The Pioneer (India)

This article is about the newspaper in India. For other uses, see Pioneer (newspaper) and Pioneer (disambiguation).

The Pioneer

Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Broadsheet
Owner(s)	Sanchar Holdings[1] (57 %) IDBI Bank ICICI Bank Rainbow Productions Starlink Group of Chennai
Publisher	CMYK Printech Ltd
Editor-in-chief	Chandan Mitra (1998-2021) • Shobori Ganguli (as of 23 December 2024)
Founded	1865 (estd 1864)
Language	English and Hindi
Circulation	2,30,000
Website	www.dailypioneer.com

The Pioneer is an English-language daily newspaper in India. It is published from multiple locations in India, including Delhi. It is the second oldest English-language newspaper in India still in circulation after The Times of India.^[2] In 2010, The Pioneer launched its Hindi version in Lucknow.^[3]

History

Alfred Percy Sinnett (1874)

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)

The Pioneer was founded in Allahabad in 1865, by George Allen, an Englishman who had great success in the tea business in north-east India in the previous decade.^[4] It was brought out three times a week from 1865 to 1869 and daily thereafter.^[5] In 1866, a supplement, the Pioneer Mail, consisting of "48 quarto-size pages," mostly of advertisements, was added to the publication.^[4] In 1872, Alfred Sinnett became the editor of the newspaper. Although he was later to be known for his interest in theosophy, he oversaw the transformation of the newspaper to one of exercising great influence in British India.^[4] In 1874, the weekly Pioneer Mail became the Pioneer Mail and India Weekly News and began to also feature short stories and travel writings.^[5] Author Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), in his early 20s, worked at the newspaper office in Allahabad as an assistant editor from November 1887 to March 1889.^{[6][failed verification]} In July 1933, The Pioneer was sold to a syndicate^[7] and moved from Allahabad to Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, at which time the Pioneer Mail and India Weekly News ceased publication.^[5]

The newspaper remained a primarily Lucknow-based paper until 1990, when it was purchased by the Thapar Group, under L. M. Thapar, who made it a national newspaper, published from Delhi, Lucknow, Bhubaneswar, Kochi, Bhopal, Chandigarh, Dehradun and Ranchi. Thapar sold the paper to its editor Chandan Mitra in 1998. At that time it had 484 employees. Mitra announced that he intended to seek other investors in due course rather than to remain the owner.^[8] On 17 October 2010, The Pioneer launched its Hindi version of the newspaper from Lucknow ^[3] and in May 2012, the paper inaugurated its Raipur bureau, beginning operations of its Chhattisgarh edition.^[9]

As of 2013,^[update] Chandan Mitra was the Editor-in-Chief of The Pioneer. He resigned as printer and publisher in June 2021, and died in September 2021. Also, the senior journalist Siddharth Mishra worked as an associate editor at The Pioneer.^[10]

Editions

• Bhopal
• Bhubaneshwar
• Chandigarh
• Delhi
• Dehradun
• Hyderabad
• Lucknow
• Raipur
• Ranchi
• Vijayawada

Lucknow edition includes four other editions Varanasi, Kanpur, Allahabad and Lucknow itself.

Columnists

• Chandan Mitra (former)
• Kanchan Gupta
• Balbir Punj
• K G Suresh
• KPS Gill

Cartoonists

• Sudhir Dar (former)
• Shekhar Gurera
• Irfan Hussain (former)

References

1. Sumantha Rathore (15 September 2011). "Ownership of Pioneer Group reorganised". afaqs.com. Retrieved 23 April 2020. Sanchar Holdings, the new entity formed by Chandan Mitra, Durbar Ganguly and Amit Goel, will hold a 57 per cent stake in The Pioneer Group.
2. Robert Jackson Baumgardner (1996). South Asian English: Structure, Use, and Users. University of Illinois Press. pp. 14–. ISBN 978-0-252-06493-7. Retrieved 7 December 2017.
3. Pioneer launches Hindi edition in Lucknow, The Pioneer
4. Das Gupta, Uma. 1977. "The Indian Press 1870–1880: A Small World of Journalism", Modern Asian Studies, 11(2):213–235. pp. 233–234.
5. National Library of Australia. 1994. South Asian Newspapers in Australian Libraries: A Holdings List
6. The proprietors of The Pioneer also owned a smaller newspaper, The Civil and Military Gazette, published from Lahore, at which Kipling had worked from 1883 to 1887, and which had served to launch his career as an author.
7. "When, at long last, the Pioneer—India’s greatest and most important paper which used to pay twenty-seven per cent to its shareholders—fell on evil days and, after being bedevilled and bewitched, was sold to a syndicate, and I received a notification beginning; ‘We think you may be interested to know that,’ etc., I felt curiously alone and unsponsored. But my first mistress and most true love, the little Civil and Military Gazette, weathered the storm." From: Kipling, Rudyard. 1937. Something of Myself Archived 18 May 2008 at the Wayback Machine, Chapter III (Seven Years' Hard). Available (public domain) at Words: University of Newcastle, Australia Archived 10 July 2007 at the Wayback Machine.
8. Editor steps in to save The Pioneer, The Times Of India, 12 May 1998.
9. "Advani launches Pioneer Raipur". Retrieved 7 May 2012.
10. "The death of a credible media with a backbone". The Pioneer. Retrieved 22 March 2024.