Newspapers of Nepal: Press Council Classification (A+ to D)

The Press Council Nepal (PCN, Nepali: Press Council Nepal) is the autonomous statutory media-regulatory body headquartered at Tilganga, Kathmandu. It traces its origins to the Press Commission of 1957 and the Press Advisory Council of the early 1970s, and operates today under the Press Council Act, 2048 BS (1992 AD). One of its best-known functions is the annual classification, or gradation, of the country's newspapers and magazines.

Each fiscal year the Council invites publications to submit their circulation and publishing records for a distribution audit. On the basis of that audit it places each qualifying title into one of five classes and at one of three geographic levels. The final classification report is forwarded to the Ministry of Information and Communications, and it becomes the reference the government uses to decide which papers may carry state advertising.

Because the ranking is produced by a government-mandated body using audited figures rather than self-reported popularity, it is the most authoritative and defensible answer to questions such as "what are the top newspapers in Nepal" or "which is an A-plus class newspaper." It is recalculated every year, so a title's class can move up or down between cycles.

PCN uses a five-tier grade running from the highest, A+ (Nepali: Ka Plus, क प्लस), down to D (Nepali: Gha, घ). A+ is reserved for the largest, most regular and best-organised publications; D is the entry tier for small papers that meet only the minimum standard. Titles that fail the audit are not classified at all and are excluded from the list.

Crucially, the same grade is awarded separately within three levels of reach — national (rastriya), provincial (pradesh) and local (sthaniya). So a paper can be "National A+," "Provincial A," or "Local B." A national A+ daily therefore sits at the very top of the entire system, while a local A+ paper is the best in its district but not comparable in scale to a national title.

The grading is carried out by a Distribution Audit Committee (Bitaran Samparikshan Samiti) constituted under Section 10 of the Press Council Act, 2048. It works to the Newspaper Distribution Audit Standard, 2066 BS (2009 AD), which was revised in 2075 BS (2018 AD). The standard sets out the points and thresholds a title must meet to qualify for each class.

Audited circulation and distribution is the primary metric, but it is not the only one. The Council also weighs the regularity and continuity of publication, proper registration and record-keeping, the size and organisation of the newsroom, printing and technology, and compliance with the journalists' code of conduct. Originality of content matters too: papers found reproducing others' material verbatim can be penalised or refused classification, and the Council periodically acts against such titles.

In practice a large share of applicants are dropped each year for insufficient original content or for missing the minimum regularity and distribution bar. Publications unhappy with their grade may file for re-computation or review within a set window before the result is finalised, after which the report goes to the ministry.

The A+ national tier is small — in recent cycles the Council has placed roughly 10 to 13 publications (dailies plus a few leading weeklies) in A+. These are the titles most Nepalis mean by "the big papers." In the classification announced for the 2073/74 (2016/17) cycle, the confirmed A+ national dailies were Nagarik, Gorkhapatra, Kantipur, The Himalayan Times and Naya Patrika, alongside A+ weeklies such as Shukrabar, Nepal and Himal Khabarpatrika.

Kantipur (Nepali) is generally the largest-circulation private daily, and Gorkhapatra is the oldest and the state-owned daily of record. Because membership of A+ is re-scored annually on audited distribution, other very large national dailies — including Annapurna Post, The Kathmandu Post, Republica and The Rising Nepal — feature in the top classes, but a title's exact grade in any given year should be checked against that year's published PCN result rather than assumed.

Beyond the confirmed A+ titles, Nepal's national daily market is dominated by a handful of media houses, split between Nepali-language and English-language papers. The government-owned Gorkhapatra Corporation publishes the Nepali Gorkhapatra and the English The Rising Nepal. The private Kantipur Media Group publishes the Nepali Kantipur and the English The Kathmandu Post.

Other leading houses include Nepal Republic Media (Nagarik in Nepali and Republica in English), the Annapurna Media Network (Annapurna Post), the International Media Network (The Himalayan Times) and Naya Prakashan (Naya Patrika). Together these titles account for the bulk of national print circulation and almost all of the A-plus and A grades. Readers searching for a "list of Nepali newspapers" should treat this group as the core national tier, with hundreds of smaller provincial and local papers filling the B, C and D classes.

Nepal registers thousands of publications, but only a fraction publish regularly enough to be classified. In the 2072/73 (2015/16) cycle, 990 newspapers and magazines applied and 833 were classified, with 77 excluded; that cycle listed 13 A+ titles. In the 2073/74 (2016/17) round, 953 applied and 816 were classified. A later cycle placed 766 titles into A (157), B (321), C (239) and D (49).

The mix is heavily weighted toward weeklies. In the 2077/78 (2020/21) classification, 868 publications took part, of which 190 were dailies and 509 weeklies, the rest being fortnightlies, monthlies and other periodicals. The Council has continued the exercise into recent years, publishing preliminary results for 2079/80 (2022/23) in late 2025 and opening applications for the 2081/82 cycle in early 2026.

These totals shift year to year because the pool depends on who applies and who clears the audit, so the count of "newspapers in Nepal" is best quoted with its fiscal year attached.

The classification is not merely a league table — it has direct commercial consequences. Nepal's communication policy directs public bodies to place government advertisements in private newspapers on the basis of their regularity and PCN class, so a paper's grade helps determine both its eligibility for state advertising and, effectively, the rate band it can command. Of the papers on the Council's classified list, the large majority carry such public-welfare advertising.

For that reason the annual grade is a meaningful revenue signal, especially for smaller titles that depend on government notices. It also functions as a credibility marker for readers and advertisers: an A+ or A national grade signals scale, regularity and code compliance that a self-declared circulation figure cannot.

The system is not without critics. Observers note that classification leans heavily on distribution volume and paperwork rather than editorial quality or genuine readership, and that many classified titles have very low real circulation. Even so, as the only official, audited and defensible ranking of Nepali newspapers, the PCN classification remains the standard reference for the country's press hierarchy.