, Kashmir news, JK news — and its coverage of subjects from the Line of Control and militancy to houseboats, Kashmiri Pandits, rehabilitation and Sufi culture show a paper trying to hold the entire erstwhile state's complexity within one editorial frame, from a Jammu dateline.
Coverage and Content
Day-to-day coverage spans Jammu and Kashmir politics and governance, national politics, world news and breaking developments, as the portal's long-running archive of state and national stories attests. Political reporting follows the Union Territory's leading figures and parties, assembly and administrative developments, and the security and border questions that remain a permanent part of the region's news agenda.
Features are the declared speciality. The paper says its print edition's feature pages carry magazine-length journalism each morning, and its online identity retains categories for history, culture, industry and economy alongside hard news. That breadth lets it move between a breaking security update and a longer read on the region's culture or economy — the 'untold stories' of struggle and change its tagline promises to seek out beyond the official briefing circuit.
Audience and Reach
The paper's audience, by its own framing, is twofold: readers in Jammu and Kashmir who want their region covered from within, and national readers it hopes to attract with that insider coverage. Third-party traffic estimates for the portal — which are estimates only, not audited figures — have put it in the range of roughly eighteen hundred visitors a day and over fifty thousand visits a month, with an average visit of a little over two minutes and about two pages per visit. Those numbers describe a modest but real digital readership layered on top of the print broadsheet's circulation in Jammu.
Its readership profile also reflects Jammu city's role as the winter capital, a commercial centre and an education hub: a market of traders, officials, students and professionals for whom an English daily published a few kilometres away, in Gangyal, is a natural morning read and whose phones carry its app.
Digital Presence
The online edition at thenewsnow.co.in is built to move quickly; the paper says its online team tries to be as fast as possible in bringing readers nearly live news, in contrast to the reflective pace of its print features. The site is built on WordPress, carries the paper's sections and archive, and is complemented by an Android application published under the paper's name, through which the same about-us, team and contact information is presented to mobile readers.
Social presence is centred on Facebook, where the paper maintains its page under its own name, and on direct reader contact channels including WhatsApp numbers published for the newsroom. For a regional daily, that combination — portal, app, social page and messaging contact — is the standard toolkit for competing with national news apps for the attention of Jammu readers.
Notable People
The editorial team is led by Zafar Choudhary, who serves as Editor. The paper identifies him as an alumnus of the London School of Economics and Political Science and describes its editorial team as comprising some of the finest journalists around. Choudhary is a known byline in Jammu and Kashmir journalism beyond the paper, having written on the region's media and politics for other publications over the years, which lends the editorship a public profile unusual for a paper of its size.
On the ownership side, the Bansal Group promoters are the named force behind The News Now LLP. The paper's public materials keep the focus on the institution rather than individual proprietors, presenting the group identity — steel, cement, hospitality and education — as its declaration of interests.
Recent Developments
The verifiable recent story of The News Now is one of continuity across platforms rather than a single headline event. The portal remains active as the online edition of the Jammu daily, the app remains listed for Android readers, and the paper continues to project the same dual promise it set out in its mission: speed online, depth in print. Its domain registration was updated in 2022, consistent with an operation maintaining its digital infrastructure.
In a media market transformed since August 2019 by Jammu and Kashmir's reorganisation into a Union Territory, the survival of an independent, locally owned English broadsheet in Jammu — professionally organised, openly owned, and edited under a stated policy of independence and courage — is itself the development worth recording. The News Now's bet is that there remains a durable audience, in Jammu and beyond, for a paper from the region that insists on telling its untold stories.
