Agartala, July 26 - The Tripura Newspapers Society (TNS), an apex body of the newspapers owners and publishers, has urged the state's Left Front government to modify what they called an 'anti-media' advertisement policy.

In a seminar here last night, newspapers editors and intellectuals appealed to the Tripura government to resolve the crisis arising out of the new advertisement policy, introduced earlier this year.

TNS chairman and veteran journalist Subal Kumar Dey said that in the new policy, the state government had reduced the advertisement rates by 42 per cent from January 2009, even as the production cost of the newspapers had risen.

'The economic situation of the media sector in India is so precarious that the Indian Newspaper Society (INS), for the first time, had advised its members to reduce the circulation numbers by 20 percent,' Dey added.