Sportstar

What is Sportstar?

Sportstar is an English-language sports magazine published in India by Kasturi & Sons Limited, the Chennai company whose flagship title is the daily newspaper The Hindu. Media Ownership Monitor India, the ownership study run in India by Reporters Without Borders with DataLEADS, records Kasturi & Sons as a private limited company founded in 1940 and wholly owned by the Kasturi family, and lists Sportstar among its titles as a sports magazine launched in 1978.^[1]

The magazine's own description, reproduced on its Muck Rack outlet profile, says it began as a print-only multi-sport weekly on 15 July 1978, and describes it as a cherished offering from a group with a long-standing interest in sport through the sports pages of The Hindu. The same profile classifies it as national in scope, English-language, consumer-facing and published fortnightly.^[2] That description is the publisher's characterisation of its own title, not an independent assessment.

Media Ownership Monitor India lists the group's titles as The Hindu, Business Line, Frontline and the group's digital edition alongside Sportstar.^[1]

What does Sportstar cover?

The magazine is a multi-sport title rather than a single-sport one. Its Muck Rack profile records it as a multi-sport publication and lists a working editorial staff of named correspondents.^[2]

The magazine also runs an annual awards programme, the Sportstar Aces Awards. Its organisers describe the 2026 edition as honouring athletes, teams and moments in Indian sport, and published photographs of the ceremony showing figures from chess, field hockey and cricket among those present.^[3] An awards programme run by a publication is a piece of that publication's editorial activity and is reported here as such.

How large is Sportstar's audience?

No certified circulation or audited readership figure for Sportstar could be retrieved for this page. The body that certifies circulation for Indian print titles is the Audit Bureau of Circulations, whose own site shows July to December 2025 as its most recent completed audit period and offers state, district and town-level distribution detail for that period; no Sportstar certificate was retrievable from it.^[4]

Media Ownership Monitor India, which does publish ownership and revenue data for the group, records no circulation or readership figure for Sportstar and marks audience data as missing for several of the group's titles.^[1] The magazine's Muck Rack profile indicates that Similarweb and Comscore traffic measurements exist for the title's website but places them behind paid access, so no figure from either could be read.^[2]

That is a limitation of the retrievable evidence rather than an absence of measurement, and it is stated here instead of an estimate.

Since when has Sportstar existed?

Two dates belong to different things and are kept apart here. The publisher, Kasturi & Sons Limited, was founded in 1940.^[1] That is not the magazine's date.

The magazine itself was launched in 1978 according to Media Ownership Monitor India; the magazine's own description gives the precise date as 15 July 1978 and the original form as a print-only multi-sport weekly.^[1][2] The second date is independent of the publisher's own founding and should not be collapsed into it.

The two records also disagree on frequency: Media Ownership Monitor India lists the magazine as a weekly, while the outlet profile describes it as fortnightly.^[1][2]

Why does Sportstar matter in India's sport?

Its significance is institutional rather than statistical. It is a dedicated multi-sport magazine published inside a newspaper group: Media Ownership Monitor India records it in a portfolio that also carries a national English daily, a business daily and a current-affairs fortnightly, all under one family-owned publisher.^[1] A general news publisher that maintains a separate sports title is maintaining a separate sports newsroom, and the outlet profile lists that newsroom by name.^[2]

The awards programme gives a second, dated marker of the title's position in Indian sport: the Sportstar Aces Awards reached a 2026 edition, and its organisers describe it as recognising athletes, teams and moments across Indian sport.^[3]

What cannot be established from retrievable sources is scale. Without a certified circulation figure or a readable digital audience measurement, any claim about the magazine's standing relative to other Indian sports publications would be an assertion rather than a report, and none is made here.^[4]