MUMBAI: Everyone is feeling the pinch of the bad economic conditions in the country and news channels seem to be hit hard by it.

According to sources, the Punjabi news channel that MCCS was planning to launch has been postponed to sometime in end-2013, due to the difficult phase that the industry is going through Although no date was fixed, sources had told indiantelevision.com, that it would be sometime in September or October.

“News media is going through difficult and painful times and we are waiting for things to settle down,” says a source from the organisation. ABP already has a foothold in Hindi (ABP News), Marathi (ABP Majha) and Bengali (ABP Ananda).

The news network had decided to expand into regional languages or Tier II cities as it felt it had saturated the potential in the metros. It had identified Punjabi as the first of the languages that it would launch. Sources in MCCS say that the company is reaping good profits and the delay is due to the overall financial conditions of the genre and the fact that it was still waiting to be granted an uplink license from the ministry of information and broadcasting.

Recently, Network 18 laid off more than 350 employees and Bloomberg slashed its rolls by 30 as well. Tough times are peeling off the skin from the news sector.