Tehelka is launching a weekly English newspaper called Tehelka - The People's Paper across six cities -- Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Calcutta, Bangalore and Pune.
Tehelka is the media company which owns Tehelka.com, the website which uncovered the arms scam.
Tarun Tejpal, editor-in-chief of Tehelka, said, "We are hoping to roll out our first edition on November 8 across the six cities."
"The mandate of the paper is aimed at constructive journalism. To ensure the paper's independence, we have decided to fund it entirely through advance subscriptions," he added.
Tejpal said he has roped in several big names as founder-subscribers. These include: the Godrejs, Dr Pratap Reddy of Apollo Hospitals, author Shobhaa De, actress and parliamentarian Shabana Azmi, film-makers Mahesh Bhatt, Shyam Bhatt and Meera Nair, among others.
According to Tejpal, the cost of bringing out the paper is estimated at a few crores.
"Currently we have a few thousand subscriptions in Delhi and the support has been good. We are looking at about 30-40 thousand subscriptions before the launch," he said.
Subscriptions to the newspaper include a founder subscriber option, which comes at a contribution of Rs 1 lakh (Rs 100,000) and has the benefit of a preferential allotment of shares, when the company goes public, besides receiving the newspaper for life.
Tejpal added that the newspaper was at a very primitive stage to comment on the public issue.
He also ruled out the possibility of a corporate involvement emphasising that the funding would be backed by subscriptions alone.
The other subscription patterns include a yearly subscription at Rs 520, and a two and three year subscription at Rs 990 and Rs 1,450, respectively.
