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Rafique Pathan Joins Pudhari Publications As Head Of Digital Business

Ad Tribe! Bureau2 min read
Rafique Pathan, Head of Digital Business at Pudhari Publications

Rafique Pathan has joined Pudhari Publications as Head of Digital Business. He announced the move on LinkedIn.

  • New role: Head, Digital Business, Pudhari Publications Private Limited
  • Previous role: Digital Operations Lead, Sakal Media Group
  • At Sakal for more than nine years, joining in 2017 as Product Manager and moving through several senior roles

A Product Manager Running A Digital Business

The route matters here. Pathan came into Sakal as a product manager, not as an editor or an ad sales lead, and worked up to running digital operations. Regional publishing has historically staffed its digital leadership from one of those two traditional sides, which is part of why so many Indian language news sites still feel like a print edition pasted onto a template.

Someone whose training is product tends to ask different questions: what does the page load like on a cheap phone, where do readers drop off, which format actually gets shared. Those are the questions that decide whether a Marathi publisher grows online.

Marathi Print, Moving Between Houses

Both Sakal and Pudhari are established Marathi publishing groups, and Pudhari has a strong base in western Maharashtra. So this is not a jump from legacy print into a digital pure-play. It is a lateral move inside regional language publishing, taking nine years of accumulated operational knowledge from one house to a competitor.

Rafique Pathan arrives at a moment when the economics for regional publishers have turned interesting rather than bleak. Indian language readership online is still growing while English news traffic has flattened, and the advertising market has been slow to reprice that. A publisher that gets its digital operation right in Marathi is competing for a genuinely expanding audience.

Rafique Pathan's Nine Years In One Group

Worth saying plainly: a long single-employer record is a different asset from broad market exposure, and this is the former. What it buys is knowing where the operational bodies are buried in a print-first organisation, which is exactly the knowledge required to change one.

More on Ad Tribe People.

#Pudhari Publications#Rafique Pathan#Sakal Media Group#Regional Media#Digital Publishing
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