With the slow death of print media in film journalism, Filmfare is the last standing bastion of archiving Bollywood. Circulation is down, ad sales aren't what they used to be, the staff numbers are down, the freelance budget is near non-existent, the photography budget hasn't changed in eons... btw this is true of almost all magazines, be it a rag in New York or New Delhi.
The Bollywood fandom is strong - it'll take a collective to fund a process to scan and archive all the issues - as Vogue did painstakingly.
Condé Nast officially launched the digital Vogue Archive in December 2011. It made every single issue of American Vogue, from its founding debut issue in December 1892 up through the current issues, fully searchable and accessible online.
The digitization project took approximately two years to complete (spanning 2009 to late 2011) as over 2,700–2,800 issues were scanned, translating to roughly 400,000 pages and over 100,000 to 400,000 images, advertisements, covers, and articles indexed by designer, model, photographer, and garment type.
Condé Nast has never publicly disclosed the total financial expenditure spent to execute the digitization project. However, industry estimates for archival scanning, high-resolution color capture, OCR text extraction, and granular tagging put large-scale database builds of this magnitude in the multi-million dollar range.
When Condé Nast first introduced the standalone archive, consumer subscriptions were priced at US$1,575 per year. In subsequent years, individual prices were increased to $3,250 per year for commercial professionals (fashion designers, stylists, and industry researchers). Institutional Access (ProQuest): Today, standard access is largely provided through the database provider ProQuest. Academic institutions, universities, and public libraries pay annual licensing fees to provide access to their students and patrons for free.
Now, imagine if they could do the same with Filmfare?
Filmfare was launched on March 7, 1952, by J. C. Jain and published by Sahu Shanti Prasad Jain and his wife Rama Jain of The Times Group (Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd.) in Bombay. Its debut issue featured screen icon Kamini Kaushal on the cover. Filmfare has been continuously published for 74 years. While the publisher has not released an exact master count of every issue printed, the total can be estimated based on its publication frequency changes over the decades:
1952–2000s (Fortnightly): For over 50 years, Filmfare was published as a bi-weekly (24 issues per year), generating roughly 1,300–1,400 regular issues.
2000s–Present (Monthly & Special Editions): In later years, the print schedule shifted primarily to a monthly cadence (12 issues per year), alongside annual special issues (such as the Filmfare Awards collector issues, regional editions in South India, and special style/glamour releases).
Accounting for regular fortnightly runs, monthly issues, and regional/special collector editions, Filmfare has published approximately 1,600 to 1,800 total issues.
To put every published work, image and credit into a digital archive... a Sisyphean task as the volume is vast and the budget - nonexistent!
One fine day, a passionate fan with deep interest and deeper pockets will have to do the deed....
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