Vol. 2, Issue 6, Part E (2016)

Abstract
The study will investigate the strategic paths and media management of local area newspapers in Andhra Pradesh. The local area newspapers otherwise called community newspapers are published from different cities of Andhra Pradesh. These papers mainly depend on advertisement income. Because of stiff competition from established regular newspapers, the strategic paths and media management of local area newspapers is different and unique to reach more specifically the target population for whom these papers are being published. Stratified sampling method is followed in this study, out of the total population, that is, the total number of local area newspapers from different cities of Andhra Pradesh. Only ten papers from Vijayawada, ten from Visakhapatnam, ten from Guntur, five from Kadapa and five from Nellore were selected as samples for this study. Thus, a total number of forty local area newspapers from five different cities of Andhra Pradesh were selected for this study. Based on the methodology of the scoring explained above, the collected questionnaires were scored separately for all the seven strategic paths and media management perceptions, as detailed earlier from all the five cities in Andhra Pradesh. The following statistical analysis was made on the data collected. To find out the differences on strategic paths and media management perceptions among different city local area newspapers, ANOVA was used and post hoc analysis using Scheffe’s Confidence Interval was used where obtained F-value was significant. Pearson Coefficient Correlation was used to find out the relationship between the selected strategic paths and media management and the number of circulation being made by the local area newspapers. In all cases 0.05 level was fixed to test the hypothesis set for this study.